In 2013, the Authors’ Licensing & Collecting Society
(ALCS)[1](ch3.xhtml#footnote-152) commissioned a survey of its members to
explore writers’ earnings and contractual issues in the UK. The survey, the
results of which were published in the summary booklet ‘What Are Words Worth
Now?’, was carried out by Queen Mary, University of London. Almost 2,500
writers — from literary authors to academics and screenwriters — responded.
‘What Are Words Worth Now?’ summarises the findings of a larger study titled
‘The Business Of Being An Author: A Survey Of Authors’ Earnings And
Contracts’, carried out by Johanna Gibson, Phillip Johnson and Gaetano Dimita
and published in April 2015 by Queen Mary University of
London.[2](ch3.xhtml#footnote-151) The ALCS press release that accompanies the
study states that this ‘shocking’ new research into authors’ earnings finds a
‘dramatic fall, both in incomes, and the number of those working full-time as
writers’.[3](ch3.xhtml#footnote-150) Indeed, two of the main findings of the
study are that, first of all, the income of a professional author (which the
research defines as those who dedicate the majority of their time to writing)
has dropped 29% between 2005 and 2013, from £12,330 (£15,450 in real terms) to
just £11,000. Furthermore, the research found that in 2005 40% of professional
authors earned their incomes solely from writing, where in 2013 this figure
had dropped to just 11.5%.[4](ch3.xhtml#footnote-149)
It seems that one of the primary reasons for the ALCS to conduct this survey
was to collect ‘accurate, independent data’ on writers’ earnings and
contractual issues, in order for the ALCS to ‘make the case for authors’
rights’ — at least, that is what the ALCS Chief Executive Owen Atkinson writes
in the introduction accompanying the survey, which was sent out to all ALCS
members.[5](ch3.xhtml#footnote-148) Yet although this research was conducted
independently and the researchers did not draw conclusions based on the data
collected — in the form of policy recommendations for example — the ALCS did
frame the data and findings in a very specific way, as I will outline in what
follows; this framing includes both the introduction to the survey and the
press release that accompanies the survey’s findings. Yet to some extent this
framing, as I will argue, is already apparent in the methodology used to
produce the data underlying the research report.
First of all, let me provide an example of how the research findings have been
framed in a specific way. Chief Executive Atkinson mentions in his
introduction to the survey that the ALCS ‘exists to ensure that writers are
treated fairly and remunerated appropriately’. He continues that the ALCS
commissioned the survey to collect ‘accurate, independent data,’ in order to
‘make the case for writers’ rights’.[6](ch3.xhtml#footnote-147) Now this focus
on rights in combination with remuneration is all the more noteworthy if we
look at an earlier ALCS funded report from 2007, ‘Authors’ Earnings from
Copyright and Non-Copyright Sources: a Survey of 25,000 British and German
Writers’. This report is based on the findings of a 2006 writers’ survey,
which the 2013 survey updates. The 2007 report argues conclusively that
current copyright law has empirically failed to ensure that authors receive
appropriate reward or remuneration for the use of their
work.[7](ch3.xhtml#footnote-146) The data from the subsequent 2013 survey show
an even bleaker picture as regards the earnings of writers. Yet Atkinson
argues in the press release accompanying the findings of the 2013 survey that
‘if writers are to continue making their irreplaceable contribution to the UK
economy, they need to be paid fairly for their work. This means ensuring
clear, fair contracts with equitable terms and a copyright regime that support
creators and their ability to earn a living from their
creations’.[8](ch3.xhtml#footnote-145) Atkinson does not outline what this
copyright regime should be, nor does he draw attention to how this model could
be improved. More importantly, the fact that a copyright model is needed to
ensure fair pay stands uncontested for Atkinson and the ALCS — not surprising
perhaps, as protecting and promoting the rights of authors is the primary
mission of this member society. If there is any culprit to be held responsible
for the study’s ‘shocking’ findings, it is the elusive and further undefined
notion of ‘the digital’. According to Atkinson, digital technology is
increasingly challenging the mission of the ALCS to ensure fair remuneration
for writers, since it is ‘driving new markets and leading the copyright
debate’.[9](ch3.xhtml#footnote-144) The 2013 study is therefore, as Atkinson
states ‘the first to capture the impact of the digital revolution on writers’
working lives’.[10](ch3.xhtml#footnote-143) This statement is all the more
striking if we take into consideration that none of the questions in the 2013
survey focus specifically on digital publishing.[11](ch3.xhtml#footnote-142)
It therefore seems that — despite earlier findings — the ALCS has already
decided in advance what ‘the digital’ is and that a copyright regime is the
only way to ensure fair remuneration for writers in a digital context.
## Creative Industries
This strong uncontested link between copyright and remuneration can be traced
back to various other aspects of the 2015 report and its release. For example,
the press release draws a strong connection between the findings of the report
and the development of the creative industries in the UK. Again, Atkinson
states in the press release:
These are concerning times for writers. This rapid decline in both author
incomes and in the numbers of those writing full-time could have serious
implications for the economic success of the creative industries in the
UK.[12](ch3.xhtml#footnote-141)
This connection to the creative industries — ‘which are now worth £71.4
billion per year to the UK economy’,[13](ch3.xhtml#footnote-140) Atkinson
points out — is not surprising where the discourse around creative industries
maintains a clear bond between intellectual property rights and creative
labour. As Geert Lovink and Ned Rossiter state in their MyCreativity Reader,
the creative industries consist of ‘the generation and exploitation of
intellectual property’.[14](ch3.xhtml#footnote-139) Here they refer to a
definition created as part of the UK Government’s Creative Industries Mapping
Document,[15](ch3.xhtml#footnote-138) which states that the creative
industries are ‘those industries which have their origin in individual
creativity, skill and talent and which have a potential for wealth and job
creation through the generation and exploitation of intellectual property’.
Lovink and Rossiter point out that the relationship between IP and creative
labour lies at the basis of the definition of the creative industries where,
as they argue, this model of creativity assumes people only create to produce
economic value. This is part of a larger trend Wendy Brown has described as
being quintessentially neoliberal, where ‘neoliberal rationality disseminates
the model of the market to all domains and activities’ — and this includes the
realm of politics and rights.[16](ch3.xhtml#footnote-137) In this sense the
economization of culture and the concept of creativity is something that has
become increasingly embedded and naturalised. The exploitation of intellectual
property stands at the basis of the creative industries model, in which
cultural value — which can be seen as intricate, complex and manifold —
becomes subordinated to the model of the market; it becomes economic
value.[17](ch3.xhtml#footnote-136)
This direct association of cultural value and creativity with economic value
is apparent in various other facets of the ALCS commissioned research and
report. Obviously, the title of the initial summary booklet, as a form of
wordplay, asks ‘What are words worth?’. It becomes clear from the context of
the survey that the ‘worth’ of words will only be measured in a monetary
sense, i.e. as economic value. Perhaps even more important to understand in
this context, however, is how this economic worth of words is measured and
determined by focusing on two fixed and predetermined entities in advance.
First of all, the study focuses on individual human agents of creativity (i.e.
creators contributing economic value): the value of writing is established by
collecting data and making measurements at the level of individual authorship,
addressing authors/writers as singular individuals throughout the survey.
Secondly, economic worth is further determined by focusing on the fixed and
stable creative objects authors produce, in other words the study establishes
from the outset a clear link between the worth and value of writing and
economic remuneration based on individual works of
writing.[18](ch3.xhtml#footnote-135) Therefore in this process of determining
the economic worth of words, ‘writers’ and/or ‘authors’ are described and
positioned in a certain way in this study (i.e. as the central agents and
originators of creative objects), as is the form their creativity takes in the
shape of quantifiable outputs or commodities. The value of both these units of
measurement (the creator and the creative objects) are then set off against
the growth of the creative industries in the press release.
The ALCS commissioned survey provides some important insights into how
authorship, cultural works and remuneration — and ultimately, creativity — is
currently valued, specifically in the context of the creative industries
discourse in the UK. What I have tried to point out — without wanting to
downplay the importance either of writers receiving fair remuneration for
their work or of issues related to the sustainability of creative processes —
is that the findings from this survey have both been extracted and
subsequently framed based on a very specific economic model of creativity (and
authorship). According to this model, writing and creativity are sustained
most clearly by an individual original creator (an author) who extracts value
from the work s/he creates and distributes, aided by an intellectual property
rights regime. As I will outline more in depth in what follows, the enduring
liberal and humanist presumptions that underlie this survey continuously
reinforce the links between the value of writing and established IP and
remuneration regimes, and support a vision in which authorship and creativity
are dependent on economic incentives and ownership of works. By working within
this framework and with these predetermined concepts of authorship and
creativity (and ‘the digital’) the ALCS is strongly committed to the upkeep of
a specific model and discourse of creativity connected to the creative
industries. The ALCS does not attempt to complicate this model, nor does it
search for alternatives even when, as the 2007 report already implies, the
existing IP model has empirically failed to support the remuneration of
writers appropriately.
I want to use this ALCS survey as a reference point to start problematising
existing constructions of creativity, authorship, ownership, and
sustainability in relation to the ethics of publishing. To explore what ‘words
are worth’ and to challenge the hegemonic liberal humanist model of creativity
— to which the ALCS adheres — I will examine a selection of theoretical and
practical publishing and writing alternatives, from relational and posthuman
authorship to radical open access and uncreative writing. These alternatives
do not deny the importance of fair remuneration and sustainability for the
creative process; however, they want to foreground and explore creative
relationalities that move beyond the individual author and her ownership of
creative objects as the only model to support creativity and cultural
exchange. By looking at alternatives while at the same time complicating the
values and assumptions underlying the dominant narrative for IP expansion, I
want to start imagining what more ethical, fair and emergent forms of
creativity might entail. Forms that take into consideration the various
distributed and entangled agencies involved in the creation of cultural
content — which are presently not being included in the ALCS survey on fair
remuneration, for example. As I will argue, a reconsideration of the liberal
and humanist model of creativity might actually create new possibilities to
consider the value of words, and with that perhaps new solutions to the
problems pointed out in the ALCS study.
## Relational and Distributed Authorship
One of the main critiques of the liberal humanist model of authorship concerns
how it privileges the author as the sole source and origin of creativity. Yet
the argument has been made, both from a historical perspective and in relation
to today’s networked digital environment, that authorship and creativity, and
with that the value and worth of that creativity, are heavily
distributed.[19](ch3.xhtml#footnote-134) Should we therefore think about how
we can distribute notions of authorship and creativity more ethically when
defining the worth and value of words too? Would this perhaps mean a more
thorough investigation of what and who the specific agencies involved in
creative production are? This seems all the more important given that, today,
‘the value of words’ is arguably connected not to (distributed) authors or
creative agencies, but to rights holders (or their intermediaries such as
agents).[20](ch3.xhtml#footnote-133) From this perspective, the problem with
the copyright model as it currently functions is that the creators of
copyright don’t necessarily end up benefiting from it — a point that was also
implied by the authors of the 2007 ALCS commissioned report. Copyright
benefits rights holders, and rights holders are not necessarily, and often not
at all, involved in the production of creative work.
