Draft translation of a talk given at the seminar Informace mezi komoditou a komunitou [The Information Between Commodity and Community] held at Tranzitdisplay in Prague, Czech Republic, on May 6, 2014
My contribution has three parts. I will begin by sketching the current environment of publishing in general, move on to some of the specificities of publishing
in the humanities and art, and end with a brief introduction to the Monoskop
initiative I was asked to include in my talk.
I would like to thank Milos Vojtechovsky, Matej Strnad and CAS/FAMU for
the invitation, and Tranzitdisplay for hosting this seminar. It offers itself as an
opportunity for reflection for which there is a decent distance from a previous
presentation of Monoskop in Prague eight years ago when I took part in a new
media education workshop prepared by Miloš and Denisa Kera. Many things
changed since then, not only in new media, but in the humanities in general,
and I will try to articulate some of these changes from today’s perspective and
primarily from the perspective of publishing.
I. The Environment of Publishing
One change, perhaps the most serious, and which indeed relates to the humanities
publishing as well, is that from a subject that was just a year ago treated as a paranoia of a bunch of so called technological enthusiasts, is today a fact with which
the global public is well acquainted: we are all being surveilled. Virtually every
utterance on the internet, or rather made by means of the equipment connected
to it through standard protocols, is recorded, in encrypted or unencrypted form,
on servers of information agencies, besides copies of a striking share of these data
on servers of private companies. We are only at the beginning of civil mobilization towards reversal of the situation and the future is open, yet nothing suggests
so far that there is any real alternative other than “to demand the impossible.”
There are at least two certaintes today: surveillance is a feature of every communication technology controlled by third parties, from post, telegraphy, telephony
to internet; and at the same time it is also a feature of the ruling power in all its
variants humankind has come to know. In this regard, democracy can be also understood as the involvement of its participants in deciding on the scale and use of
information collected in this way.
I mention this because it suggests that also all publishing initiatives, from libraries,
through archives, publishing houses to schools have their online activities, back1
ends, shared documents and email communication recorded by public institutions–
which intelligence agencies are, or at least ought to be.
In regard to publishing houses it is notable that books and other publications today are printed from digital files, and are delivered to print over email, thus it is
not surprising to claim that a significant amount of electronically prepared publications is stored on servers in the public service. This means that besides being
required to send a number of printed copies to their national libraries, in fact,
publishers send their electronic versions to information agencies as well. Obviously, agencies couldn’t care less about them, but it doesn’t change anything on
the likely fact that, whatever it means, the world’s largest electronic repository of
publications today are the server farms of the NSA.
Information agencies archive publications without approval, perhaps without awareness, and indeed despite disapproval of their authors and publishers, as an
“incidental” effect of their surveillance techniques. This situation is obviously
radically different from a totalitarianism we got to know. Even though secret
agencies in the Eastern Bloc were blackmailing people to produce miserable literature as their agents, samizdat publications could at least theoretically escape their
attention.
This is not the only difference. While captured samizdats were read by agents of
flesh and blood, publications collected through the internet surveillance are “read”
by software agents. Both of them scan texts for “signals”, ie. terms and phrases
whose occurrences trigger interpretative mechanisms that control operative components of their organizations.
Today, publishing is similarly political and from the point of view of power a potentially subversive activity like it was in the communist Czechoslovakia. The
difference is its scale, reach and technique.
One of the messages of the recent “revelations” is that while it is recommended
to encrypt private communication, the internet is for its users also a medium of
direct contact with power. SEO, or search engine optimization, is now as relevant technique for websites as for books and other publications since all of them
are read by similar algorithms, and authors can read this situation as a political
dimension of their work, as a challenge to transform and model these algorithms
by texts.
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II. Techniques of research in the humanities literature
Compiling the bibliography
Through the circuitry we got to the audience, readers. Today, they also include
software and algorithms such as those used for “reading” by information agencies
and corporations, and others facilitating reading for the so called ordinary reader,
the reader searching information online, but also the “expert” reader, searching
primarily in library systems.
