SCI-HUB d/b/a WWW.SCI-HUB.ORG, THE LIBRARY GENESIS PROJECT d/b/a LIBGEN.ORG, ALEXANDRA ELBAKYAN, JOHN DOES 1-99,
Defendants.
Plaintiffs Elsevier Inc, Elsevier B.V., and Elsevier Ltd. (collectively “Elsevier”),
by their attorneys DeVore & DeMarco LLP, for their complaint against www.scihub.org,
www.libgen.org, Alexandra Elbakyan, and John Does 1-99 (collectively the “Defendants”),
allege as follows:
NATURE OF THE ACTION
1. This is a civil action seeking damages and injunctive relief for: (1) copyright infringement under the copyright laws of the United States (17 U.S.C. § 101 et seq.); and (2) violations of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, 18.U.S.C. § 1030, based upon Defendants’ unlawful access to, use, reproduction, and distribution of Elsevier’s copyrighted works. Defendants’ actions in this regard have caused and continue to cause irreparable injury to Elsevier and its publishing partners (including scholarly societies) for which it publishes certain journals.
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PARTIES
2. Plaintiff Elsevier Inc. is a corporation organized under the laws of Delaware, with its principal place of business at 360 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10010.
3. Plaintiff Elsevier B.V. is a corporation organized under the laws of the Netherlands, with its principal place of business at Radarweg 29, Amsterdam, 1043 NX, Netherlands.
4. Plaintiff Elsevier Ltd. is a corporation organized under the laws of the United Kingdom, with its principal place of business at 125 London Wall, EC2Y 5AS United Kingdom.
5. Upon information and belief, Defendant Sci-Hub is an individual or organization engaged in the operation of the website accessible at the URL “www.sci-hub.org,” and related subdomains, including but not limited to the subdomain “www.sciencedirect.com.sci-hub.org,”
www.elsevier.com.sci-hub.org,” “store.elsevier.com.sci-hub.org,” and various subdomains
incorporating the company and product names of other major global publishers (collectively with www.sci-hub.org the “Sci-Hub Website”). The sci-hub.org domain name is registered by
“Fundacion Private Whois,” located in Panama City, Panama, to an unknown registrant. As of
the date of this filing, the Sci-Hub Website is assigned the IP address 31.184.194.81. This IP address is part of a range of IP addresses assigned to Petersburg Internet Network Ltd., a webhosting company located in Saint Petersburg, Russia.
6. Upon information and belief, Defendant Library Genesis Project is an organization which operates an online repository of copyrighted materials accessible through the website located at the URL “libgen.org” as well as a number of other “mirror” websites
(collectively the “Libgen Domains”). The libgen.org domain is registered by “Whois Privacy
Corp.,” located at Ocean Centre, Montagu Foreshore, East Bay Street, Nassau, New Providence,
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Bahamas, to an unknown registrant. As of the date of this filing, libgen.org is assigned the IP address 93.174.95.71. This IP address is part of a range of IP addresses assigned to Ecatel Ltd., a web-hosting company located in Amsterdam, the Netherlands.
7. The Libgen Domains include “elibgen.org,” “libgen.info,” “lib.estrorecollege.org,” and “bookfi.org.”
8. Upon information and belief, Defendant Alexandra Elbakyan is the principal owner and/or operator of Sci-Hub. Upon information and belief, Elbakyan is a resident of Almaty, Kazakhstan.
9. Elsevier is unaware of the true names and capacities of the individuals named as Does 1-99 in this Complaint (together with Alexandra Elbakyan, the “Individual Defendants”),
and their residence and citizenship is also unknown. Elsevier will amend its Complaint to allege the names, capacities, residence and citizenship of the Doe Defendants when their identities are learned.
10. Upon information and belief, the Individual Defendants are the owners and operators of numerous of websites, including Sci-Hub and the websites located at the various
Libgen Domains, and a number of e-mail addresses and accounts at issue in this case.
11. The Individual Defendants have participated, exercised control over, and benefited from the infringing conduct described herein, which has resulted in substantial harm to
the Plaintiffs.
JURISDICTION AND VENUE
12. This is a civil action arising from the Defendants’ violations of the copyright laws of the United States (17 U.S.C. § 101 et seq.) and the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (“CFAA”),
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18.U.S.C. § 1030. Therefore, the Court has subject matter jurisdiction over this action pursuant to 28 U.S.C. § 1331.
13. Upon information and belief, the Individual Defendants own and operate computers and Internet websites and engage in conduct that injures Plaintiff in this district, while
also utilizing instrumentalities located in the Southern District of New York to carry out the acts complained of herein.
14. Defendants have affirmatively directed actions at the Southern District of New York by utilizing computer servers located in the District without authorization and by
unlawfully obtaining access credentials belonging to individuals and entities located in the
District, in order to unlawfully access, copy, and distribute Elsevier's copyrighted materials
which are stored on Elsevier’s ScienceDirect platform.
15.
Defendants have committed the acts complained of herein through unauthorized
access to Plaintiffs’ copyrighted materials which are stored and maintained on computer servers
located in the Southern District of New York.