Yet copyright and the work as object are knit tightly to the authorship
construct. In this respect, the above criticism notwithstanding, in a liberal
vision of creativity and ownership the typical unit remains either the author
or the work. This ‘solid and fundamental unit of the author and the work’ as
Foucault has qualified it, albeit challenged, still retains a privileged
position.[21](ch3.xhtml#footnote-132) As Mark Rose argues, authorship — as a
relatively recent cultural formation — can be directly connected to the
commodification of writing and to proprietorship. Even more it developed in
tandem with the societal principle of possessive individualism, in which
individual property rights are protected by the social
order.[22](ch3.xhtml#footnote-131)
Some of the more interesting recent critiques of these constructs of
authorship and proprietorship have come from critical and feminist legal
studies, where scholars such as Carys Craig have started to question these
connections further. As Craig, Turcotte and Coombe argue, IP and copyright are
premised on liberal and neoliberal assumptions and constructs, such as
ownership, private rights, self-interest and
individualism.[23](ch3.xhtml#footnote-130) In this sense copyright,
authorship, the work as object, and related discourses around creativity
continuously re-establish and strengthen each other as part of a self-
sustaining system. We have seen this with the discourse around creative
industries, as part of which economic value comes to stand in for the creative
process itself, which, according to this narrative, can only be sustained
through an IP regime. Furthermore, from a feminist new materialist position,
the current discourse on creativity is very much a material expression of
creativity rather than merely its representation, where this discourse has
been classifying, constructing, and situating creativity (and with that,
authorship) within a neoliberal framework of creative industries.
Moving away from an individual construct of creativity therefore immediately
affects the question of the value of words. In our current copyright model
emphasis lies on the individual original author, but in a more distributed
vision the value of words and of creative production can be connected to a
broader context of creative agencies. Historically there has been a great
discursive shift from a valuing of imitation or derivation to a valuing of
originality in determining what counts as creativity or creative output.
Similar to Rose, Craig, Turcotte and Coombe argue that the individuality and
originality of authorship in its modern form established a simple route
towards individual ownership and the propertisation of creative achievement:
the original work is the author’s ownership whereas the imitator or pirate is
a trespasser of thief. In this sense original authorship is
‘disproportionately valued against other forms of cultural expression and
creative play’, where copyright upholds, maintains and strengthens the binary
between imitator and creator — defined by Craig, Turcotte and Coombe as a
‘moral divide’.[24](ch3.xhtml#footnote-129) This also presupposes a notion of
creativity that sees individuals as autonomous, living in isolation from each
other, ignoring their relationality. Yet as Craig, Turcotte and Coombe argue,
‘the act of writing involves not origination, but rather the adaptation,
derivation, translation and recombination of “raw material” taken from
previously existing texts’.[25](ch3.xhtml#footnote-128) This position has also
been explored extensively from within remix studies and fan culture, where the
adaptation and remixing of cultural content stands at the basis of creativity
(what Lawrence Lessig has called Read/Write culture, opposed to Read/Only
culture).[26](ch3.xhtml#footnote-127) From the perspective of access to
culture — instead of ownership of cultural goods or objects — one could also
argue that its value would increase when we are able to freely distribute it
and with that to adapt and remix it to create new cultural content and with
that cultural and social value — this within a context in which, as Craig,
Turcotte and Coombe point out, ‘the continuous expansion of intellectual
property rights has produced legal regimes that restrict access and downstream
use of information resources far beyond what is required to encourage their
creation’[27](ch3.xhtml#footnote-126)
To move beyond Enlightenment ideals of individuation, detachment and unity of
author and work, which determine the author-owner in the copyright model,
Craig puts forward a post-structuralist vision of relational authorship. This
sees the individual as socially situated and constituted — based also on
feminist scholarship into the socially situated self — where authorship in
this vision is situated within the communities in which it exists, but also in
relation to the texts and discourses that constitute it. Here creativity takes
place from within a network of social relations and the social dimensions of
authorship are recognised, as connectivity goes hand in hand with individual
autonomy. Craig argues that copyright should not be defined out of clashing
rights and interests but should instead focus on the kinds of relationships
this right would structure; it should be understood in relational terms: ‘it
structures relationships between authors and users, allocating powers and
responsibilities amongst members of cultural communities, and establishing the
rules of communication and exchange’.[28](ch3.xhtml#footnote-125) Cultural
value is then defined within these relationships.
## Open Access and the Ethics of Care
Craig, Turcotte and Coombe draw a clear connection between relational
authorship, feminism and (the ideals of) the open access movement, where as
they state, ‘rather than adhering to the individuated form of authorship that
intellectual property laws presuppose, open access initiatives take into
account varying forms of collaboration, creativity and
development’.[29](ch3.xhtml#footnote-124) Yet as I and others have argued
elsewhere,[30](ch3.xhtml#footnote-123) open access or open access publishing
is not a solid ideological block or model; it is made up of disparate groups,
visions and ethics. In this sense there is nothing intrinsically political or
democratic about open access, practitioners of open access can just as well be
seen to support and encourage open access in connection with the neoliberal
knowledge economy, with possessive individualism — even with CC licenses,
which can be seen as strengthening individualism —[31](ch3.xhtml#footnote-122)
and with the unity of author and work.[32](ch3.xhtml#footnote-121)
Nevertheless, there are those within the loosely defined and connected
‘radical open access community’, that do envision their publishing outlook and
relationship towards copyright, openness and authorship within and as part of
a relational ethics of care.[33](ch3.xhtml#footnote-120) For example Mattering
Press, a scholar-led open access book publishing initiative founded in 2012
and launched in 2016, publishes in the field of Science and Technology Studies
(STS) and works with a production model based on cooperation and shared
scholarship. As part of its publishing politics, ethos and ideology, Mattering
Press is therefore keen to include various agencies involved in the production
of scholarship, including ‘authors, reviewers, editors, copy editors, proof
readers, typesetters, distributers, designers, web developers and
readers’.[34](ch3.xhtml#footnote-119) They work with two interrelated feminist
(new materialist) and STS concepts to structure and perform this ethos:
mattering[35](ch3.xhtml#footnote-118) and care.[36](ch3.xhtml#footnote-117)
Where it concerns mattering, Mattering Press is conscious of how their
experiment in knowledge production, being inherently situated, puts new
relationships and configurations into the world. What therefore matters for
them are not so much the ‘author’ or the ‘outcome’ (the object), but the
process and the relationships that make up publishing:
[…] the way academic texts are produced matters — both analytically and
politically. Dominant publishing practices work with assumptions about the
conditions of academic knowledge production that rarely reflect what goes on
in laboratories, field sites, university offices, libraries, and various
workshops and conferences. They tend to deal with almost complete manuscripts
and a small number of authors, who are greatly dependent on the politics of
the publishing industry.[37](ch3.xhtml#footnote-116)
For Mattering Press care is something that extends not only to authors but to
the many other actants involved in knowledge production, who often provide
free volunteer labour within a gift economy context. As Mattering Press
emphasises, the ethics of care ‘mark vital relations and practices whose value
cannot be calculated and thus often goes unacknowledged where logics of
calculation are dominant’.[38](ch3.xhtml#footnote-115) For Mattering Press,
care can help offset and engage with the calculative logic that permeates
academic publishing:
[…] the concept of care can help to engage with calculative logics, such as
those of costs, without granting them dominance. How do we calculate so that
calculations do not dominate our considerations? What would it be to care for
rather than to calculate the cost of a book? This is but one and arguably a
relatively conservative strategy for allowing other logics than those of
calculation to take centre stage in publishing.[39](ch3.xhtml#footnote-114)
This logic of care refers, in part, to making visible the ‘unseen others’ as
Joe Deville (one of Mattering Press’s editors) calls them, who exemplify the
plethora of hidden labour that goes unnoticed within this object and author-
focused (academic) publishing model. As Endre Danyi, another Mattering Press
editor, remarks, quoting Susan Leigh Star: ‘This is, in the end, a profoundly
political process, since so many forms of social control rely on the erasure
or silencing of various workers, on deleting their work from representations
of the work’.[40](ch3.xhtml#footnote-113)
## Posthuman Authorship
Authorship is also being reconsidered as a polyvocal and collaborative
endeavour by reflecting on the agentic role of technology in authoring
content. Within digital literature, hypertext and computer-generated poetry,
media studies scholars have explored the role played by technology and the
materiality of text in the creation process, where in many ways writing can be
seen as a shared act between reader, writer and computer. Lori Emerson
emphasises that machines, media or technology are not neutral in this respect,
which complicates the idea of human subjectivity. Emerson explores this
through the notion of ‘cyborg authorship’, which examines the relation between
machine and human with a focus on the potentiality of in-
betweenness.[41](ch3.xhtml#footnote-112) Dani Spinosa talks about
‘collaboration with an external force (the computer, MacProse, technology in
general)’.[42](ch3.xhtml#footnote-111) Extending from the author, the text
itself, and the reader as meaning-writer (and hence playing a part in the
author function), technology, she states, is a fourth term in this
collaborative meaning-making. As Spinosa argues, in computer-generated texts
the computer is more than a technological tool and becomes a co-producer,
where it can occur that ‘the poet herself merges with the machine in order to
place her own subjectivity in flux’.[43](ch3.xhtml#footnote-110) Emerson calls
this a ‘break from the model of the poet/writer as divinely inspired human
exemplar’, which is exemplified for her in hypertext, computer-generated
poetry, and digital poetry.[44](ch3.xhtml#footnote-109)
Yet in many ways, as Emerson and Spinosa also note, these forms of posthuman
authorship should be seen as part of a larger trend, what Rolf Hughes calls an
‘anti-authorship’ tradition focused on auto-poesis (self-making), generative
systems and automatic writing. As Hughes argues, we see this tradition in
print forms such as Oulipo and in Dada experiments and surrealist games
too.[45](ch3.xhtml#footnote-108) But there are connections here with broader
theories that focus on distributed agency too, especially where it concerns
the influence of the materiality of the text. Media theorists such as N.
Katherine Hayles and Johanna Drucker have extensively argued that the
materiality of the page is entangled with the intentionality of the author as
a further agency; Drucker conceptualises this through a focus on ‘conditional
texts’ and ‘performative materiality’ with respect to the agency of the
material medium (be it the printed page or the digital
screen).[46](ch3.xhtml#footnote-107)
Where, however, does the redistribution of value creation end in these
narratives? As Nick Montfort states with respect to the agency of technology,
‘should other important and inspirational mechanisms — my CD player, for
instance, and my bookshelves — get cut in on the action as
well?’[47](ch3.xhtml#footnote-106) These distributed forms of authorship do
not solve issues related to authorship or remuneration but further complicate
them. Nevertheless Montfort is interested in describing the processes involved
in these types of (posthuman) co-authorship, to explore the (previously
unexplored) relationships and processes involved in the authoring of texts
more clearly. As he states, this ‘can help us understand the role of the
different participants more fully’.[48](ch3.xhtml#footnote-105) In this
respect a focus on posthuman authorship and on the various distributed
agencies that play a part in creative processes is not only a means to disrupt
the hegemonic focus on a romantic single and original authorship model, but it
is also about a sensibility to (machinic) co-authorship, to the different
agencies involved in the creation of art, and playing a role in creativity
itself. As Emerson remarks in this respect: ‘we must be wary of granting a
(romantic) specialness to human intentionality — after all, the point of
dividing the responsibility for the creation of the poems between human and
machine is to disrupt the singularity of human identity, to force human
identity to intermingle with machine identity’.[49](ch3.xhtml#footnote-104)
## Emergent Creativity
This more relational notion of rights and the wider appreciation of the
various (posthuman) agencies involved in creative processes based on an ethics
of care, challenges the vision of the single individualised and original
author/owner who stands at the basis of our copyright and IP regime — a vision
that, it is worth emphasising, can be seen as a historical (and Western)
anomaly, where collaborative, anonymous, and more polyvocal models of
authorship have historically prevailed.[50](ch3.xhtml#footnote-103) The other
side of the Foucauldian double bind, i.e. the fixed cultural object that
functions as a commodity, has however been similarly critiqued from several
angles. As stated before, and as also apparent from the way the ALCS report
has been framed, currently our copyright and remuneration regime is based on
ownership of cultural objects. Yet as many have already made clear, this
regime and discourse is very much based on physical objects and on a print-
based context.[51](ch3.xhtml#footnote-102) As such the idea of ‘text’ (be it
print or digital) has not been sufficiently problematised as versioned,
processual and materially changing within an IP context. In other words, text
and works are mostly perceived as fixed and stable objects and commodities
instead of material and creative processes and entangled relationalities. As
Craig et al. state, ‘the copyright system is unfortunately employed to
reinforce the norms of the analog world’.[52](ch3.xhtml#footnote-101) In
contrast to a more relational perspective, the current copyright regime views
culture through a proprietary lens. And it is very much this discursive
positioning, or as Craig et al. argue ‘the language of “ownership,”
“property,” and “commodity”’, which ‘obfuscates the nature of copyright’s
subject matter, and cloaks the social and cultural conditions of its
production and the implications of its
protection’.[53](ch3.xhtml#footnote-100) How can we approach creativity in
context, as socially and culturally situated, and not as the free-standing,
stable product of a transcendent author, which is very much how it is being
positioned within an economic and copyright framework? This hegemonic
conception of creativity as property fails to acknowledge or take into
consideration the manifold, distributed, derivative and messy realities of
culture and creativity.