Libraries, as we said, are different from information agencies in that they are
funded by the public not to hide publications from it but to provide access to
them. A telling paradox of the age is that on the one hand information agencies
are storing almost all contemporary book production in its electronic version,
while generally they absolutely don’t care about them since the “signal” information lies elsewhere, and on the other in order to provide electronic access, paid or
direct, libraries have to costly scan also publications that were prepared for print
electronically.
A more remarkable difference is, of course, that libraries select and catalogize
publications.
Their methods of selection are determined in the first place by their public institutional function of the protector and projector of patriotic values, and it is reflected
in their preference of domestic literature, ie. literature written in official state languages. Methods of catalogization, on the other hand, are characterized by sorting
by bibliographic records, particularly by categories of disciplines ordered in the
tree structure of knowledge. This results in libraries shaping the research, including academic research, towards a discursivity that is national and disciplinary, or
focused on the oeuvre of particular author.
Digitizing catalogue records and allowing readers to search library indexes by their
structural items, ie. the author, publisher, place and year of publication, words in
title, and disciplines, does not at all revert this tendency, but rather extends it to
the web as well.
I do not intend to underestimate the value and benefits of library work, nor the
importance of discipline-centered writing or of the recognition of the oeuvre of
the author. But consider an author working on an article who in the early phase
of his research needs to prepare a bibliography on the activity of Fluxus in central Europe or on the use of documentary film in education. Such research cuts
through national boundaries and/or branches of disciplines and he is left to travel
not only to locate artefacts, protagonists and experts in the field but also to find
literature, which in turn makes even the mere process of compiling bibliography
relatively demanding and costly activity.
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In this sense, the digitization of publications and archival material, providing their
free online access and enabling fulltext search, in other words “open access”, catalyzes research across political-geographical and disciplinary configurations. Because while the index of the printed book contains only selected terms and for
the purposes of searching the index across several books the researcher has to have
them all at hand, the software-enabled search in digitized texts (with a good OCR)
works with the index of every single term in all of them.
This kind of research also obviously benefits from online translation tools, multilingual case bibliographies online, as well as second hand bookstores and small
specialized libraries that provide a corrective role to public ones, and whose “open
access” potential has been explored to the very small extent until now, but which
I won’t discuss here further for the lack of time.
Writing
The disciplinarity and patriotism are “embedded” in texts themselves, while I repeat that I don’t say this in a pejorative way.
Bibliographic records in bodies of texts, notes, attributions of sources and appended references can be read as formatted addresses of other texts, making apparent a kind of intertextual structure, well known in hypertext documents. However, for the reader these references are still “virtual”. When following a reference
she is led back to a library, and if interested in more references, to more libraries.
Instead, authors assume certain general erudition of their readers, while following references to their very sources is perceived as an exception from the standard
self-limitation to reading only the body of the text. Techniques of writing with
virtual bibliography thus affirm national-disciplinary discourses and form readers
and authors proficient in the field of references set by collections of local libraries
and so called standard literature of fields they became familiar with during their
studies.
When in this regime of writing someone in the Czech Republic wants to refer to
the work of Gilbert Simondon or Alexander Bogdanov, to give an example, the
effect of his work will be minimal, since there was practically nothing from these
authors translated into Czech. His closely reading colleague is left to try ordering
books through a library and wait for 3-4 weeks, or to order them from an online
store, travel to find them or search for them online. This applies, in the case of
these authors, for readers in the vast majority of countries worldwide. And we can
tell with certainty that this is not only the case of Simondon and Bogdanov but
of the vast majority of authors. Libraries as nationally and pyramidally situated
institutions face real challenges in regard to the needs of free research.
This is surely merely one aspect of techniques of writing.
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Reading
Reading texts with “live” references and bibliographies using electronic devices is
today possible not only to imagine but to realise as well. This way of reading
allows following references to other texts, visual material, other related texts of
an author, but also working with occurrences of words in the text, etc., bringing
reading closer to textual analysis and other interesting levels. Due to the time
limits I am going to sketch only one example.
Linear reading is specific by reading from the beginning of the text to its end,
as well as ‘tree-like’ reading through the content structure of the document, and
through occurrences of indexed words. Still, techniques of close reading extend
its other aspect – ‘moving’ through bibliographic references in the document to
particular pages or passages in another. They make the virtual reference plastic –
texts are separated one from another merely by a click or a tap.