16.
Defendants have undertaken the acts complained of herein with knowledge that
such acts would cause harm to Plaintiffs and their customers in both the Southern District of
New York and elsewhere. Defendants have caused the Plaintiff injury while deriving revenue
from interstate or international commerce by committing the acts complained of herein.
Therefore, this Court has personal jurisdiction over Defendants.
17.
Venue in this District is proper under 28 U.S.C. § 1391(b) because a substantial
part of the events giving rise to Plaintiffs’ claims occurred in this District and because the
property that is the subject of Plaintiffs’ claims is situated in this District.
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FACTUAL ALLEGATIONS
Elsevier’s Copyrights in Publications on ScienceDirect
18.
Elsevier is a world leading provider of professional information solutions in the
Science, Medical, and Health sectors. Elsevier publishes, markets, sells, and licenses academic
textbooks, journals, and examinations in the fields of science, medicine, and health. The
majority of Elsevier’s institutional customers are universities, governmental entities, educational
institutions, and hospitals that purchase physical and electronic copies of Elsevier’s products and
access to Elsevier’s digital libraries. Elsevier distributes its scientific journal articles and book
chapters electronically via its proprietary subscription database “ScienceDirect”
(www.sciencedirect.com). In most cases, Elsevier holds the copyright and/or exclusive
distribution rights to the works available through ScienceDirect. In addition, Elsevier holds
trademark rights in “Elsevier,” “ScienceDirect,” and several other related trade names.
19.
The ScienceDirect database is home to almost one-quarter of the world's peer-
reviewed, full-text scientific, technical and medical content. The ScienceDirect service features
sophisticated search and retrieval tools for students and professionals which facilitates access to
over 10 million copyrighted publications. More than 15 million researchers, health care
professionals, teachers, students, and information professionals around the globe rely on
ScienceDirect as a trusted source of nearly 2,500 journals and more than 26,000 book titles.
20.
Authorized users are provided access to the ScienceDirect platform by way of
non-exclusive, non-transferable subscriptions between Elsevier and its institutional customers.
According to the terms and conditions of these subscriptions, authorized users of ScienceDirect
must be users affiliated with the subscriber (e.g., full-time and part-time students, faculty, staff
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and researchers of subscriber universities and individuals using computer terminals within the
library facilities at the subscriber for personal research, education or other non-corporate use.)
21.
A substantial portion of American research universities maintain active
subscriptions to ScienceDirect. These subscriptions, under license, allow the universities to
provide their faculty and students access to the copyrighted works within the ScienceDirect
database.
22.
Elsevier stores and maintains the copyrighted material available in ScienceDirect
on servers owned and operated by a third party whose servers are located in the Southern District
of New York and elsewhere. In order to optimize performance, these third-party servers
collectively operate as a distributed network which serves cached copies of Elsevier’s
copyrighted materials by way of particular servers that are geographically close to the user. For
example, a user that accesses ScienceDirect from a University located in the Southern District of
New York will likely be served that content from a server physically located in the District.
Authentication of Authorized University ScienceDirect Users
23.
Elsevier maintains the integrity and security of the copyrighted works accessible
on ScienceDirect by allowing only authenticated users access to the platform. Elsevier
authenticates educational users who access ScienceDirect through their affiliated university’s
subscription by verifying that they are able to access ScienceDirect from a computer system or
network previously identified as belonging to a subscribing university.
24.
Elsevier does not track individual educational users’ access to ScienceDirect.
Instead, Elsevier verifies only that the user has authenticated access to a subscribing university.
25.
Once an educational user authenticates his computer with ScienceDirect on a
university network, that computer is permitted access to ScienceDirect for a limited amount of
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time without re-authenticating. For example, a student could access ScienceDirect from their
laptop while sitting in a university library, then continue to access ScienceDirect using that
laptop from their dorm room later that day. After a specified period of time has passed, however,
a user will have to re-authenticate his or her computer’s access to ScienceDirect by connecting to
the platform through a university network.
26.
As a matter of practice, educational users access university networks, and thereby
authenticate their computers with ScienceDirect, primarily through one of two methods. First,
the user may be physically connected to a university network, for example by taking their
computer to the university’s library. Second, the user may connect remotely to the university’s
network using a proxy connection. Universities offer proxy connections to their students and
faculty so that those users may access university computing resources – including access to
research databases such as ScienceDirect – from remote locations which are unaffiliated with the
university. This practice facilitates the use of ScienceDirect by students and faculty while they
are at home, travelling, or otherwise off-campus.
Defendants’ Unauthorized Access to University Proxy Networks to Facilitate Copyright
Infringement
27.
Upon information and belief, Defendants are reproducing and distributing
unauthorized copies of Elsevier’s copyrighted materials, unlawfully obtained from
ScienceDirect, through Sci-Hub and through various websites affiliated with the Library Genesis
Project. Specifically, Defendants utilize their websites located at sci-hub.org and at the Libgen
Domains to operate an international network of piracy and copyright infringement by
circumventing legal and authorized means of access to the ScienceDirect database. Defendants’
piracy is supported by the persistent intrusion and unauthorized access to the computer networks
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of Elsevier and its institutional subscribers, including universities located in the Southern District
of New York.