It is therefore important to put forward and promote another more emergent
vision of creativity, where creativity is seen as both processual and only
ever temporarily fixed, and where the work itself is seen as being the product
of a variety of (posthuman) agencies. Interestingly, someone who has written
very elaborately about a different form of creativity relevant to this context
is one of the authors of the ALCS commissioned report, Johanna Gibson. Similar
to Craig, who focuses on the relationality of copyright, Gibson wants to pay
more attention to the networking of creativity, moving it beyond a focus on
traditional models of producers and consumers in exchange for a ‘many-to-many’
model of creativity. For Gibson, IP as a system aligns with a corporate model
of creativity, one which oversimplifies what it means to be creative and
measures it against economic parameters alone.[54](ch3.xhtml#footnote-099) In
many ways in policy driven visions, IP has come to stand in for the creative
process itself, Gibson argues, and is assimilated within corporate models of
innovation. It has thus become a synonym for creativity, as we have seen in
the creative industries discourse. As Gibson explains, this simplified model
of creativity is very much a ‘discursive strategy’ in which the creator is
mythologised and output comes in the form of commodified
objects.[55](ch3.xhtml#footnote-098) In this sense we need to re-appropriate
creativity as an inherently fluid and uncertain concept and practice.
Yet this mimicry of creativity by IP and innovation at the same time means
that any re-appropriation of creativity from the stance of access and reuse is
targeted as anti-IP and thus as standing outside of formal creativity. Other,
more emergent forms of creativity have trouble existing within this self-
defining and sustaining hegemonic system. This is similar to what Craig
remarked with respect to remixed, counterfeit and pirated, and un-original
works, which are seen as standing outside the system. Gibson uses actor
network theory (ANT) as a framework to construct her network-based model of
creativity, where for her ANT allows for a vision that does not fix creativity
within a product, but focuses more on the material relationships and
interactions between users and producers. In this sense, she argues, a network
model allows for plural agencies to be attributed to creativity, including
those of users.[56](ch3.xhtml#footnote-097)
An interesting example of how the hegemonic object-based discourse of
creativity can be re-appropriated comes from the conceptual poet Kenneth
Goldsmith, who, in what could be seen as a direct response to this dominant
narrative, tries to emphasise that exactly what this discourse classifies as
‘uncreative’, should be seen as valuable in itself. Goldsmith points out that
appropriating is creative and that he uses it as a pedagogical method in his
classes on ‘Uncreative Writing’ (which he defines as ‘the art of managing
information and representing it as writing’[57](ch3.xhtml#footnote-096)). Here
‘uncreative writing’ is something to strive for and stealing, copying, and
patchwriting are elevated as important and valuable tools for writing. For
Goldsmith the digital environment has fostered new skills and notions of
writing beyond the print-based concepts of originality and authorship: next to
copying, editing, reusing and remixing texts, the management and manipulation
of information becomes an essential aspect of
creativity.[58](ch3.xhtml#footnote-095) Uncreative writing involves a
repurposing and appropriation of existing texts and works, which then become
materials or building blocks for further works. In this sense Goldsmith
critiques the idea of texts or works as being fixed when asking, ‘if artefacts
are always in flux, when is a historical work determined to be
“finished”?’[59](ch3.xhtml#footnote-094) At the same time, he argues, our
identities are also in flux and ever shifting, turning creative writing into a
post-identity literature.[60](ch3.xhtml#footnote-093) Machines play important
roles in uncreative writing, as active agents in the ‘managing of
information’, which is then again represented as writing, and is seen by
Goldsmith as a bridge between human-centred writing and full-blown
‘robopoetics’ (literature written by machines, for machines). Yet Goldsmith is
keen to emphasise that these forms of uncreative writing are not beholden to
the digital medium, and that pre-digital examples are plentiful in conceptual
literature and poetry. He points out — again by a discursive re-appropriation
of what creativity is or can be — that sampling, remixing and appropriation
have been the norm in other artistic and creative media for decades. The
literary world is lagging behind in this respect, where, despite the
experiments by modernist writers, it continues neatly to delineate avant-garde
from more general forms of writing. Yet as Goldsmith argues the digital has
started to disrupt this distinction again, moving beyond ‘analogue’ notions of
writing, and has fuelled with it the idea that there might be alternative
notions of writing: those currently perceived as
uncreative.[61](ch3.xhtml#footnote-092)
## Conclusion
There are two addendums to the argument I have outlined above that I would
like to include here. First of all, I would like to complicate and further
critique some of the preconceptions still inherent in the relational and
networked copyright models as put forward by Craig et al. and Gibson. Both are
in many ways reformist and ‘responsive’ models. Gibson, for example, does not
want to do away with IP rights, she wants them to develop and adapt to mirror
society more accurately according to a networked model of creativity. For her,
the law is out of tune with its public, and she wants to promote a more
inclusive networked (copy) rights model.[62](ch3.xhtml#footnote-091) For Craig
too, relationalities are established and structured by rights first and
foremost. Yet from a posthuman perspective we need to be conscious of how the
other actants involved in creativity would fall outside such a humanist and
subjective rights model.[63](ch3.xhtml#footnote-090) From texts and
technologies themselves to the wider environmental context and to other
nonhuman entities and objects: in what sense will a copyright model be able to
extend such a network beyond an individualised liberal humanist human subject?
What do these models exclude in this respect and in what sense are they still
limited by their adherence to a rights model that continues to rely on
humanist nodes in a networked or relational model? As Anna Munster has argued
in a talk about the case of the monkey selfie, copyright is based on a logic
of exclusion that does not line up with the assemblages of agentic processes
that make up creativity and creative expression.[64](ch3.xhtml#footnote-089)
How can we appreciate the relational and processual aspects of identity, which
both Craig and Gibson seem to want to promote, if we hold on to an inherently
humanist concept of subjectification, rights and creativity?
Secondly, I want to highlight that we need to remain cautious of a movement
away from copyright and the copyright industries, to a context of free culture
in which free content — and the often free labour it is based upon — ends up
servicing the content industries (i.e. Facebook, Google, Amazon). We must be
wary when access or the narrative around (open) access becomes dominated by
access to or for big business, benefitting the creative industries and the
knowledge economy. The danger of updating and adapting IP law to fit a
changing digital context and to new technologies, of making it more inclusive
in this sense — which is something both Craig and Gibson want to do as part of
their reformative models — is that this tends to be based on a very simplified
and deterministic vision of technology, as something requiring access and an
open market to foster innovation. As Sarah Kember argues, this technocratic
rationale, which is what unites pro-and anti-copyright activists in this
sense, essentially de-politicises the debate around IP; it is still a question
of determining the value of creativity through an economic perspective, based
on a calculative lobby.[65](ch3.xhtml#footnote-088) The challenge here is to
redefine the discourse in such a way that our focus moves away from a dominant
market vision, and — as Gibson and Craig have also tried to do — to emphasise
a non-calculative ethics of relations, processes and care instead.
I would like to return at this point to the ALCS report and the way its
results have been framed within a creative industries discourse.
Notwithstanding the fact that fair remuneration and incentives for literary
production and creativity in general are of the utmost importance, what I have
tried to argue here is that the ‘solution’ proposed by the ALCS does not do
justice to the complexities of creativity. When discussing remuneration of
authors, the ALCS seems to prefer a simple solution in which copyright is seen
as a given, the digital is pointed out as a generalised scapegoat, and
binaries between print and digital are maintained and strengthened.
Furthermore, fair remuneration is encapsulated by the ALCS within an economic
calculative logic and rhetoric, sustained by and connected to a creative
industries discourse, which continuously recreates the idea that creativity
and innovation are one. Instead I have tried to put forward various
alternative visions and practices, from radical open access to posthuman
authorship and uncreative writing, based on vital relationships and on an
ethics of care and responsibility. These alternatives highlight distributed
and relational authorship and/or showcase a sensibility that embraces
posthuman agencies and processual publishing as part of a more complex,
emergent vision of creativity, open to different ideas of what creativity is
and can become. In this vision creativity is thus seen as relational, fluid
and processual and only ever temporarily fixed as part of our ethical decision
making: a decision-making process that is contingent on the contexts and
relationships with which we find ourselves entangled. This involves asking
questions about what writing is and does, and how creativity expands beyond
our established, static, or given concepts, which include copyright and a
focus on the author as a ‘homo economicus’, writing as inherently an
enterprise, and culture as commodified. As I have argued, the value of words,
indeed the economic worth and sustainability of words and of the ‘creative
industries’, can and should be defined within a different narrative. Opening
up from the hegemonic creative industries discourse and the way we perform it
through our writing practices might therefore enable us to explore extended
relationalities of emergent creativity, open-ended publishing processes, and a
feminist ethics of care and responsibility.
This contribution has showcased examples of experimental, hybrid and posthuman
writing and publishing practices that are intervening in this established
discourse on creativity. How, through them, can we start to performatively
explore a new discourse and reconfigure the relationships that underlie our
writing processes? How can the worth of writing be reflected in different
ways?
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and Michaela Spencer (2013) ‘Mattering Press: New Forms of Care for STS
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Studies (New York and London: Routledge), pp. 104–14,
— (2014) ‘Embracing Messiness’, LSE Impact of Social Sciences,
adema-pdsc14/>
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Monograph in Contemporary Digital Culture’ (PhD dissertation, Coventry
University),
f4c62c77ac86/1/ademacomb.pdf>
— (2014) ‘Open Access’, in Critical Keywords for the Digital Humanities
(Lueneburg: Centre for Digital Cultures (CDC)),
— and Gary Hall (2013) ‘The Political Nature of the Book: On Artists’ Books
and Radical Open Access’, New Formations 78.1, 138–56,
— and Samuel Moore (2018) ‘Collectivity and Collaboration: Imagining New Forms
of Communality to Create Resilience in Scholar-Led Publishing’, Insights 31.3,
ALCS, Press Release (8 July 2014) ‘What Are Words Worth Now? Not Enough’,
Barad, Karen (2007) Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the
Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Durham, N.C., and London: Duke University
Press).