We are well familiar with a similar movement through the content on the web
– surfing, browsing, and clicking through. This leads us to an interesting parallel: standards of structuring, composing, etc., of texts in the humanities has been
evolving for centuries, what is incomparably more to decades of the web. From
this stems also one of the historical challenges the humanities are facing today:
how to attune to the existence of the web and most importantly to epistemological consequences of its irreversible social penetration. To upload a PDF online is
only a taste of changes in how we gain and make knowledge and how we know.
This applies both ways – what is at stake is not only making production of the
humanities “available” online, it is not only about open access, but also about the
ways of how the humanities realise the electronic and technical reality of their
own production, in regard to the research, writing, reading, and publishing.
Publishing
The analogy between information agencies and national libraries also points to
the fact that large portion of publications, particularly those created in software,
is electronic. However the exceptions are significant. They include works made,
typeset, illustrated and copied manually, such as manuscripts written on paper
or other media, by hand or using a typewriter or other mechanic means, and
other pre-digital techniques such as lithography, offset, etc., or various forms of
writing such as clay tablets, rolls, codices, in other words the history of print and
publishing in its striking variety, all of which provide authors and publishers with
heterogenous means of expression. Although this “segment” is today generally
perceived as artists’ books interesting primarily for collectors, the current process
of massive digitization has triggered the revival, comebacks, transformations and
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novel approaches to publishing. And it is these publications whose nature is closer
to the label ‘book’ rather than the automated electro-chemical version of the offset
lithography of digital files on acid-free paper.
Despite that it is remarkable to observe a view spreading among publishers that
books created in software are books with attributes we have known for ages. On
top of that there is a tendency to handle files such as PDFs, EPUBs, MOBIs and
others as if they are printed books, even subject to the rules of limited edition, a
consequence of what can be found in the rise of so called electronic libraries that
“borrow” PDF files and while someone reads one, other users are left to wait in
the line.
Whilst, from today’s point of view of the humanities research, mass-printed books
are in the first place archives of the cultural content preserved in this way for the
time we run out of electricity or have the internet ‘switched off’ in some other
way.
III. Monoskop
Finally, I am getting to Monoskop and to begin with I am going to try to formulate
its brief definition, in three versions.
From the point of view of the humanities, Monoskop is a research, or questioning, whose object’s nature renders no answer as definite, since the object includes
art and culture in their widest sense, from folk music, through visual poetry to
experimental film, and namely their history as well as theory and techniques. The
research is framed by the means of recording itself, what makes it a practise whose
record is an expression with aesthetic qualities, what in turn means that the process of the research is subject to creative decisions whose outcomes are perceived
esthetically as well.
In the language of cultural management Monoskop is an independent research
project whose aim is subject to change according to its continual findings; which
has no legal body and thus as organisation it does not apply for funding; its participants have no set roles; and notably, it operates with no deadlines. It has a reach
to the global public about which, respecting the privacy of internet users, there
are no statistics other than general statistics on its social networks channels and a
figure of numbers of people and bots who registered on its website and subscribed
to its newsletter.
At the same time, technically said, Monoskop is primarily an internet website
and in this regard it is no different from any other communication media whose
function is to complicate interpersonal communication, at least due to the fact
that it is a medium with its own specific language, materiality, duration and access.
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Contemporary media
Monoskop has began ten years ago in the milieu of a group of people running
a cultural space where they had organised events, workshops, discussion, a festival,
etc. Their expertise, if to call that way the trace left after years spent in the higher
education, varied well, and it spanned from fine art, architecture, philosophy,
through art history and literary theory, to library studies, cognitive science and
information technology. Each of us was obviously interested in these and other
fields other than his and her own, but the praxis in naming the substance whose
centripetal effects brought us into collaboration were the terms new media, media
culture and media art.
Notably, it was not contemporary art, because a constituent part of the praxis was
also non-visual expression, information media, etc., so the research began with the
essentially naive question ‘of what are we contemporary?’. There had been not
much written about media culture and art as such, a fact I perceived as drawback
but also as challenge.