28.
Upon information and belief, Defendants have unlawfully obtained and continue
to unlawfully obtain student or faculty access credentials which permit proxy connections to
universities which subscribe to ScienceDirect, and use these credentials to gain unauthorized
access to ScienceDirect.
29.
Upon information and belief, Defendants have used and continue to use such
access credentials to authenticate access to ScienceDirect and, subsequently, to obtain
copyrighted scientific journal articles therefrom without valid authorization.
30.
The Sci-Hub website requires user interaction in order to facilitate its illegal
copyright infringement scheme. Specifically, before a Sci-Hub user can obtain access to
copyrighted scholarly journals, articles, and books that are maintained by ScienceDirect, he must
first perform a search on the Sci-Hub page. A Sci-Hub user may search for content using either
(a) a general keyword-based search, or (b) a journal, article or book identifier (such as a Digital
Object Identifier, PubMed Identifier, or the source URL).
31.
When a user performs a keyword search on Sci-Hub, the website returns a proxied
version of search results from the Google Scholar search database. 1 When a user selects one of
the search results, if the requested content is not available from the Library Genesis Project, SciHub unlawfully retrieves the content from ScienceDirect using the access previously obtained.
Sci-Hub then provides a copy of that article to the requesting user, typically in PDF format. If,
however, the requested content can be found in the Library Genesis Project repository, upon
1
Google Scholar provides its users the capability to search for scholarly literature, but does not provide the
full text of copyrighted scientific journal articles accessible through paid subscription services such as
ScienceDirect. Instead, Google Scholar provides bibliographic information concerning such articles along with a
link to the platform through which the article may be purchased or accessed by a subscriber.
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information and belief, Sci-Hub obtains the content from the Library Genesis Project repository
and provides that content to the user.
32.
When a user searches on Sci-Hub for an article available on ScienceDirect using a
journal or article identifier, the user is redirected to a proxied version of the ScienceDirect page
where the user can download the requested article at no cost. Upon information and belief, SciHub facilitates this infringing conduct by using unlawfully-obtained access credentials to
university proxy servers to establish remote access to ScienceDirect through those proxy servers.
If, however, the requested content can be found in the Library Genesis Project repository, upon
information and belief, Sci-Hub obtains the content from it and provides it to the user.
33.
Upon information and belief, Sci-Hub engages in no other activity other than the
illegal reproduction and distribution of digital copies of Elsevier’s copyrighted works and the
copyrighted works of other publishers, and the encouragement, inducement, and material
contribution to the infringement of the copyrights of those works by third parties – i.e., the users
of the Sci-Hub website.
34.
Upon information and belief, in addition to the blatant and rampant infringement
of Elsevier’s copyrights as described above, the Defendants have also used the Sci-Hub website
to earn revenue from the piracy of copyrighted materials from ScienceDirect. Sci-Hub has at
various times accepted funds through a variety of payment processors, including PayPal,
Yandex, WebMoney, QiQi, and Bitcoin.
Sci-Hub’s Use of the Library Genesis Project as a Repository for Unlawfully-Obtained
Scientific Journal Articles and Books
35.
Upon information and belief, when Sci-Hub pirates and downloads an article from
ScienceDirect in response to a user request, in addition to providing a copy of that article to that
user, Sci-Hub also provides a duplicate copy to the Library Genesis Project, which stores the
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article in a database accessible through the Internet. Upon information and belief, the Library
Genesis Project is designed to be a permanent repository of this and other illegally obtained
content.
36.
Upon information and belief, in the event that a Sci-Hub user requests an article
which has already been provided to the Library Genesis Project, Sci-Hub may provide that user
access to a copy provided by the Library Genesis Project rather than re-download an additional
copy of the article from ScienceDirect. As a result, Defendants Sci-Hub and Library Genesis
Project act in concert to engage in a scheme designed to facilitate the unauthorized access to and
wholesale distribution of Elsevier’s copyrighted works legitimately available on the
ScienceDirect platform.
The Library Genesis Project’s Unlawful Distribution of Plaintiff’s Copyrighted Works
37.
Access to the Library Genesis Project’s repository is facilitated by the website
“libgen.org,” which provides its users the ability to search, download content from, and upload
content to, the repository. The main page of libgen.org allows its users to perform searches in
various categories, including “LibGen (Sci-Tech),” and “Scientific articles.” In addition to
searching by keyword, users may also search for specific content by various other fields,
including title, author, periodical, publisher, or ISBN or DOI number.
38.
The libgen.org website indicates that the Library Genesis Project repository
contains approximately 1 million “Sci-Tech” documents and 40 million scientific articles. Upon
information and belief, the large majority of these works is subject to copyright protection and is
being distributed through the Library Genesis Project without the permission of the applicable
rights-holder. Upon information and belief, the Library Genesis Project serves primarily, if not
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exclusively, as a scheme to violate the intellectual property rights of the owners of millions of
copyrighted works.
39.