Boon, Marcus (2010) In Praise of Copying (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press).
Brown, Wendy (2015) Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press).
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Europe Between the 14th and 18th Centuries, 1st ed. (Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press).
Craig, Carys J. (2011) Copyright, Communication and Culture: Towards a
Relational Theory of Copyright Law (Cheltenham, UK, and Northampton, MA:
Edward Elgar Publishing).
— Joseph F. Turcotte, and Rosemary J. Coombe (2011) ‘What’s Feminist About
Open Access? A Relational Approach to Copyright in the Academy’, Feminists@law
1.1,
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New York, NY: nai010 publishers).
Drucker, Johanna (2015) ‘Humanist Computing at the End of the Individual Voice
and the Authoritative Text’, in Patrik Svensson and David Theo Goldberg
(eds.), Between Humanities and the Digital (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press), pp.
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— (2014) ‘Distributed and Conditional Documents: Conceptualizing
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Materialidades da Literatura 2.1, 11–29.
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Poem: Reading Walter Benn Michaels with Erin Moureacute’s Pillage Land’, ESC:
English Studies in Canada 34, 45–69.
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Koskimaa, Loss Pequeño Glazier and John Cayley (eds.), CyberText Yearbook
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Epistemology (New York: The New Press).
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humanities/>
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Access Now (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press).
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Jenkins, Henry, and Owen Gallagher (2008) ‘“What Is Remix Culture?”: An
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(Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press).
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New Formations: A Journal of Culture/Theory/Politics 83.1, 99–116.
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report.pdf](https://microsites.bournemouth.ac.uk/cippm/files/2007/07/ACLS-
Full-report.pdf)
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(Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press).
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Eskelinen, Raine Kosimaa, Loss Pequeño Glazier and John Cayley (eds.),
CyberText Yearbook 2002–2003, 2003, 201–17, , pp. 201–17.
Moore, Samuel A. (2017) ‘A Genealogy of Open Access: Negotiations between
Openness and Access to Research’, Revue Française des Sciences de
l’information et de la Communication 11,
Munster, Anna (2016) ‘Techno-Animalities — the Case of the Monkey Selfie’
(presented at the Goldsmiths University, London),
Navas, Eduardo (2012) Remix Theory: The Aesthetics of Sampling (Vienna and New
York: Springer).
Parikka, Jussi, and Mercedes Bunz (11 July 2014) ‘A Mini-Interview: Mercedes
Bunz Explains Meson Press’, Machinology,
meson-press/>
Richards, Victoria (7 January 2016) ‘Monkey Selfie: Judge Rules Macaque Who
Took Grinning Photograph of Himself “Cannot Own Copyright”’, The Independent,
macaque-who-took-grinning-photograph-of-himself-cannot-own-
copyright-a6800471.html>
Robbins, Sarah (2003) ‘Distributed Authorship: A Feminist Case-Study Framework
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Rose, Mark (1993) Authors and Owners: The Invention of Copyright (Cambridge,
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Spinosa, Dani (14 May 2014) ‘“My Line (Article) Has Sighed”: Authorial
Subjectivity and Technology’, Generic Pronoun,
Star, Susan Leigh (1991) ‘The Sociology of the Invisible: The Primacy of Work
in the Writings of Anselm Strauss’, in Anselm Leonard Strauss and David R.
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Anselm Strauss (New York: A. de Grutyer).
* * *
[1](ch3.xhtml#footnote-152-backlink) The Authors’ Licensing and Collecting
Society is a [British](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Kingdom)
membership organisation for writers, established in 1977 with over 87,000
members, focused on protecting and promoting authors’ rights. ALCS collects
and pays out money due to members for secondary uses of their work (copying,
broadcasting, recording etc.).
[2](ch3.xhtml#footnote-151-backlink) This survey was an update of an earlier
survey conducted in 2006 by the Centre of Intellectual Property Policy and
Management (CIPPM) at Bournemouth University.
[3](ch3.xhtml#footnote-150-backlink) ‘New Research into Authors’ Earnings
Released’, Authors’ Licensing and Collecting Society, 2014,
Us/News/News/What-are-words-worth-now-not-much.aspx>
[4](ch3.xhtml#footnote-149-backlink) Johanna Gibson, Phillip Johnson, and
Gaetano Dimita, The Business of Being an Author: A Survey of Author’s Earnings
and Contracts (London: Queen Mary University of London, 2015), p. 9,
[https://orca.cf.ac.uk/72431/1/Final Report - For Web Publication.pdf
](https://orca.cf.ac.uk/72431/1/Final%20Report%20-%20For%20Web%20Publication.pdf)
[5](ch3.xhtml#footnote-148-backlink) ALCS, Press Release. What Are Words Worth
Now? Not Enough, 8 July 2014,
worth-now-not-enough>
[6](ch3.xhtml#footnote-147-backlink) Gibson, Johnson, and Dimita, The Business
of Being an Author, p. 35.
[7](ch3.xhtml#footnote-146-backlink) M. Kretschmer and P. Hardwick, Authors’
Earnings from Copyright and Non-Copyright Sources: A Survey of 25,000 British
and German Writers (Poole: CIPPM/ALCS Bournemouth University, 2007), p. 3,
[https://microsites.bournemouth.ac.uk/cippm/files/2007/07/ALCS-Full-
report.pdf](https://microsites.bournemouth.ac.uk/cippm/files/2007/07/ACLS-
Full-report.pdf)
[8](ch3.xhtml#footnote-145-backlink) ALCS, Press Release, 8 July 2014,
[https://www.alcs.co.uk/news/what-are-words-](https://www.alcs.co.uk/news
/what-are-words-worth-now-not-enough) worth-now-not-enough
[9](ch3.xhtml#footnote-144-backlink) Gibson, Johnson, and Dimita, The Business
of Being an Author, p. 35.
[10](ch3.xhtml#footnote-143-backlink) Ibid.
[11](ch3.xhtml#footnote-142-backlink) In the survey, three questions that
focus on various sources of remuneration do list digital publishing and/or
online uses as an option (questions 8, 11, and 15). Yet the data tables
provided in the appendix to the report do not provide the findings for
questions 11 and 15 nor do they differentiate according to type of media for
other tables related to remuneration. The only data table we find in the
report related to digital publishing is table 3.3, which lists ‘Earnings
ranked (1 to 7) in relation to categories of work’, where digital publishing
ranks third after books and magazines/periodicals, but before newspapers,
audio/audio-visual productions and theatre. This lack of focus on the effect
of digital publishing on writers’ incomes, for a survey that is ‘the first to
capture the impact of the digital revolution on writers’ working lives’, is
quite remarkable. Gibson, Johnson, and Dimita, The Business of Being an
Author, Appendix 2.
[12](ch3.xhtml#footnote-141-backlink) Ibid., p. 35.
[13](ch3.xhtml#footnote-140-backlink) Ibid.
[14](ch3.xhtml#footnote-139-backlink) Geert Lovink and Ned Rossiter (eds.),
MyCreativity Reader: A Critique of Creative Industries (Amsterdam: Institute
of Network Cultures, 2007), p. 14,
[16](ch3.xhtml#footnote-137-backlink) Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos:
Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015), p. 31.
[17](ch3.xhtml#footnote-136-backlink) Therefore Lovink and Rossiter make a
plea to, ‘redefine creative industries outside of IP generation’. Lovink and
Rossiter, MyCreativity Reader, p. 14.
[18](ch3.xhtml#footnote-135-backlink) Next to earnings made from writing more
in general, the survey on various occasions asks questions about earnings
arising from specific categories of works and related to the amount of works
exploited (published/broadcast) during certain periods. Gibson, Johnson, and
Dimita, The Business of Being an Author, Appendix 2.
[19](ch3.xhtml#footnote-134-backlink) Roger Chartier, The Order of Books:
Readers, Authors, and Libraries in Europe Between the 14th and 18th Centuries,
1st ed. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994); Lisa Ede and Andrea A.
Lunsford, ‘Collaboration and Concepts of Authorship’, PMLA 116.2 (2001),
354–69; Adrian Johns, The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the
Making (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1998); Jerome J. McGann, A
Critique of Modern Textual Criticism (Charlottesville, VA, University of
Virginia Press, 1992); Sarah Robbins, ‘Distributed Authorship: A Feminist
Case-Study Framework for Studying Intellectual Property’, College English 66.2
(2003), 155–71,
[20](ch3.xhtml#footnote-133-backlink) The ALCS survey addresses this problem,
of course, and tries to lobby on behalf of its authors for fair contracts with
publishers and intermediaries. That said, the survey findings show that only
42% of writers always retain their copyright. Gibson, Johnson, and Dimita, The
Business of Being an Author, p. 12.
[21](ch3.xhtml#footnote-132-backlink) Michel Foucault, ‘What Is an Author?’,
in James D. Faubion (ed.), Essential Works of Foucault, 1954–1984, Volume Two:
Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology (New York: The New Press, 1998), p. 205.
[22](ch3.xhtml#footnote-131-backlink) Mark Rose, Authors and Owners: The
Invention of Copyright (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993).
[23](ch3.xhtml#footnote-130-backlink) Carys J. Craig, Joseph F. Turcotte, and
Rosemary J. Coombe, ‘What’s Feminist About Open Access? A Relational Approach
to Copyright in the Academy’, Feminists@law 1.1 (2011),
[24](ch3.xhtml#footnote-129-backlink) Ibid., p. 8.
[25](ch3.xhtml#footnote-128-backlink) Ibid., p. 9.
[26](ch3.xhtml#footnote-127-backlink) Lawrence Lessig, Remix: Making Art and
Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy (New York: Penguin Press, 2008); Eduardo
Navas, Remix Theory: The Aesthetics of Sampling (Vienna and New York:
Springer, 2012); Henry Jenkins and Owen Gallagher, ‘“What Is Remix Culture?”:
An Interview with Total Recut’s Owen Gallagher’, Confessions of an Aca-Fan,
2008,
[27](ch3.xhtml#footnote-126-backlink) Craig, Turcotte, and Coombe, ‘What’s
Feminist About Open Access?, p. 27.
[28](ch3.xhtml#footnote-125-backlink) Ibid., p. 14.
[29](ch3.xhtml#footnote-124-backlink) Ibid., p. 26.
[30](ch3.xhtml#footnote-123-backlink) Janneke Adema, ‘Open Access’, in
Critical Keywords for the Digital Humanities (Lueneburg: Centre for Digital
Cultures (CDC), 2014), ; Janneke Adema,
‘Embracing Messiness’, LSE Impact of Social Sciences, 2014,
adema-pdsc14/>; Gary Hall, Digitize This Book!: The Politics of New Media, or
Why We Need Open Access Now (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press,
2008), p. 197; Sarah Kember, ‘Why Write?: Feminism, Publishing and the
Politics of Communication’, New Formations: A Journal of
Culture/Theory/Politics 83.1 (2014), 99–116; Samuel A. Moore, ‘A Genealogy of
Open Access: Negotiations between Openness and Access to Research’, Revue
Française des Sciences de l’information et de la Communication, 2017,
[31](ch3.xhtml#footnote-122-backlink) Florian Cramer, Anti-Media: Ephemera on
Speculative Arts (Rotterdam and New York: nai010 publishers, 2013).