The reflection, discussion and critique need to be grounded in reality, in a wider
context of the field, thus the research has began in-field. From the beginning, the
website of Monoskop served to record the environment, including people, groups,
organizations, events we had been in touch with and who/which were more or
less explicitly affiliated with media culture. The result of this is primarily a social
geography of live media culture and art, structured on the wiki into cities, with
a focus on the two recent decades.
Cities and agents
The first aim was to compile an overview of agents of this geography in their
wide variety, from eg. small independent and short-lived initiatives to established
museums. The focus on the 1990s and 2000s is of course problematic. One of
its qualities is a parallel to the history of the World Wide Web which goes back
precisely to the early 1990s and which is on the one hand the primary recording
medium of the Monoskop research and on the other a relevant self-archiving and–
stemming from its properties–presentation medium, in other words a platform on
which agents are not only meeting together but potentially influence one another
as well.
http://monoskop.org/Prague
The records are of diverse length and quality, while the priorities for what they
consist of can be generally summed up in several points in the following order:
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1. Inclusion of a person, organisation or event in the context of the structure.
So in case of a festival or conference held in Prague the most important is to
mention it in the events section on the page on Prague.
2. Links to their web presence from inside their wiki pages, while it usually
implies their (self-)presentation.
http://monoskop.org/The_Media_Are_With_Us
3. Basic information, including a name or title in an original language, dates
of birth, foundation, realization, relations to other agents, ideally through
links inside the wiki. These are presented in narrative and in English.
4. Literature or bibliography in as many languages as possible, with links to
versions of texts online if there are any.
5. Biographical and other information relevant for the object of the research,
while the preference is for those appearing online for the first time.
6. Audiovisual material, works, especially those that cannot be found on linked
websites.
Even though pages are structured in the quasi same way, input fields are not structured, so when you create a wiki account and decide to edit or add an entry, the
wiki editor offers you merely one input box for the continuous text. As is the case
on other wiki websites. Better way to describe their format is thus articles.
There are many related questions about representation, research methodology,
openness and participation, formalization, etc., but I am not going to discuss them
due to the time constraint.
The first research layer thus consists of live and active agents, relations among
them and with them.
Countries
Another layer is related to a question about what does the field of media culture
and art stem from; what and upon what does it consciously, but also not fully
consciously, builds, comments, relates, negates; in other words of what it may be
perceived a post, meta, anti, retro, quasi and neo legacy.
An approach of national histories of art of the 20th century proved itself to be
relevant here. These entries are structured in the same way like cities: people,
groups, events, literature, at the same time building upon historical art forms and
periods as they are reflected in a range of literature.
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http://monoskop.org/Czech_Republic
The overviews are organised purposely without any attempts for making relations
to the present more explicit, in order to leave open a wide range of intepretations
and connotations and to encourage them at the same time.
The focus on art of the 20th century originally related to, while the researched
countries were mostly of central and eastern Europe, with foundations of modern
national states, formations preserving this field in archives, museums, collections
but also publications, etc. Obviously I am not saying that contemporary media
culture is necessarily archived on the web while art of the 20th century lies in
collections “offline”, it applies vice versa as well.
In this way there began to appear new articles about filmmakers, fine artists, theorists and other partakers in artistic life of the previous century.
Since then the focus has considerably expanded to more than a century of art and
new media on the whole continent. Still it portrays merely another layer of the
research, the one which is yet a collection of fragmentary data, without much
context. Soon we also hit the limit of what is about this field online. The next
question was how to work in the internet environment with printed sources.
Log
http://monoskop.org/log
When I was installing this blog five years ago I treated it as a side project, an offshoot, which by the fact of being online may not be only an archive of selected
source literature for the Monoskop research but also a resource for others, mainly
students in the humanities. A few months later I found Aaaarg, then oriented
mainly on critical theory and philosophy; there was also Gigapedia with publications without thematic orientation; and several other community library portals
on password. These were the first sources where I was finding relevant literature
in electronic version, later on there were others too, I began to scan books and catalogues myself and to receive a large number of scans by email and soon came to
realise that every new entry is an event of its own not only for myself. According
to the response, the website has a wide usership across all the continents.
At this point it is proper to mention the copyright. When deciding about whether
to include this or that publication, there are at least two moments always present.