Upon information and belief, Elsevier owns the copyrights in a substantial
number of copyrighted materials made available for distribution through the Library Genesis
Project. Elsevier has not authorized the Library Genesis Project or any of the Defendants to
copy, display, or distribute through any of the complained of websites any of the content stored
on ScienceDirect to which it holds the copyright. Among the works infringed by the Library
Genesis Project are the “Guyton and Hall Textbook of Medical Physiology,” and the article “The
Varus Ankle and Instability” (published in Elsevier’s journal “Foot and Ankle Clinics of North
America”), each of which is protected by Elsevier’s federally-registered copyrights.
40.
In addition to the Library Genesis Project website accessible at libgen.org, users
may access the Library Genesis Project repository through a number of “mirror” sites accessible
through other URLs. These mirror sites are similar, if not identical, in functionality to
libgen.org. Specifically, the mirror sites allow their users to search and download materials from
the Library Genesis Project repository.
FIRST CLAIM FOR RELIEF
(Direct Infringement of Copyright)
41.
Elsevier incorporates by reference the allegations contained in paragraphs 1-40
42.
Elsevier’s copyright rights and exclusive distribution rights to the works available
above.
on ScienceDirect (the “Works”) are valid and enforceable.
43.
Defendants have infringed on Elsevier’s copyright rights to these Works by
knowingly and intentionally reproducing and distributing these Works without authorization.
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44.
The acts of infringement described herein have been willful, intentional, and
purposeful, in disregard of and indifferent to Plaintiffs’ rights.
45.
Without authorization from Elsevier, or right under law, Defendants are directly
liable for infringing Elsevier’s copyrighted Works pursuant to 17 U.S.C. §§ 106(1) and/or (3).
46.
As a direct result of Defendants’ actions, Elsevier has suffered and continues to
suffer irreparable harm for which Elsevier has no adequate remedy at law, and which will
continue unless Defendants’ actions are enjoined.
47.
Elsevier seeks injunctive relief and costs and damages in an amount to be proven
at trial.
SECOND CLAIM FOR RELIEF
(Secondary Infringement of Copyright)
48.
Elsevier incorporates by reference the allegations contained in paragraphs 1-40
49.
Elsevier’s copyright rights and exclusive distribution rights to the works available
above.
on ScienceDirect (the “Works”) are valid and enforceable.
50.
Defendants have infringed on Elsevier’s copyright rights to these Works by
knowingly and intentionally reproducing and distributing these Works without license or other
authorization.
51.
Upon information and belief, Defendants intentionally induced, encouraged, and
materially contributed to the reproduction and distribution of these Works by third party users of
websites operated by Defendants.
52.
The acts of infringement described herein have been willful, intentional, and
purposeful, in disregard of and indifferent to Elsevier’s rights.
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53.
Without authorization from Elsevier, or right under law, Defendants are directly
liable for third parties’ infringement of Elsevier’s copyrighted Works pursuant to 17 U.S.C. §§
106(1) and/or (3).
54.
Upon information and belief, Defendants profited from third parties’ direct
infringement of Elsevier’s Works.
55.
Defendants had the right and the ability to supervise and control their websites
and the third party infringing activities described herein.
56.
As a direct result of Defendants’ actions, Elsevier has suffered and continues to
suffer irreparable harm for which Elsevier has no adequate remedy at law, and which will
continue unless Defendants’ actions are enjoined.
57.
Elsevier seeks injunctive relief and costs and damages in an amount to be proven
at trial.
THIRD CLAIM FOR RELIEF
(Violation of the Computer Fraud & Abuse Act)
58.
Elsevier incorporates by reference the allegations contained in paragraphs 1-40
59.
Elsevier’s computers and servers, the third-party computers and servers which
above.
store and maintain Elsevier’s copyrighted works for ScienceDirect, and Elsevier’s customers’
computers and servers which facilitate access to Elsevier’s copyrighted works on ScienceDirect,
are all “protected computers” under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (“CFAA”).
60.
Defendants (a) knowingly and intentionally accessed such protected computers
without authorization and thereby obtained information from the protected computers in a
transaction involving an interstate or foreign communication (18 U.S.C. § 1030(a)(2)(C)); and
(b) knowingly and with an intent to defraud accessed such protected computers without
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authorization and obtained information from such computers, which Defendants used to further
the fraud and obtain something of value (18 U.S.C. § 1030(a)(4)).
61.
Defendants’ conduct has caused, and continues to cause, significant and
irreparable damages and loss to Elsevier.
62.
Defendants’ conduct has caused a loss to Elsevier during a one-year period
aggregating at least $5,000.
63.
As a direct result of Defendants’ actions, Elsevier has suffered and continues to
suffer irreparable harm for which Elsevier has no adequate remedy at law, and which will
continue unless Defendants’ actions are enjoined.
64.
Elsevier seeks injunctive relief, as well as costs and damages in an amount to be
proven at trial.