[32](ch3.xhtml#footnote-121-backlink) Especially within humanities publishing
there is a reluctance to allow derivative uses of one’s work in an open access
setting.
[33](ch3.xhtml#footnote-120-backlink) In 2015 the Radical Open Access
Conference took place at Coventry University, which brought together a large
array of presses and publishing initiatives (often academic-led) in support of
an ‘alternative’ vision of open access and scholarly communication.
Participants in this conference subsequently formed the loosely allied Radical
Open Access Collective: [radicaloa.co.uk](https://radicaloa.co.uk/). As the
conference concept outlines, radical open access entails ‘a vision of open
access that is characterised by a spirit of on-going creative experimentation,
and a willingness to subject some of our most established scholarly
communication and publishing practices, together with the institutions that
sustain them (the library, publishing house etc.), to rigorous critique.
Included in the latter will be the asking of important questions about our
notions of authorship, authority, originality, quality, credibility,
sustainability, intellectual property, fixity and the book — questions that
lie at the heart of what scholarship is and what the university can be in the
21st century’. Janneke Adema and Gary Hall, ‘The Political Nature of the Book:
On Artists’ Books and Radical Open Access’, New Formations 78.1 (2013),
138–56, ; Janneke Adema and Samuel
Moore, ‘Collectivity and Collaboration: Imagining New Forms of Communality to
Create Resilience In Scholar-Led Publishing’, Insights 31.3 (2018), ; Gary Hall, ‘Radical Open Access in the
Humanities’ (presented at the Research Without Borders, Columbia University,
2010),
humanities/>; Janneke Adema, ‘Knowledge Production Beyond The Book? Performing
the Scholarly Monograph in Contemporary Digital Culture’ (PhD dissertation,
Coventry University, 2015),
f4c62c77ac86/1/ademacomb.pdf>
[34](ch3.xhtml#footnote-119-backlink) Julien McHardy, ‘Why Books Matter: There
Is Value in What Cannot Be Evaluated’, Impact of Social Sciences, 2014, n.p.,
[http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocial sciences/2014/09/30/why-books-
matter/](http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2014/09/30/why-books-
matter/)
[35](ch3.xhtml#footnote-118-backlink) Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe
Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Durham,
N.C. and London: Duke University Press, 2007).
[36](ch3.xhtml#footnote-117-backlink) Annemarie Mol, The Logic of Care: Health
and the Problem of Patient Choice, 1st ed. (London and New York: Routledge,
2008).
[37](ch3.xhtml#footnote-116-backlink) Sebastian Abrahamsson and others,
‘Mattering Press: New Forms of Care for STS Books’, The EASST Review 32.4
(2013),
press-new-forms-of-care-for-sts-books/>
[40](ch3.xhtml#footnote-113-backlink) Susan Leigh Star, ‘The Sociology of the
Invisible: The Primacy of Work in the Writings of Anselm Strauss’, in Anselm
Leonard Strauss and David R. Maines (eds.), Social Organization and Social
Process: Essays in Honor of Anselm Strauss (New York: A. de Gruyter, 1991).
Mattering Press is not alone in exploring an ethics of care in relation to
(academic) publishing. Sarah Kember, director of Goldsmiths Press is also
adamant in her desire to make the underlying processes of publishing (i.e.
peer review, citation practices) more transparent and accountable Sarah
Kember, ‘Why Publish?’, Learned Publishing 29 (2016), 348–53, . Mercedes Bunz, one of the editors running
Meson Press, argues that a sociology of the invisible would incorporate
‘infrastructure work’, the work of accounting for, and literally crediting
everybody involved in producing a book: ‘A book isn’t just a product that
starts a dialogue between author and reader. It is accompanied by lots of
other academic conversations — peer review, co-authors, copy editors — and
these conversations deserve to be taken more serious’. Jussi Parikka and
Mercedes Bunz, ‘A Mini-Interview: Mercedes Bunz Explains Meson Press’,
Machinology, 2014,
mercedes-bunz-explains-meson-press/>. For Open Humanities Press authorship is
collaborative and even often anonymous: for example, they are experimenting
with research published in wikis to further complicate the focus on single
authorship and a static marketable book object within academia (see their
living and liquid books series).
[41](ch3.xhtml#footnote-112-backlink) Lori Emerson, ‘Digital Poetry as
Reflexive Embodiment’, in Markku Eskelinen, Raine Koskimaa, Loss Pequeño
Glazier and John Cayley (eds.), CyberText Yearbook 2002–2003, 2003, 88–106,
[42](ch3.xhtml#footnote-111-backlink) Dani Spinosa, ‘“My Line (Article) Has
Sighed”: Authorial Subjectivity and Technology’, Generic Pronoun, 2014,
[43](ch3.xhtml#footnote-110-backlink) Spinosa, ‘My Line (Article) Has Sighed’.
[44](ch3.xhtml#footnote-109-backlink) Emerson, ‘Digital Poetry as Reflexive
Embodiment’, p. 89.
[45](ch3.xhtml#footnote-108-backlink) Rolf Hughes, ‘Orderly Disorder: Post-
Human Creativity’, in Proceedings of the Linköping Electronic Conference
(Linköpings universitet: University Electronic Press, 2005).
[46](ch3.xhtml#footnote-107-backlink) N. Katherine Hayles, ‘Print Is Flat,
Code Is Deep: The Importance of Media-Specific Analysis’, Poetics Today 25.1
(2004), 67–90, ; Johanna Drucker,
‘Performative Materiality and Theoretical Approaches to Interface’, Digital
Humanities Quarterly 7.1 (2013), ; Johanna
Drucker, ‘Distributed and Conditional Documents: Conceptualizing
Bibliographical Alterities’, MATLIT: Revista do Programa de Doutoramento em
Materialidades da Literatura 2.1 (2014), 11–29.
[47](ch3.xhtml#footnote-106-backlink) Nick Montfort, ‘The Coding and Execution
of the Author’, in Markku Eskelinen, Raine Kosimaa, Loss Pequeño Glazier and
John Cayley (eds.), CyberText Yearbook 2002–2003, 2003, 201–17 (p. 201),
[48](ch3.xhtml#footnote-105-backlink) Montfort, ‘The Coding and Execution of
the Author’, p. 202.
[49](ch3.xhtml#footnote-104-backlink) Lori Emerson, ‘Materiality,
Intentionality, and the Computer-Generated Poem: Reading Walter Benn Michaels
with Erin Moureacute’s Pillage Land’, ESC: English Studies in Canada 34
(2008), 66.
[50](ch3.xhtml#footnote-103-backlink) Marcus Boon, In Praise of Copying
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010); Johanna Drucker, ‘Humanist
Computing at the End of the Individual Voice and the Authoritative Text’, in
Patrik Svensson and David Theo Goldberg (eds.), Between Humanities and the
Digital (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015), pp. 83–94.
[51](ch3.xhtml#footnote-102-backlink) We have to take into consideration here
that print-based cultural products were never fixed or static; the dominant
discourses constructed around them just perceive them to be so.
[52](ch3.xhtml#footnote-101-backlink) Craig, Turcotte, and Coombe, ‘What’s
Feminist About Open Access?’, p. 2.
[53](ch3.xhtml#footnote-100-backlink) Ibid.
[54](ch3.xhtml#footnote-099-backlink) Johanna Gibson, Creating Selves:
Intellectual Property and the Narration of Culture (Aldershot, UK, and
Burlington: Routledge, 2007), p. 7.
[55](ch3.xhtml#footnote-098-backlink) Gibson, Creating Selves, p. 7.
[56](ch3.xhtml#footnote-097-backlink) Ibid.
[57](ch3.xhtml#footnote-096-backlink) Kenneth Goldsmith, Uncreative Writing:
Managing Language in the Digital Age (New York: Columbia University Press,
2011), p. 227.
[58](ch3.xhtml#footnote-095-backlink) Ibid., p. 15.
[59](ch3.xhtml#footnote-094-backlink) Goldsmith, Uncreative Writing, p. 81.
[60](ch3.xhtml#footnote-093-backlink) Ibid.
[61](ch3.xhtml#footnote-092-backlink) It is worth emphasising that what
Goldsmith perceives as ‘uncreative’ notions of writing (including
appropriation, pastiche, and copying), have a prehistory that can be traced
back to antiquity (thanks go out to this chapter’s reviewer for pointing this
out). One example of this, which uses the method of cutting and pasting —
something I have outlined more in depth elsewhere — concerns the early modern
commonplace book. Commonplacing as ‘a method or approach to reading and
writing involved the gathering and repurposing of meaningful quotes, passages
or other clippings from published books by copying and/or pasting them into a
blank book.’ Janneke Adema, ‘Cut-Up’, in Eduardo Navas (ed.), Keywords in
Remix Studies (New York and London: Routledge, 2017), pp. 104–14,
[62](ch3.xhtml#footnote-091-backlink) Gibson, Creating Selves, p. 27.
[63](ch3.xhtml#footnote-090-backlink) For example, animals cannot own
copyright. See the case of Naruto, the macaque monkey that took a ‘selfie’
photograph of itself. Victoria Richards, ‘Monkey Selfie: Judge Rules Macaque
Who Took Grinning Photograph of Himself “Cannot Own Copyright”’, The
Independent, 7 January 2016,
/monkey-selfie-judge-rules-macaque-who-took-grinning-photograph-of-himself-
cannot-own-copyright-a6800471.html>
[64](ch3.xhtml#footnote-089-backlink) Anna Munster, ‘Techno-Animalities — the
Case of the Monkey Selfie’ (presented at the Goldsmiths University, London,
2016),
[65](ch3.xhtml#footnote-088-backlink) Sarah Kember, ‘Why Write?: Feminism,
Publishing and the Politics of Communication’, New Formations: A Journal of
Culture/Theory/Politics 83.1 (2014), 99–116.
Sollfrank, Francke & Weinmayr
Piracy Project
2013
Giving What You Don't Have
Andrea Francke, Eva Weinmayr
Piracy Project
Birmingham, 6 December 2013
[00:12]
Eva Weinmayr: When we talk about the word piracy, it causes a lot of problems
to quite a few institutions to deal with it. So events that we’ve organised
have been announced by Central Saint Martins without using the word piracy.
That’s interesting, the problems it still causes…
Cornelia Sollfrank: And how do you announce the project without “Piracy”? The
Project?
E. W.: It’s a project about intellectual property.
C. S.: The P Project.
Andrea Francke, Eva Weinmayr: [laugh] Yes.
[00:52]
Andrea Francke: The Piracy Project is a knowledge platform, and it is based
around a collection of pirated books, of books that have been copied by
people. And we use it to raise discussion about originality, authorship,
intellectual property questions, and to produce new material, new essays and
new questions.
[01:12]
E. W.: So the Piracy Project includes several aspects. One is that it is an
act of piracy in itself, because it is located in an art school, in a library,
in an officially built up a collection of pirated books. [01:30] So that’s the
second aspect, it’s a collection of books which have been copied,
appropriated, modified, improved, which live in this library. [01:40] And the
third part is that it is a collection of physical books, which is touring. We
create reading rooms and invite people to explore the books and discuss issues
raised by cultural piracy.