One brings me back to my local library at the outskirts of Bratislava in the early
1990s and asks that if I would have found this book there and then, could it change
my life? Because books that did I was given only later and elsewhere; and here I
think of people sitting behind computers in Belarus, China or Kongo. And even
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if not, the latter is a wonder on whether this text has a potential to open up some
serious questions about disciplinarity or national discursivity in the humanities,
while here I am reminded by a recent study which claims that more than half
of academic publications are not read by more than three people: their author,
reviewer and editor. What does not imply that it is necessary to promote them
to more people but rather to think of reasons why is it so. It seems that the
consequences of the combination of high selectivity with open access resonate
also with publishers and authors from whom the complaints are rather scarce and
even if sometimes I don’t understand reasons of those received, I respect them.
Media technology
Throughout the years I came to learn, from the ontological perspective, two main
findings about media and technology.
For a long time I had a tendency to treat technologies as objects, things, while now
it seems much more productive to see them as processes, techniques. As indeed
nor the biologist does speak about the dear as biology. In this sense technology is
the science of techniques, including cultural techniques which span from reading,
writing and counting to painting, programming and publishing.
Media in the humanities are a compound of two long unrelated histories. One of
them treats media as a means of communication, signals sent from point A to the
point B, lacking the context and meaning. Another speaks about media as artistic
means of expression, such as the painting, sculpture, poetry, theatre, music or
film. The term “media art” is emblematic for this amalgam while the historical
awareness of these two threads sheds new light on it.
Media technology in art and the humanities continues to be the primary object of
research of Monoskop.
I attempted to comment on political, esthetic and technical aspects of publishing.
Let me finish by saying that Monoskop is an initiative open to people and future
and you are more than welcome to take part in it.
Dušan Barok
Written May 1-7, 2014, in Bergen and Prague. Translated by the author on May 10-13,
2014. This version generated June 10, 2014.
Dockray
Openings and Closings
2013
Militarization of campuses
Early, on a recent November morning, 400 Military Police with tear gas and helicopters arrested 72 people, almost all students of the University of Sao Paulo. Those people were occupying the Rectory in response to an other arrest – of 3 fellow students – which was itself a consequence of the contract that the university administration signed with the MP, an agreement inviting the police back onto campus after decades in which this presence was essentially prohibited. University “autonomy” had been established by Article 207 of the 1988 Brazilian Constitution to close a chapter on Brazil’s military rule, during which time the Military Police enforced a series of decrees aimed at eliminating opposition to the dictatorship, including the local articulation of the 1960’s student movement. The 1964 Suplicy de Lacerda law forbade student organizations from engaging in politics; in 1968, Institutional Act No. 5 did away with the writ of habeus corpus; and Decree 477 a year later gave university and education authorities the right to expel students and professors involved in protests. A similar provision of “university asylum” restricted the access of policemen onto Greece’s campuses for 35 years. Like Brazil, this measure was adopted after the fall of a military regime that had violently crushed student uprisings and, like Brazil, this prohibition on police incursions into campuses collapsed in 2011. Greek politicians abolished the law in order to more effectively implement austerity measures imposed by European financial interests. Ten days after the raid at the University of Sao Paulo, the chancellor of the University of California, Davis ordered police to clear a handful of tents from a campus quadrangle. Because the peaceful demonstration was planned in solidarity with other actions on UC campuses drawing inspiration from the “occupy movement,” police force swiftly and forcefully dismantled the encampment. Students were pepper-‐sprayed at close range by a well-‐armored policeman wearing little concern. Such examples of the militarization of university campuses have become more common, especially in the context of growing social unrest. In California, they demonstrate the continued influence of Ronald Reagan, not simply for implementing neoliberal policies that have slashed public programs, produced a trillion dollars in US student loan debt and contracted the middle class; but also for campaigning in 1966 for governor of California on a promise to crack down on campus activists, making partnerships with conservative school officials and the FBI in order to “clean out left-‐wing elements” from the University of California. Linda Katehi – that UC Davis chancellor – was also an author of a 2011 report that recommended terminating university asylum to the Greek government. The report noted that “the politicization of students… represents a beyond-‐reasonable involvement in the political process,” continuing on to state that “Greek University campuses are not secure” because of “elements that seek political instability.”