PRAYER FOR RELIEF
WHEREFORE, Elsevier respectfully requests that the Court:
A. Enter preliminary and permanent injunctions, enjoining and prohibiting Defendants,
their officers, directors, principals, agents, servants, employees, successors and
assigns, and all persons and entities in active concert or participation with them, from
engaging in any of the activity complained of herein or from causing any of the injury
complained of herein and from assisting, aiding, or abetting any other person or
business entity in engaging in or performing any of the activity complained of herein
or from causing any of the injury complained of herein;
B. Enter an order that, upon Elsevier’s request, those in privity with Defendants and
those with notice of the injunction, including any Internet search engines, Web
Hosting and Internet Service Providers, domain-name registrars, and domain name
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registries or their administrators that are provided with notice of the injunction, cease
facilitating access to any or all domain names and websites through which Defendants
engage in any of the activity complained of herein;
C. Enter an order that, upon Elsevier’s request, those organizations which have
registered Defendants’ domain names on behalf of Defendants shall disclose
immediately to Plaintiffs all information in their possession concerning the identity of
the operator or registrant of such domain names and of any bank accounts or financial
accounts owned or used by such operator or registrant;
D. Enter an order that, upon Elsevier’s request, the TLD Registries for the Defendants’
websites, or their administrators, shall place the domain names on
registryHold/serverHold as well as serverUpdate, ServerDelete, and serverTransfer
prohibited statuses, for the remainder of the registration period for any such website.
E. Enter an order canceling or deleting, or, at Elsevier’s election, transferring the domain
name registrations used by Defendants to engage in the activity complained of herein
to Elsevier’s control so that they may no longer be used for illegal purposes;
F. Enter an order awarding Elsevier its actual damages incurred as a result of
Defendants’ infringement of Elsevier’s copyright rights in the Works and all profits
Defendant realized as a result of its acts of infringement, in amounts to be determined
at trial; or in the alternative, awarding Elsevier, pursuant to 17 U.S.C. § 504, statutory
damages for the acts of infringement committed by Defendants, enhanced to reflect
the willful nature of the Defendants’ infringement;
G. Enter an order disgorging Defendants’ profits;
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Liang
Shadow Libraries
2012
Journal #37 - September 2012
# Shadow Libraries
Over the last few monsoons I lived with the dread that the rain would
eventually find its ways through my leaky terrace roof and destroy my books.
Last August my fears came true when I woke up in the middle of the night to
see my room flooded and water leaking from the roof and through the walls.
Much of the night was spent rescuing the books and shifting them to a dry
room. While timing and speed were essential to the task at hand they were also
the key hazards navigating a slippery floor with books perched till one’s
neck. At the end of the rescue mission, I sat alone, exhausted amongst a
mountain of books assessing the damage that had been done, but also having
found books I had forgotten or had not seen in years; books which I had
thought had been permanently borrowed by others or misplaced found their way
back as I set many aside in a kind of ritual of renewed commitment.
Sorting the badly damaged from the mildly wet, I could not help but think
about the fragile histories of books from the library of Alexandria to the
great Florence flood of 1966. It may have seemed presumptuous to move from the
precarity of one’s small library and collection to these larger events, but is
there any other way in which one experiences earth-shattering events if not
via a microcosmic filtering through one’s own experiences? I sent a distressed
email to a friend Sandeep a committed bibliophile and book collector with a
fantastic personal library, who had also been responsible for many of my new
acquisitions. He wrote back on August 17, and I quote an extract of the email:
> Dear Lawrence
>
> I hope your books are fine. I feel for you very deeply, since my nightmares
about the future all contain as a key image my books rotting away under a
steady drip of grey water. Where was this leak, in the old house or in the
new? I spent some time looking at the books themselves: many of them I greeted
like old friends. I see you have Lewis Hyde’s _Trickster Makes the World_ and
Edward Rice’s _Captain Sir Richard Francis Burton_ in the pile: both top-class
books. (Burton is a bit of an obsession with me. The man did and saw
everything there was to do and see, and thought about it all, and wrote it all
down in a massive pile of notes and manuscripts. He squirrelled a fraction of
his scholarship into the tremendous footnotes to the Thousand and One Nights,
but most of it he could not publish without scandalising the Victorians, and
then he died, and his widow made a bonfire in the backyard, and burnt
everything because she disapproved of these products of a lifetime’s labors,
and of a lifetime such as few have ever had, and no one can ever have again. I
almost hope there is a special hell for Isabel Burton to burn in.)
Moving from one’s personal pile to the burning of the work of one of the
greatest autodidacts of the nineteenth century and back it was strangely
comforting to be reminded that libraries—the greatest of time machines
invented—were testimonies to both the grandeur and the fragility of
civilizations. Whenever I enter huge libraries it is with a tingling sense of
excitement normally reserved for horror movies, but at the same time this same
sense of awe is often accompanied by an almost debilitating sense of what it
means to encounter finitude as it is dwarfed by centuries of words and
scholarship. Yet strangely when I think of libraries it is rarely the New York
public library that comes to mind even as I wish that we could have similar
institutions in India. I think instead of much smaller collections—sometimes
of institutions but often just those of friends and acquaintances. I enjoy
browsing through people’s bookshelves, not just to discern their reading
preferences or to discover for myself unknown treasures, but also to take
delight in the local logic of their library, their spatial preferences and to
understand the order of things not as a global knowledge project but as a
personal, often quirky rationale.