[01:58] The Piracy Project started in an art college library, which was
supposed to be closed down. And the Piracy Project is one project of And
Publishing. And Publishing is a publishing activity exploring print-on-demand
and new modes of production and of dissemination, the immediacy of
dissemination. [02:20] And Publishing is a collaboration between myself and
Lynn Harris, and we were hosted by Central Saint Martins College of Art and
Design in London. And the campus where this library was situated was the
campus we were working at. [02:40] So when the library was being closed, we
moved in the library together with other members of staff, and kept the
library open in a self-organised way. But we were aware that there’s no budget
to buy new books, and we wanted to have this as a lively space, so we created
an open call for submissions and we asked people to select a book which is
really important to them and make a copy of it. [03:09] So we weren’t
interested in piling up a collection of second hand books, we were really
interested in this process: what happens when you make a copy of a book, and
how does this copy sit next to the original authoritative copy of the book.
This is how it started.
[03:31]
A. F.: I met Eva at the moment when And Publishing was helping to set up this
new space in the library, and they were trying to think how to make the
library more alive inside that university. [03:44] And I was doing research on
Peruvian book piracy at that time, and I had found this book that was modified
and was in circulation. And it was a very exciting moment for us to think what
happens if we can promote this type of production inside this academic
library.
[04:05] Piracy Project
Collection / Reading Room / Research
[04:11]
The Collection
[04:15]
E. W.: We asked people to make a copy of a book which is important to them and
send it to us, and so with these submission we started to build up the
collections. Lots of students were getting involved, but also lots of people
who work in this topic, and were interested in these topics. [04:38] So we
received about one hundred books in a couple of months. And then, parallel to
this, we started to do research ourselves. [04:50] We had a residency in
China, so we went to China, to Beijing and Shanghai, to meet illegal
booksellers of pirated architecture books. And we had a residency in Turkey,
in Istanbul, where we did lots of interviews with publishers and artists on
book piracy. [05:09] So the collection is a mix of our own research and cases
from the real book markets, and creative work, artistic work which is produced
in the context of an art college and the wider cultural realm.
[05:29]
A. F.: And it is an ongoing project.
E. W.: The project is ongoing, we still receive submissions. The collection is
growing, and at the moment here we have about 180 books, here at Grand Union
(Birmingham).
[05:42]
A. F.: When we did the open call, something that was really important to us
was to make clear for people that they have a space of creativity when they
are making a copy. So we wrote, please send us a copy of a book, and be aware
that things happen when you copy a book. [05:57] Whether you do it
intentionally or not a copy is never the same. So you can use that space, take
ownership of that space and make something out of that; or you can take a step
back and allow things to happen without having control. And I think that is
something that is quite important for us in the project. [06:12] And it is
really interesting how people have embraced that in different measures, like
subtle things, or material things, or adding text, taking text out, mixing
things, judging things. Sometimes just saying, I just want it to circulate, I
don’t mind what happens in the space, I just want the subject to be in the
world again.
[06:35]
E. W.: I think this is one which I find interesting in terms of making a copy,
because it’s not so much about my own creativity, it’s more about exploring
how technology edits what you can see. It’s Jan van Toorn’s Critical Practice,
and the artist is Hester Barnard, a Canadian artist. [07:02] She sent us these
three copies, and we thought, that’s really generous, three copies. But they
are not identical copies, they are very different. Some have a lot of empty
pages in the book. And this book has been screen-captured on a 3.5 inch
iPhone, whereas this book has been screen-captured on a desktop, and this one
has been screen-captured with a laptop. [07:37] So the device you use to
access information online determines what you actually receive. And I find
this really interesting, that she translated this back into a hardcopy, the
online edited material. [07:53] And this is kind of taught by this book,
standard International Copyright. She went to Google Books, and screen-
captured all the pages Google Books are showing. So we are all familiar with
blurry text pages, but then it starts that you get the message “Page 38 is not
shown in this preview.” [08:18] And then it’s going through the whole book, so
she printed every page basically, omitting the actual information. But the
interesting thing is that we are all aware that this is happening on Google,
on screen online, but the fact that she’s translating this back into an
object, into a printed book, is interesting.
[08:44]
Reading Room
[08:48]
A. F.: We create these reading rooms with the collection as a way to tour the
collection, and meet people and have conversations around the books. And that
is something quite important to us, that we go with the physical books to a
place, either for two or three months, and meet different people that have
different interests in relation to the collection in that locality. We’ve been
doing that for the last two years, I think, three years. [09:12] And it’s
quite interesting because different places have very different experiences of
piracy. So you can go to a country where piracy is something very common, or a
different place where people have a very strong position against piracy, or a
different legal framework. And I feel the type of conversations and the
quality of interactions is quite different from being present on the space and
with the books. [09:36] And that’s why we don’t call these exhibitions,
because we always have places where people can come and they can stay, and
they can come again. Sometimes people come three or four times and they
actually read the books. And a few times they go back to their houses and they
bring books back, and they said, I’m going to contact this friend who has been
to Russia and he told me about this book – so we can add it to the collection.
I think that makes a big difference to how the research in the project
functions.
[10:06]
E. W.: One of the most interesting events we did with the Piracy collection
was at the Show Room where we had a residency for the last year. There were
three events, and one was A Day At The Courtroom. This was an afternoon where
we invited three copyright lawyers coming from different legal systems: the
US, the UK, and the Continental European, Athens. And we presented ten
selected cases from the collection and the three copyright lawyers had to
assess them in the eyes of the law, and they had to agree where to put this
book in a scale from legal to illegal. [10:51] So we weren’t interested really
to say, this is legal and this is illegal, we were interested in all the
shades in between. And then they had to discuss where they would place the
book. But then the audience had the last verdict, and then the audience placed
the book. [11:05] And this was an extremely interesting discussion, because it
was interesting to see how different the legal backgrounds are, how blurry the
whole field is, how you can assess when is the moment where a work becomes a
transformative work, or when it stays a derivative work, and this whole
discussion.
[11:30] When we do these reading rooms – and we had one in New York, for
example, at the New York Art Book Fair – people are coming, and they are
coming to see the physical books in a physical space, so this creates a social
encounter and we have these conversations. [11:47] For example, a woman stood
up to us in New york and she told us about a piracy project she run where she
was working in a juvenile detention centre, and she produced a whole shadow
library of books because the incarcerated kids couldn’t take the books in
their cells, so she created these copies, individual chapters, and they could
circulate. [12:20] I’m telling this because the fact that we are having this
reading room and that we are meeting people, and that we are having these
conversations, really furthers our research. We find out about these projects
by sharing knowledge.
[12:38]
Categories
[12:42]
A. F.: Whenever we set our reading room for the Piracy Project we need to
organise the books in a certain way. What we started to do now is that we’ve
created these different categories, and the first set of categories came from
the legal event. [12:56] So we set up, we organised the books in different
categories that would help us have questions for the lawyers, that would work
for groups of books instead of individual works. [13:07] And the idea is that,
for example, we are going to have our next events with librarians, and a new
set of categories would come. So the categories change as our interest or
research in the project is changing. [13:21] The current categories are:
Pirated Design, so books where the look of the book has been copied but not
the content; recirculation, books that have been copied trying to be
reproduced exactly as they were, because they need to be circulating again;
transformation, books that have been modified; For Sale Doctrine, so we
receive quite a few books where people haven’t actually made a copy but they
have cut the book or drawn inside the book, and legally you are allowed to do
anything with a book except copy it, so we thought that it was quite important
so that we didn’t have to discuss that with the lawyers; [14:03] Public
Domain, which are works that are already out of copyright, again, so whatever
you do with those books is legal; and collation, books gathered from different
sources, and who owns the copyright, which was a really interesting question,
which is when you have a book that has many authors – it’s really interesting.
Different systems in different countries have different ways to deal with who
owns the copyright and what are the rights of the owners of the different
works.
[14:36]
E. W.: Ahmet Şık is a journalist who published a book about the Ergenekon
scandal and the Turkish government, and connects that kind of mafioso
structures. Before the book could be published he was arrested and put in jail
for a whole year without trial, and he sent the PDF to friends, and the PDF
was circulating on many different computers so it couldn’t be taken. [15:06]
They published the PDF, and as authors they put over a hundred different
author names, so there was not just one author who could be taken into
responsibility.
[15:22] We have in the collection this book, it’s Teignmouth Electron by
Tacita Dean. This is the original, it’s published by Book Works and Steidl.
And to this round table, to this event, we invited also Jane Rolo, director of
Book Works (and she published this book). [15:41] And we invited her saying,
do you know that your book has been pirated? So she was really interested and
she came along. This is the pirated version, it’s Alias, [by] Damián Ortega in
Mexico. It’s a series of books where he translates texts and theory into
Spanish, which are not available in Spanish. So it’s about access, it’s about
circulation. [16:07] But actually he redesigned the book. The pirated version
looks very different, and it has a small film roll here, from Tacita Dean’s
book. And it was really amazing that Jane Rolo flipped the pirated book and
she said, well, actually this is really very nice.
[16:31] This is kind of a standard academic publishing format, it’s Gilles
Deleuze’s Proust and Signs, and the contributor, the artist who produced the
book is Neil Chapman, a writer based in London. And he made a facsimile of his
copy of this book, including the binding mistakes – so there’s one chapter
upside down printed in the book. [17:04] But the really interesting thing is
that he scanned it on his home inkjet printer – he scanned it on his scanner
and then printed it on his home inkjet printer. And the feel of it is very
crafty, because the inkjet has a very different typographic appearance than
the official copy. [17:28] And this makes you read the book in quite a
different way, you relate differently to the actual text. So it’s not just
about the information conveyed on this page, it’s really about how I can
relate to it visually. I find this really interesting when we put this book
into the library, in our collection in the library, and it sat next to the
original, [17:54] it raises really interesting questions about what kind of
authority decides which book can access the library, because this is
definitely and obviously a self-made copy – so if this self-made copy can
enter the library, any self-made text and self-published copy could enter the
library. So it was raising really interesting questions about gatekeepers of
knowledge, and hierarchies and authorities.
[18:26]
On-line catalogue
[18:30]
E. W.: We created this online catalogue give to an overview of what we have in
the collection. We have a cover photograph and then we have a short text where
we try to frame and to describe the approach taken, like the strategy, what’s
been pirated and what was the strategy. [18:55] And this is quite a lot,
because it’s giving you the framework of it, the conceptual framework. But
it’s not giving you the book, and this is really important because lots of the
books couldn’t be digitised, because it’s exactly their material quality which
is important, and which makes the point. [19:17] So if I would… if I have a
project which is working about mediation, and then I put another layer of
mediation on top of it by scanning it, it just wouldn’t work anymore.
[19:29] The purpose of the online catalogue isn’t to give you insight into all
the books to make actually all the information available, it’s more to talk
about the approach taken and the questions which are raised by this specific
book.
[19:47]
Cultures of the copy
[19:51]
A topic of cultural difference became really obvious when we went to Istanbul.
A copy shop which had many academic titles on the shelves, copied, pirated
titles... The fact is that in London, where I’m based, you can access anything
in any library, and it’s not too expensive to get the original book. [20:27]
But in Istanbul it’s very expensive, and the whole academic community thrives
on pirated, copied academic titles.
[20:39]
A. F.: So this is the original Jaime Bayly [No se lo digas a nadie], and this
is the pirated copy of the Jaime Bayly. This book is from Peru, it was bought
on the street, on a street market. [20:53] And Peru has a very big pirated
book market, most books in Peru are pirated. And we found this because there
was a rumour that books in Peru had been modified, pirated books. And this
version, the pirated version, has two extra chapters that are not in the
original one. [21:13] It’s really hard to understand the motivation behind it.