Mobilization of books
After the Military Police operation in Sao Paulo, the rector appeared on television to accuse the students of preparing Molotov cocktails; independent media, on the other hand, described the students carrying left-‐wing books. Even more recently at UC Riverside, a contingent faculty member holding a cardboard shield that was painted to look like the cover of Figures of the Thinkable, by Cornelius Castoriadis, was dragged across the pavement by police and charged with a felony, “assault with a deadly weapon.” In Berkeley, students covered a plaza in books, open and facedown, after their tent occupation was broken up. Many of the crests and seals of universities feature a book, no doubt drawing on the book as both a symbol of knowledge and an actual repository for it. And by extension, books have been mobilized at various moments in recent occupations and protests to make material reference to education and the metastasizing knowledge economy. No doubt the use of radical theory literalizes an attempt to bridge theory and practice, while evoking a utopian imaginary, or simply taking Deleuze’s words at face value: “There is no need to fear or hope, but only to look for new weapons.” Against a background of library closures and cutbacks, as well as the concomitant demands for the humanities and social sciences to justify themselves in economic terms, it is as if books have come into view, desperately, like a rat in daylight. There is almost nowhere for them to go – the space in the remaining libraries is being given over to audio-‐visual material, computer terminals, public programming, and cafes, while publishers are shifting to digital distribution models that are designed to circumvent libraries entirely. So books have come out onto the street. Militarization of Books When knowledge does escape the jurisdiction of both the state and the market, it’s often at the hands of students (both the officially enrolled and the autodidacts). For example, returning to Brazil, the average cost of required reading material for a freshman is more than six months of minimum wage pay, with up to half of the texts not available in Brazil or simply out of print. Unsurprisingly, a system of copy shops provides on-‐demand chapters, course readers, and other texts; but the Brazilian Association of Reprographic Rights has been particularly hostile to the practice. One year before Sao Paulo, at the Federal University in Rio de Janeiro, seven armed police officers in three cars (accompanied by the Chief of the Delegation for the Repression of Immaterial Property Crimes) raided the Xerox room of the School of Social Work, arresting the operator of the machines and confiscating all illegitimate copies. Similar shows of force have proliferated ever since Brazilian copyright law was amended in 1998 to eliminate the exceptions that had previously afforded the right to copy books for educational purposes. This act of reproduction, felt by students and faculty to be inextricably linked to university autonomy and the right to education, coalesced into a movement by 2006, Copiar Livro é Direito! (Copying Books is a Right!) Illicit copies, when confiscated, usually are destroyed. In this sense, it is worthwhile to understand such an event as a contemporary form of censorship, certainly not out of any ideological disapproval of the publication’s actual content, but rather an objection to the manner of its circulation. Many books banned (and burned) during the dictatorship were obviously a matter of content – those that could “destroy society’s moral base” might “put into practice a subversive plan that places national security in danger.” Even if explicit sexuality, crime, and drug use within literature are generally tolerated today (not everywhere, of course) the rhetoric contained within the 1970 decree that instituted censorship is still alive in matters of circulation. During negotiations for the multi-‐national Anti-‐Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), the Bush and Obama administrations denied the public information, stating that it was “properly classified in the interest of national security.” Certain parts of the negotiations became known through Wikileaks and ACTA was revealed as a vehicle for exporting American intellectual property enforcement. Protecting intellectual property is essential, politicians claim, to maintaining the American “way of life,” although today this has less to do with the moral base of the country than the economic base – workers and corporations. America, Obama said in reference to ACTA, would use the “full arsenal of tools available to crack down on practices that blatantly harm our businesses.” Universities, those institutions for the production of knowledge, are deeply embedded in struggles over intellectual property, and moreover deployed as instruments of national security. The National Security Higher Education Advisory Board, which includes (surprise) Linda Katehi, brings together select university presidents and chancellors with the FBI, CIA, and other agencies several times per year. Developed to address intellectual property at the level of cyber-‐theft (preventing sensitive research from falling into the hands of terrorists) the congenial relationship between university administrations and the FBI raises the spectre of US government spying on student activists in the 1960’s and early 1970’s. Financialization of publishing To the side of such partnerships with the state, the forces of financialization have been absorbed into universities, again with the welcome of