[ ](//images.e-flux-systems.com/2012_09_library-of-congress.jpg,2000 "Machine
room for book transportation at the Library of Congress, early 20th century.")
Machine room for book transportation at the Library of Congress, early 20th
century.
Like romantic love, bibliophilia is perhaps shaped by one’s first love. The
first library that I knew intimately was a little six by eight foot shop
hidden in a by-lane off one of the busiest roads in Bangalore, Commercial
street. From its name to what it contained, Mecca stores could well have been
transported out of an Arabian nights tale. One side of the store was lined
with plastic ware and kitchen utensils of every shape and size while the other
wall was piled with books, comics, and magazines. From my eight-year-old
perspective it seemed large enough to contain all the knowledge of the world.
I earned a weekly stipend packing noodles for an hour every day after school
in the home shop that my parents ran, which I used to either borrow or buy
second hand books from the store. I was usually done with them by Sunday and
would have them reread by Wednesday. The real anguish came in waiting from
Wednesday to Friday for the next set. After finally acquiring a small
collection of books and comics myself I decided—spurred on by a fatal
combination of entrepreneurial enthusiasm and a pedantic desire to educate
others—to start a small library myself. Packing my books into a small aluminum
case and armed with a makeshift ledger, I went from house to house convincing
children in the neighborhood to forgo twenty-five paisa in exchange for a book
or comic with an additional caveat that they were not to share them with any
of their friends. While the enterprise got off to a reasonable start it soon
met its end when I realized that despite my instructions, my friends were
generously sharing the comics after they were done with them, which thereby
ended my biblioempire ambitions.
Over the past few years the explosion of ebook readers and consequent rise in
the availability of pirated books have opened new worlds to my booklust.
[Library.nu](library.nu), which began as gigapedia, suddenly made the idea of
the universal library seem like reality. By the time it shut down in February
2012 the library had close to a million books and over half a million active
users. Bibliophiles across the world were distraught when the site was shut
down and if it were ever possible to experience what the burning of the
library of Alexandria must have felt it was that collective ache of seeing the
closure of [library.nu.](library.nu)
What brings together something as monumental as the New York public library, a
collective enterprise like [library.nu](library.nu) and Mecca stores if not
the word library? As spaces they may have little in common but as virtual
spaces they speak as equals even if the scale of their imagination may differ.
All of them partake of their share in the world of logotopias. In an
exhibition designed to celebrate the place of the library in art, architecture
and imagination the curator Sascha Hastings coined the term logotopia to
designate “word places”—a happy coincidence of architecture and language.
There is however a risk of flattening the differences between these spaces by
classifying them all under a single utopian ideal of the library. Imagination
after all has a geography and physiology and requires our alertness to these
distinctions. Lets think instead of an entire pantheon (both of spaces as well
as practices) that we can designate as shadow libraries (or shadow logotopias
if you like) which exist in the shadows cast by the long history of monumental
libraries. While they are often dwarfed by the idea of the library, like the
shadows cast by our bodies, sometimes these shadows surge ahead of the body.
[ ](//images.e-flux-systems.com/2012_09_london-blitz-WEB.jpg,2000 "The London
Library after the Blitz, c. 1940.")
The London Library after the Blitz, c. 1940.
At the heart of all libraries lies a myth—that of the burning of the library
of Alexandria. No one knows what the library of Alexandria looked like or
possesses an accurate list of its contents. What we have long known though is
a sense of loss. But a loss of what? Of all the forms of knowledge in the
world in a particular time. Because that was precisely what the library of
Alexandria sought to collect under its roofs. It is believed that in order to
succeed in assembling a universal library, King Ptolemy I wrote “to all the
sovereigns and governors on earth” begging them to send to him every kind of
book by every kind of author, “poets and prose-writers, rhetoricians and
sophists, doctors and soothsayers, historians, and all others too.” The king’s
scholars had calculated that five hundred thousand scrolls would be required
if they were to collect in Alexandria “all the books of all the peoples of the
world.”1
What was special about the Library of Alexandria was the fact that until then
the libraries of the ancient world were either private collections of an
individual or government storehouses where legal and literary documents were
kept for official reference. By imagining a space where the public could have
access to all the knowledge of the world, the library also expressed a new
idea of the human itself. While the library of Alexandria is rightfully
celebrated, what is often forgotten in the mourning of its demise is another
library—one that existed in the shadows of the grand library but whose
whereabouts ensured that it survived Caesar’s papyrus destroying flames.
According to the Sicilian historian Diodorus Siculus, writing in the first
century BC, Alexandria boasted a second library, the so-called daughter
library, intended for the use of scholars not affiliated with the Museion. It
was situated in the south-western neighborhood of Alexandria, close to the
temple of Serapis, and was stocked with duplicate copies of the Museion
library’s holdings. This shadow library survived the fire that destroyed the
primary library of Alexandria but has since been eclipsed by the latter’s
myth.