There’s no credit, so the person is inhabiting this author’s identity in a
sense. They are not getting any cultural capital from it. They are not getting
extra money, because if they are found out, nobody would buy books from this
publisher anymore. [21:33] The chapters are really well written, so you as a
reader would not realise that you are reading something that has been pirated.
And that was really fascinating in terms of what space you create. So when you
have this technology that allows you to have the book open and print it so
easily – how you can you take advantage of that, and take ownership or inhabit
these spaces that technology is opening up for you.
[22:01]
E. W.: Book piracy in China is really important when it comes to architecture
books, Western architecture books. Lots of architecture studios, but even
university libraries would buy from pirate book sellers, because it’s just so
much cheaper. [22:26] And we’ve found this Mark magazine with one of the
architecture sellers, and it’s supposed to be a bargain because you have six
magazines in one. [22:41] And we were really interested in the question, what
are the criteria for the editing? How do you edit six issues into one? But
basically everything is in here, from advertisement, to text, to images, it’s
all there. But then a really interesting question arises when it comes to
technology, because in this magazine there are pages in Italian language
clearly taken from other magazines.
[23:14]
A. F.: But it was also really interesting to go there, and actually interview
the distributor and go through the whole experience. We had to meet the
distributor in a neutral place, and he interviewed us to see if he was going
to allow us to go into the shop and buy his books. [23:31] And then going
through the catalogue and realising how Rem Koolhaas is really popular among
the pirates, but actually Chinese architecture is not popular, so there’s only
like three pirated books on Chinese architecture; or that from all the
architecture universities in the world only the AA books are copied – the
Architectural Association books. [23:51] And I think those small things are
really things that are worth spending time and reflecting on.
[23:58]
E. W.: We found this pirate copy of Tintin when we visited Beijing, and
obviously compared to the original, it looks different, a different format.
But also it’s black and white, but it’s not a photocopy of the original full-
colour. [24:23] It’s redrawn by hand, so all the drawings are redrawn and
obviously translated into Chinese. This is quite a labour of love, which is
really amazing. I can compare the two. The space is slightly differently
interpreted.
[24:50]
A. F.: And it’s really incredible, because at some point in China there were
14 or 15 different publishers publishing Tintin, and they all have their
versions. They are all hand-drawn by different people, so in the back, in
Chinese, it’s the credit. So you can buy it by deciding which person does the
best drawings of the production of Tintin, which I thought it was really…
[25:14] It’s such a different cultural way to actually give credit to the
person that is copying it, and recognise the labour, and the intention and the
value of that work.
[25:24]
Why books?
[25:28]
E. W.: Books have always been very important in my practice, in my artistic
practice, because lots of my projects culminated in a book, or led into a
book. And publications are important because they can circulate freely, they
can circulate much easier than artworks in a gallery. [25:50] So this question
of how to make things public and how to create an audience… not how to create
an audience – how to reach a reader and how to create a dialogue. So the book
is the perfect tool for this.
[26:04]
A. F.: My interest in books comes from making art, or thinking about art as a
way to interact with the world, so outside art settings, and I found books
really interesting in that. And that’s how I met Eva, in a sense, because I
was interested in that part of her practice. [26:26] When I found the Jaime
Bayly book, for me that was a real moment of excitement, of this person that
was doing this things in the world without taking any credit, but was having
such a profound effect on so many readers. I’m quite fascinated by that.
[26:44] I'm also really interested in research and using events – research
that works with people. So it kind of creates communities around certain
subjects, and then it uses that to explore different issues and to interact
with different areas of knowledge. And I think books are a privileged space to
do that.
[27:11]
E. W.: The books in the Piracy collection, because they are objects you can
grab, and because they need a place, they are a really important tool to start
a dialogue. When we had this reading room in the New York Art Book Fair, it
was really the book that created this moment when you started a conversation
with somebody else. And I think this is a very important moment in the Piracy
collection as a tool to start this discussion. [27:44] In the Piracy
collection the books are not so important to circulate, because they don’t
circulate. They only travel with us, in a way, or they travel here to Grand
Union to be installed in this reading room. But they are not meant to be
printed in a thousands print run and circulated in the world.
C. S.: So what is their function?
[28:08]
E. W.: The functions of the books here in the Piracy collection are to create
a dialogue, debate about these issues they are raising, and they are a tool
for a direct encounter, for a social encounter. As Andrea said, building a
community which is debating these issues which they are raising. [28:32] And I
also find it really interesting – when we where in China we also talked with
lots of publishers and artists, and they said that the book, in comparison to
an online file, is a really important tool in China, because it can’t be
controlled as easily as online communication. [28:53] So a book is an
autonomous object which can be passed on from one hand to the other, without
the state or another authority to intervene. I think that is an important
aspect when you talk about books in comparison with circulating information
online.
[29:13]
Passion for piracy
[29:17]
A. F.: I’m quite interested in enclosures, and people that jump those
enclosures. I’m kind of interested in these imposed… Maybe because I come from
Peru and we have a different relation to rules, and I’m in Britain where rules
seem to have so much strength. And I’m quite interested in this agency of
taking personal responsibility and saying, I’m going to obey this rule, I’m
not going to obey this one, and what does that mean. [29:42] That makes me
really interested in all these different strategies, and also to find a way to
value them and show them – how when you make this decision to jump a rule, you
actually help bring up questions, modifications, and propose new models or new
ways about thinking things. [30:02] And I think that is something that is part
of all the other projects that I do: stating the rules and the people that
break them.
[30:12]
E. W.: The pirate as a trickster who tries to push the boundaries which are
being set. And I think the interesting, or the complex part of the Piracy
Project is that we are not saying, I’m for piracy or I’m against piracy, I’m
for copyright, I’m against copyright. It’s really about testing out these
decisions and the own boundaries, the legal boundaries, the moral limits – to
push them and find them. [30:51] I mean, the Piracy Project as a whole is a
project which is pushing the boundaries because it started in this academic
library, and it’s assessed by copyright lawyers as illegal, so to run such a
project is an act of piracy in itself.
[31:17]
This method of doing or approaching this art project is to create a
collaboration to instigate this discourse, and this discourse is happening on
many different levels. One of them is conversation, debate. But the other one
is this material outcome, and then this material outcome is creating a new
debate.
Dockray & Liang
Sharing Instinct: An Annotation of the Social Contract Through Shadow Libraries
2015
# Sean Dockray & Lawrence Liang — Sharing Instinct: An Annotation of the
Social Contract Through Shadow Libraries
 Abdel Kader
Haïdara, a librarian who smuggled hundreds of thousands of manuscripts from
jihadist-occupied Timbuktu to safety in Bamako, stands with ancient volumes
from Timbuktu packed into metal trunks. Photo: Brent Stirton/Getty Images.
_Foederis aequas Dicamus leges _
(Let us make fair terms for the compact.)
—Virgil’s _Aeneid_ , XI
Man was born free, and everywhere he is in chains.1All excerpts from _The
Social Contract_ are from Jean-Jacques Rousseau, _The Social Contract: And,
The First and Second Discourses_, ed. Susan Dunn and Gita May (New Haven, CT:
Yale University Press, 2002).
> _June 30, 2015_
>
> _Dear Sean,_
>
> _I have been asked by Raqs Media Collective to contribute to a special
ongoing issue of _e-flux journal _that is part of the Venice Biennale. Raqs’s
section in the issue rethinks Rousseau’s social contract and the possibility
of its being rewritten, as a way of imagining social bonds and solidarities
that can help instigate and affirm a vision of the world as a space of
potential._
>
> _I was wondering if you would join me in a conversation on shadow libraries
and social contracts. The entire universe of the book-sharing communities
seems to offer the possibility of rethinking the terms of the social contract
and its associated terms (consent, general will, private interest, and so on).
While the rise in book sharing is at one level a technological phenomenon (a
library of 100,000 books put in PDF format can presently fit on a one-terabyte
drive that costs less than seventy-five dollars), it is also about how we
think of transformations in social relations mediated by sharing books._
>
> _If the striking image of books in preprint revolution was of being “in
chains,” as Rousseau puts it, I am prompted to wonder about the contemporary
conflict between the digital and mechanisms of control. Are books born free
but are everywhere in chains, or is it the case that they have been set free?
In which case are they writing new social contracts?_
>
> _I was curious about whether you, as the founder of _[
_Aaaaarg.org_](http://aaaaarg.org/) _, had the idea of a social contract in
mind, or even a community, when you started?_
>
> _Lawrence_
**Book I, Chapter VI : The Social Pact**
To find a form of association that may defend and protect with the whole force
of the community the person and property of every associate, and by means of
which each, joining together with all, may nevertheless obey only himself, and
remain as free as before.’’ Such is the fundamental problem to which the
social contract provides the solution.
We can reduce it to the following terms: ‘‘Each of us puts in common his
person and all his power under the supreme direction of the general will; and
in return each member becomes an indivisible part of the whole.’’
> _June 30, 2015_
>
> _Dear Lawrence,_
>
> _I am just listing a few ideas to put things out there and am happy to try
other approaches:_
>
> _—To think about the two kinds of structure that digital libraries take:
either each library is shared by many user-librarians or there is a library
for each person, shared with all the others. It’s a technological design
question, yes, but it also suggests different social contracts?_
>
> _—What is subtracted when we subtract your capacity/right to share a book
with others, when every one of us must approach the market anew to come into
contact with it? But to take a stab at misappropriating the terms you’ve
listed, consent, what libraries do I consent to? Usually the consent needs to
come from the library, in the form of a card or something, but we don’t ask
enough what we want, maybe. Also what about a social contract of books? Does a
book consent to being in a library? What rights does it have or expect?_
>
> _I really loved the math equation Rousseau used to arrive at the general
will: if you subtract the pluses and minuses of particular wills that cancel
each other out, then the general will is the sum of the differences! But why
does the general need to be the lowest common denominator—certainly there are
more appropriate mathematical concepts that have been developed in the past
few hundred years?_
>
> _Sean_
**Book I, Chapter II: Primitive Societies**
This common liberty is a consequence of man’s nature. His first law is to
attend to his own survival, his first concerns are those he owes to himself;
and as soon as he reaches the age of rationality, being sole judge of how to
survive, he becomes his own master.
It is the relation of things and not of men that constitutes war; and since
the state of war cannot arise from simple personal relations, but only from
real relations, private war—war between man and man—cannot exist either in the
state of nature, where there is no settled ownership, or in the social state,
where everything is under the authority of the laws.