administrations. Towering US student loan debt is one very clear index; another, less apparent, but growing, is the highly controlled circulation of academic publishing, especially journals and textbooks. Although apparently marginal (or niche) in topic, the vertical structure of the corporations behind most journals is surprisingly large. The Dutch company Elsevier, for example, publishes 250,000 articles per year, and earned $1.6 billion (a profit margin of 36%) in 2010. Texts are written, peer reviewed, and edited on a voluntary basis (usually labor costs are externalized, for example to the state or university). They are sold back to university libraries at extraordinarily high prices, and the libraries are obliged to pay because their constituency relies on access to research as a material for further research. When the website library.nu was taken-‐down recently for providing access to over 400,000 digital texts, it was not the major “commercial” publishers that were behind the action, but a coalition of 17 educational publishers, including Elsevier, Springer, Taylor and Francis, the Cambridge University Press, and Macmillan. On the heels of FBI raids on prominent torrent sites, and with a similar level of coordination, this publishers’ alliance hired private investigators to deploy software “specifically developed by IT experts” to secure evidence. In order to expand their profitability, corporate academic publishers exploit and reinforce entrenched hierarchies within the academia. Compensation comes in the forms of CV lines and disciplinary visibility; and it is that very validation that individuals need to find and secure employment at research institutions. “Publish or die” is not anything new, but as employment grows increasingly temporary and managerial systems for assessment and quantifying productivity proliferate, it has grown more ominous. Beyond intensifying internal hierarchies, this publishing situation has widened the gap between the university and the rest of the world (even as it subjects the exchange of knowledge to the logic of the stock market); publications are meant for current students and faculty only, and their legitimacy is regularly checked against ID cards, passwords, and other credentials. One without such legitimacy finds themselves on the wrong side of a paywall. Here, we discover the quotidian dimension to the militarization of the university, in the inconveniences of proximity cards, accounts, and login screens. If our contemporary forms of censorship are focused on the manner of a thing’s circulation, then systems of control would be oriented towards policing access. Reprographic machines and file-‐sharing software are obvious targets but, with the advent of tablet computers (such as Apple’s iPad, marketed heavily towards students), so are actual textbooks. The practice of reselling textbooks, a yearly student money-‐saving ritual that is perfectly legal under the first-‐sale doctrine, has long represented lost revenue to publishers. So many, including MacMillan and McGraw-‐Hill, have moved strongly into the e-‐textbook market, which allows them to shut the door on the secondary market because students are no longer buying the things themselves, but only temporary access to the things.
Opening of Access
Open Access publishing articulates an alternative, in order to circumvent the entire parasitical apparatus and ultimately deliver texts to readers and researchers for free. In large part, its success depends on whether or not researchers choose to publish their work with OA journals or with pay-‐for-‐access ones. If many have chosen the latter, it is because of factors like reputation and the interrelation between publishing and departmental structures of advancement and power. Interestingly, it is institutions with the strongest reputations that are also pushing for more ‘openness.’ Princeton University formally adopted an open-‐access policy in 2011 (the sixth Ivy League school to do so) in order to discourage the “fruits of [their] scholarship” from languishing “artificially behind a pay wall.” MIT has long promoted openness of its materials, from OpenCourseWare (2002) to its own Open Access policy (2009), to a new online learning infrastructure, MITx. Why is it that elite, private schools are so motivated to open themselves to the world? Would this not dilute their status? The answer is obvious: opening up their research gives their faculty more exposure; it produces a positive image of an institution that is generous and genuinely interested in generating knowledge; and ultimately it builds the university’s brand. They are not giving away degrees and certainly not research positions – rather they are mobilizing their intellectual capital to attract publicity, students, donations, and contracts. We can guess what ‘opening up the university’ means for the institution and the faculty, but what about for the students, including those who may not have the proper title, those learners not enrolled? MITx is an adaptation of the common practice of distance learning, which has a century-‐and-‐a-‐half long history, beginning with the University of London’s External Programme. There are populist overtones (Charles Dickens called the External Programme the “People’s University”) to distance learning that coincide with the promises of public education more generally, namely making higher education available to those traditionally without means for it. History has provided us with less than desirable motivations for distance education – the Free University of Iran was said to have been desirable to the Shah’s