Alberto Manguel says that if the library of Alexandria stood tall as an
expression of universal ambitions, there is another structure that haunts our
imagination: the tower of Babel. If the library attempted to conquer time, the
tower sought to vanquish space. He says “The Tower of Babel in space and the
Library of Alexandria in time are the twin symbols of these ambitions. In
their shadow, my small library is a reminder of both impossible yearnings—the
desire to contain all the tongues of Babel and the longing to possess all the
volumes of Alexandria.”2 Writing about the two failed projects Manguel adds
that when seen within the limiting frame of the real, the one exists only as
nebulous reality and the other as an unsuccessful if ambitious real estate
enterprise. But seen as myths, and in the imagination at night, the solidity
of both buildings for him is unimpeachable.3
The utopian ideal of the universal library was more than a question of built
up form or space or even the possibility of storing all of the knowledge of
the world; its real aspiration was in the illusion of order that it could
impose on a chaotic world where the lines drawn by a fine hairbrush
distinguished the world of animals from men, fairies from ghosts, science from
magic, and Europe from Japan. In some cases even after the physical structure
that housed the books had crumbled and the books had been reduced to dust the
ideal remained in the form of the order imagined for the library. One such
residual evidence comes to us by way of the _Pandectae_ —a comprehensive
bibliography created by Conrad Gesner in 1545 when he feared that the Ottoman
conquerors would destroy all the books in Europe. He created a bibliography
from which the library could be built again—an all embracing index which
contained a systematic organization of twenty principal groups with a matrix
like structure that contained 30,000 concepts.4
It is not surprising that Alberto Manguel would attempt write a literary,
historical and personal history of the library. As a seventeen-year-old man in
Buenos Aries, Manguel read for the blind seer Jorge Luis Borges who once
imagined in his appropriately named story—The Tower of Babel—paradise as a
kind of library. Modifying his mentor’s statement in what can be understood as
a gesture to the inevitable demands of the real and yet acknowledging the
possible pleasures of living in shadows, Manguel asserts that sometimes
paradise must adapt itself to suit circumstantial requirements. Similarly
Jacques Rancière writing about the libraries of the working class in the
eighteenth century tells us about Gauny a joiner and a boy in love with
vagrancy and botany who decides to build a library for himself. For the sons
of the poor proletarians living in Saint Marcel district, libraries were built
only a page at a time. He learnt to read by tracing the pages on which his
mother bought her lentils and would be disappointed whenever he came to the
end of a page and the next page was not available, even though he urged his
mother to buy her lentils from the same grocer. 5
[ ](//images.e-flux-systems.com/2012_09_DGF-D-Tropics-detail-hi-res-
WEB.jpg,2000 "Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Chronotopes & Dioramas , 2009.
Diorama installation at The Hispanic Society of America, New York.")
Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, _Chronotopes & Dioramas_, 2009. Diorama
installation at The Hispanic Society of America, New York.
Is the utopian ideal of the universal library as exemplified by the library of
Alexandria or modernist pedagogic institutions of the twentieth century
adequate to the task of describing the space of the shadow library, or do we
need a different account of these other spaces? In an era of the ebook reader
where the line between a book and a library is blurred, the very idea of a
library is up for grabs. It has taken me well over two decades to build a
collection of a few thousand books while around two hundred thousand books
exist as bits and bytes on my computer. Admittedly hard drives crash and data
is lost, but is that the same threat as those of rain or fire? Which then is
my library and which its shadow? Or in the spirit of logotopias would it be
more appropriate to ask the spatial question: where is the library?
If the possibility of having 200,000 books on one’s computer feels staggering
here is an even more startling statistic. The Library of Congress which is the
largest library in the world with holdings of approximately thirty million
books, which would—if they were piled on the floor—cover 364 kilometers could
potentially fit into an SD card. It is estimated that by 2030 an ordinary SD
card will have the capacity of storing up to 64 TB and assuming each book were
digitized at an average size of 1MB it would technically be possible to fit
two Libraries of Congress in one’s pocket.
It sounds like science fiction, but isn’t it the case that much of the science
fiction of a decade ago finds itself comfortably within the weaves of everyday
life. How do we make sense of the future of the library? While it may be
tempting to throw our hands up in boggled perplexity about what it means to be
able to have thirty million books lets face it: the point of libraries have
never been that you will finish what’s there. Anyone with even a modest book
collection will testify to the impossibility of ever finishing their library
and if anything at all the library stands precisely at the cusp of our
finitude and our infinity. Perhaps that is what Borges—the consummate mixer of
time and space—meant when he described paradise as a library, not as a spatial
idea but a temporal one: that it was only within the confines of infinity that
one imagine finishing reading one’s library. It would therefore be more
interesting to think of the shadow library as a way of thinking about what it
means to dwell in knowledge. While all our aspirations for a habitat should
have a utopian element to them, lets face it, utopias have always been
difficult spaces to live in.