> _July 1, 2015_
>
> _Dear Lawrence,_
>
> _Unlike a logic of exchange, or of offer and return with its demands for
reciprocity, the logic of sharing doesn’t ask its members for anything in
return. There are no guarantees that the one who gives a book will get back
anything, whether that is money, an equivalent book, or even a token of
gratitude. Similarly, there is nothing to prevent someone from taking without
giving. I think a logic of sharing will look positively illogical across the
course of its existence. But to me, this is part of the appeal: that it can
accommodate behaviors and relationships that might be impossible within the
market._
>
> _But if there is a lack of a contract governing specific exchanges, then
there is something at another level that defines and organizes the space of
sharing, that governs its boundaries, and that establishes inclusions and
exclusions. Is this something ethics? Identity? Already I am appealing to
something that itself would be shared, and would this sharing precede the
material sharing of, for example, a library? Or would the shared
ethics/identity/whatever be a symptom of the practice of sharing? Well, this
is perhaps the conclusion that anthropologists might come to when trying to
explain the sharing practices of hunter-gatherer societies, but a library?_
>
> _Sean_
>
>
>
> _July 1, 2015_
>
> _Hi Sean,_
>
> _I liked your question of what might account for a sharing instinct when it
comes to books, and whether we appeal to something that already exists as a
shared ethics or identity, or is sharing the basis of a shared
ethics/identity? I have to say that while I have never thought of my own book-
collecting through the analogy of hunter-gatherers, the more I think about it,
the more sense it makes to me. Linguistically we always speak of going on book
hunts and my daily trawling through the various shadow libraries online does
seem to function by way of a hunting-gathering mentality._
>
> _Often I download books I know that I will never personally read because I
know that it may either be of interest to someone else, or that the place of a
library is the cave where one gathers what one has hunted down, not just for
oneself but for others. I also like that we are using so-called primitive
metaphors to account for twenty-first-century digital practices, because it
allows us the possibility of linking these practices to a primal instinct of
sharing, which precedes our encounter with the social norms that classify and
partition that instinct (legal, illegal, authorized, and so on). _
>
> _I don’t know if you remember the meeting that we had in Mumbai a few years
ago—among the other participants, we had an academic from Delhi as an
interlocutor. He expressed an absolute terror at what he saw as the “tyranny
of availability” in online libraries. In light of the immense number of books
available in electronic copies and on our computers or hard discs, he felt
overwhelmed and compared his discomfort with that of being inside a large
library and not knowing what to do. Interestingly, he regularly writes asking
me to supply him with books that he can’t find or does not have access to._
>
> _This got me thinking about the idea of a library and what it may mean, in
its classical sense and its digital sense. An encounter with any library,
especially when it manifests itself physically, is one where you encounter
your own finitude in the face of what seems like the infinity of knowledge.
But personally this sense of awe has also been tinged with an immense
excitement and possibility. The head rush of wanting to jump from a book on
forgotten swear words to an intellectual biography of Benjamin, and the
tingling anticipation as you walk out of the library with ten books, captures
for me more than any other experience the essence of the word potential._
>
> _I have a modest personal library of around four thousand books, which I
know will be kind of difficult for me to finish in my lifetime even if I stop
adding any new books, and yet the impulse to add books to our unending list
never fades. And if you think about this in terms of the number of books that
reside on our computers, then the idea of using numbers becomes a little
pointless, and we need some other way or measure to make sense of our
experience._
>
> _Lawrence_
**Book I, Chapter VII: The Sovereign**
Every individual can, as a man, have a particular will contrary to, or
divergent from, the general will which he has as a citizen; his private
interest may appear to him quite different from the common interest; his
absolute and naturally independent existence may make him envisage what he
owes to the common cause as a gratuitous contribution, the loss of which would
be less harmful to others than the payment of it would be onerous to him.
> _July 12, 2015_
>
> _Hi Sean,_
>
> _There is no symbol that to my mind captures the regulated nature of the
library more than that of the board that hushes you with its capitalized
SILENCE. Marianne Constable says, “One can acknowledge the figure of silence
in the library and its persistence, even as one may wonder what a silent
library would be, whether libraries ever are silent, and what the various
silences—if any—in a library could be.”_
>
> _If I had to think about the nature of the social contract and the
possibilities of its rewriting from the site of the library one encounters
another set of silent rules and norms. If social contracts are narrative
compacts that establish a political community under the sign of a sovereign
collective called the people, libraries also aspire to establish an authority
in the name of the readers and to that extent they share a common constitutive
character. But just as there is a foundational scandal of absence at the heart
of the social contract that presumes our collective consent (what Derrida
describes as the absence of the people and the presence of their signature)
there seems to be a similar silence in the world of libraries where readers
rarely determine the architecture, the logic, or the rules of the library._
>
> _So libraries have often mirrored, rather than inverted, power relations
that underlie the social contracts that they almost underwrite._ _In contrast
I am wondering if the various shadow libraries that have burgeoned online, the
portable personal libraries that are shared offline: Whether all of them
reimagine the social contract of libraries, and try to create a more insurgent
imagination of the library?_
>
> _Lawrence_
>
>
>
> _July 13, 2015_
>
> _Hi Lawrence,_
>
> _As you know, I’m very interested in structures that allow the people within
ways to meaningfully reconfigure them. This is distinct from participation or
interaction, where the structures are inquisitive or responsive, but not
fundamentally changeable._
>
> _I appreciate the idea that a library might have, not just a collection of
books or a system of organizing, but its own social contract. In the case of
Aaaaarg, as you noticed, it is not explicit. Not only is there no statement as
such, there was never a process prior to the library in which something like a
social contract was designed._
>
> _I did ask users to write out a short statement of their reason for joining
Aaaaarg and have around fifty thousand of these expressions of intention. I
think it’s more interesting to think of the social contract, or at least a
"general will," in terms of those. If Rousseau distinguished between the will
of all and the general will, in a way that could be illustrated by the catalog
of reasons for joining Aaaaarg. Whereas the will of all might be a sum of all
the reasons, the general will would be the sum of what remains after you "take
away the pluses and minuses that cancel one another." I haven’t done the math,
but I don’t think the general will, the general reason, goes beyond a desire
for access._
>
> _To summarize a few significant groupings:_
>
> _—To think outside institutions; _
> _—To find things that one cannot find; _
> _—To have a place to share things;_
> _—To act out a position against intellectual property; _
> _—A love of books (in whatever form)._
>
> _What I do see as common across these groupings is that the desire for
access is, more specifically, a desire to have a relationship with texts and
others that is not mediated by market relations._
>
> _In my original conception of the site, it would be something like a
collective commonplace. Like commonplacing, the excerpts that people would
keep were those parts of texts that seemed particularly useful, that produced
a spark that one wanted to share. This is important: that it was the
experience of being electrified in some way that people were sharing and not a
book as such. Over time, things changed and the shared objects became more
complete so to say, and less “subjective,” but I hope that there is still that
spark. But, at this point, I realize that I am just another one of the many
wills, and just one designer of whatever social contract is underlying the
library._
>
> _So, again—What is the social contract? It wasn’t determined in advance and
it is not written in any about section or FAQ. I would say that it is, like
the library itself, something that is growing and evolving over time, wouldn’t
you?_
>
> _Sean_
**Book II, Chapter VIII : The People**
As an architect, before erecting a large edifice, examines and tests the soil
in order to see whether it can support the weight, so a wise lawgiver does not
begin by drawing up laws that are good in themselves, but considers first
whether the people for whom he designs them are fit to maintain them.
> _July 15, 2015_
>
> _Lawrence,_
>
> _There are many different ways of organizing a library, of structuring it,
and it’s the same for online libraries. I think the most interesting
conversation would not be to bemoan the digital for overloading our ability to
be discerning, or to criticize it for not conforming to the kind of economy
that we expected publishing to have, or become nostalgic for book smells; but
to actually really wonder what it is that could make these libraries great,
places that will be missed in the future if they go away. To me, this is the
most depressing thing about the unfortunate fact that digital shadow libraries
have to operate somewhat below the radar: it introduces a precariousness that
doesn’t allow imagination to really expand, as it becomes stuck on techniques
of evasion, distribution, and redundancy. But what does it mean when a library
functions transnationally? When its contents can be searched? When reading
interfaces aren’t bound by the book form? When its contents can be referenced
from anywhere?_
>
> _What I wanted when building Aaaaarg.org the first time was to make it
useful, in the absolute fullest sense of the word, something for people who
saw books not just as things you buy to read because they’re enjoyable, but as
things you need to have a sense of self, of orientation in the world, to learn
your language and join in the conversation you are a part of—a library for
people who related to books like that._
>
> _Sean_
>
>
>
> _July 17, 2015_
>
> _Hi Sean_,
>
> _To pick up on the reasons that people give for joining Aaaaarg.org: even
though Aaaaarg.org is not bound by a social contract, we do see the
outlines—through common interests and motivations—of a fuzzy sense of a
community. And the thing with fuzzy communities is that they don’t necessarily
need to be defined with the same clarity as enumerated communities, like
nations, do. Sudipta Kaviraj, who used the term fuzzy communities, also speaks
of a “narrative contract”—perhaps a useful way to think about how to make
sense of the bibliophilic motivations and intentions, or what you describe as
the “desire to have a relationship with texts and others that is not mediated
by market relations.”_
>
> _This seems a perfectly reasonable motivation except that it is one that
would be deemed impossible at the very least, and absurd at worst by those for
whom the world of books and ideas can only be mediated by the market. And it’s
this idea of the absurd and the illogical that I would like to think a little
bit about via the idea of the ludic, a term that I think might be useful to
deploy while thinking of ways of rewriting the social contract: a ludic
contract, if you will, entered into through routes allowed by ludic libraries.
_
>
> _If we trace the word ludic back to its French and Latin roots, we find it
going back to the idea of playing (from Latin _ludere _"to play" or _ludique
_“spontaneously playful”), but today it has mutated into most popular usage
(ludicrous) generally used in relation to an idea that is so impossible it
seems absurd. And more often than not the term conveys an absurdity associated
with a deviation from well-established norms including utility, seriousness,
purpose, and property._
>
> _But what if our participation in various forms of book sharing was less
like an invitation to enter a social contract, and more like an invitation to
play? But play what, you may ask, since the term play has childish and
sometimes frivolous connotation to it? And we are talking here about serious
business. Gadamer proposes that rather than the idea of fun and games, we can
think with the analogy of a cycle, suggesting that it was important not to
tighten the nuts on the axle too much, or else the wheel could not turn. “It
has to have some play in it … and not too much play, or the wheel will fall
off. It was all about _spielraum _, ‘play-room,’ some room for play. It needs
space.” _
>
> _The ludic, or the invitation to the ludic in this account, is first and
foremost a necessary relief—just as playing is—from constraining situations
and circumstances. They could be physical, monetary, or out of sheer
nonavailability (thus the desire for access could be thought of as a tactical
maneuver to create openings). They could be philosophical constraints
(epistemological, disciplinary), social constraints (divisions of class, work,
and leisure time). At any rate all efforts at participating in shadow
libraries seem propelled by an instinct to exceed the boundaries of the self
however defined, and to make some room for play or to create a “ludic
spaciousness,” as it were. _
>
> _The spatial metaphor is also related to the bounded/unbounded (another name
for freedom I guess) and to the extent that the unbounded allows us a way into
our impossible selves; they share a space with dreams, but rarely do we think
of the violation of the right to access as fundamentally being a violation of
our right to dream. Your compilation of the reasons that people wanted to join
Aaaaarg may well be thought of as an archive of one-sentence-long dreams of
the ludic library. _
>
> _If for Bachelard the house protects the dreamer, the library for me is a
ludic shelter, which brings me back to an interesting coincidence. I don’t
know what it is that prompted you to choose the name Aaaaarg.org; I don’t know
if you are aware it binds you irrevocably (to use the legal language of
contracts) with one of the very few theorists of the ludic, the Dutch
philosopher Johan Huizinga, who coined the word _homo ludens _(as against the
more functional, scientific homo sapiens or functional homo faber). In his
1938 text Huizinga observes that “the fun of playing, resists all analysis,
all logical interpretation,” and as a concept it cannot be reduced to any
other mental category. He feels that no language really has an exact
equivalent to the word fun but the closest he comes in his own language is the
Dutch word _aardigkeit, _so the line between aaaarg and aaard may have well
have been dreamt of before Aaaaarg.org even started._
>
> _More soon,_
>
> _Lawrence_
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