regime because the students would never gather – but current western programs are influenced by other concerns. Beyond publicity and social conscience, many of these online learning programs are driven by economics. At the University of California, the Board of Regents launched a pilot program as part of a plan to close a 4.7 billion dollar budget gap, with the projection that such a program could add 25,000 students at 1.1% of the normal cost. Aside from MITx’s free component (it brings in revenue as well if people want to actually get “credit”) most of these distance-‐learning offerings are immaterial commodities. UCLA Extension is developing curricula and courses for Encore Career Institute, a for-‐profit venture bringing together Hollywood, Silicon Valley, and a chairwoman of the UC Regents, whose goal is to “deliver some of the fantastic intellectual property that UC has.” And even MITx is not without its restricted-‐access bedfellows; its pilot online course requires a textbook, which is owned by Elsevier. Students are here conceived of truly as consumers of product, and education has become a subgenre of publication. The classroom and library are seen as inefficient mechanisms for delivering education to the masses or, for that matter, for the delivering the masses to creditors, advertisers, and content providers. Clearly, classrooms will continue to exist, especially in the centers for the reproduction of the elite, such as those proponents of Open Access previously mentioned. But everywhere else, post-‐ classroom (and post-‐library) education is exploding. Students do not gather here and they certainly don’t sit-‐in or take over buildings; they don’t argue outside during a break, over a cigarette, nor do they pass books between themselves. I am not, however, a fatalist on this point – these may be networks of access managed by capital and policed by the state, but new collective forms and subjectivities are already emerging, exploiting or evading the logic of accounts, passwords, and access. They find each other across borders and across disciplines.
Negating Access
After the capitalist restructuring of the 1970s and 1980s, how do we understand the scenes of people clashing with police formations; the revival of campus occupations as a tactic; the disappearance of university autonomy; the withdrawal of learning into the disciplined walls of the academy; in short, how do we understand a situation that appears quite like before? One way – the theme of this essay – would be through the notion of “access.” If access has moved from a question of rights (who has access?) to a matter of legality and economics (what are the terms and price for access, for a particular person?) then over the past few decades we have witnessed access being turned inside-‐out, in a manner reminiscent of Marx’s “double freedom” of the proletariat: having access to academic resources while not being able to access each other. Library cards, passwords, and keys are assigned to individuals; and so are contracts, degrees, loans, and grades. Students (and faculty) are individuated at every turn, perhaps no more clearly than in online learning where each body collapses into their own profile. Access is not so much a passage into a space as it is an apparatus enclosing the individual. (In this sense, Open Access is one configuration of this apparatus). Two projects that I have worked within over the past 7 years – a file-‐sharing website for texts, AAAARG.ORG, and a proposal-‐based learning platform, The Public School – are ongoing efforts in escaping this regime of access in order to create some room to actually understand all of these conditions, their connection to larger processes, and the possibilities for future action. The Public School has no curriculum, no degrees, and nothing to do with the public school system. It is simply a framework within which people propose ideas for things they want to learn about with others; a rotating committee might organize this proposal into an actual class, bringing together a group of strangers and friends who find a way to teach each other. AAAARG.ORG is a collective library comprised of scans, excerpts, and exports that members of its public have found important enough to share with each other. They are premised, in part, on the proposition that making these kinds of spaces is an active, contingent process requiring the coordination, invention, and self-‐ reflection of many people over time. The creation of these kinds of spaces involves a negation of access, often bringing conflict to the surface. What this means is that the spaces are not territories on which pedagogy happens, but rather that the collective activity of making and defending these spaces is pedagogical.
In the militarized raids of campus occupations and knowledge-‐sharing assemblages, the state is acting to both produce and defend a structure that generates wealth from the process of education. While there are occasional clashes over content, usually any content is acceptable that circulates through this structure, and the very failure to circulate (to attract grant funding, attention, or feedback) becomes the operative, soft form of suppression. A resistant pedagogy should look for openings – and if they don’t exist, break them open – where space grows from a refusal of access and circulation, borders and disciplines; from an improvised diffusion that generates its own laws and dynamics. But a cautionary note – any time new social relations are born out of such an opening in space and time, a confrontation with power is not far behind.