In contrast to the idea of utopia is heterotopia—a term with its origins in
medicine (referring to an organ of the body that had been dislodged from its
usual space) and popularized by Michel Foucault both in terms of language as
well as a spatial metaphor. If utopia exists as a nowhere or imaginary space
with no connection to any existing social spaces, then heterotopias in
contrast are realities that exist and are even foundational, but in which all
other spaces are potentially inverted and contested. A mirror for instance is
simultaneously a utopia (placeless place) even as it exists in reality. But
from the standpoint of the mirror you discover your absence as well. Foucault
remarks, “The mirror functions as a heterotopia in this respect: it makes this
place that I occupy at the moment when I look at myself in the glass at once
absolutely real, connected with all the space that surrounds it, and
absolutely unreal, since in order to be perceived it has to pass through this
virtual point which is over there.”6
In _The Order of Things_ Foucault sought to investigate the conceptual space
which makes the order of knowledge possible; in his famed reading of Borges’s
Chinese encyclopedia he argues that the impossibility involved in the
encyclopedia consists less in the fantastical status of the animals and their
coexistence with real animals such as (d) sucking pigs and (e) sirens, but in
where they coexist and what “transgresses the boundaries of all imagination,
of all possible thought, is simply that alphabetical series (a, b, c, d) which
links each of those categories to all the others.” 7 Heterotopias destabilize
the ground from which we build order and in doing so reframe the very
epistemic basis of how we know.
Foucault later developed a greater spatial understanding of heterotopias in
which he uses specific examples such as the cemetery (at once the space of the
familiar since everyone has someone in the cemetery and at the heart of the
city but also over a period of time the other city, where each family
possesses its dark resting place).8 Indeed, the paradox of heterotopias is
that they are both separate from yet connected to all other spaces. This
connectedness is precisely what builds contestation into heterotopias.
Imaginary spaces such as utopias exist completely outside of order.
Heteretopias by virtue of their connectedness become sites in which epistemes
collide and overlap. They bring together heterogeneous collections of unusual
things without allowing them a unity or order established through resemblance.
Instead, their ordering is derived from a process of similitude that produces,
in an almost magical, uncertain space, monstrous combinations that unsettle
the flow of discourse.
If the utopian ideal of the library was to bring together everything that we
know of the world then the length of its bookshelves was coterminous with the
breadth of the world. But like its predecessors in Alexandria and Babel the
project is destined to be incomplete haunted by what it necessarily leaves out
and misses. The library as heterotopia reveals itself only through the
interstices and lays bare the fiction of any possibility of a coherent ground
on which a knowledge project can be built. Finally there is the question of
where we stand once the grounds that we stand on itself has been dislodged.
The answer from my first foray into the tiny six by eight foot Mecca store to
the innumerable hours spent on [ library.nu]( library.nu) remains the same:
the heterotopic pleasure of our finite selves in infinity.
×
This essay is a part of a work I am doing for an exhibition curated by Raqs
Media Collective, Sarai Reader 09. The show began on August 19, 2012, with a
deceptively empty space containing only the proposal, with ideas for the
artworks to come over a period of nine months. See .
**Lawrence Liang** is a researcher and writer based at the Alternative Law
Forum, Bangalore. His work lies at the intersection of law and cultural
politics, and has in recent years been looking at question of media piracy. He
is currently finish a book on law and justice in Hindi cinema.
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continues to retreat, while on the other, a more immediate crisis of faith has
accompanied the widespread sense of diminishing economic prospects felt in so
many places. Not to mention...
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the key hazards navigating a slippery floor...
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good at her job. In 1951 she started erasing her typing mistakes with a white
tempera paint solution she mixed in her kitchen blender. She called her
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Shadow Libraries
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Notes - Shadow Libraries
1
Esther Shipman and Sascha Hastings eds., _Logotopia: The Library in
Architecture Art and the Imagination,_ (Cambridge Galleries: Abc Art Books
Canada, 2008).
Go to Text
2
Alberto Manguel, “My Library” in Hastings and Shipman eds. _Logotopia, The
Library in Art and Architecture and the Imagination, (Cambridge Galleries: ABC
Art Books Canada, 2008)._
Go to Text
3
Alberto Manguel, _The Library at Night_ , (Yale University Press 2009).
Go to Text
4
Ray Hastings and Esther Shipman, eds. _Logotopia: The Library in Architecture
Art and the Imagination_. Cambridge Galleries / ABC Art Books Canada, 2008.
Go to Text
5
Jacques Rancière, _The Nights of Labour: The Workers’ Dream in Nineteenth
Century France,_ (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991).
Go to Text
6
Michel Foucault, “Different Spaces,” in _Aesthetics, Method, Epistemology_ ,
ed. James D. Faubion (New York: The New Press, 1998), 179; For Foucault on
language and heterotopias see _The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the
Human Sciences,_ (New York: Pantheon, 1970).
Go to Text
7
Ibid, xv.
Go to Text
8
In Foucault, “Different Spaces,” which was presented as a lecture to the
_Architecture Studies Circle_ in 1967, a few years after the writing of _The
Order of Things_.
Go to Text
Esther Shipman and Sascha Hastings eds., _Logotopia: The Library in
Architecture Art and the Imagination,_ (Cambridge Galleries: Abc Art Books
Canada, 2008).
Alberto Manguel, “My Library” in Hastings and Shipman eds. _Logotopia, The
Library in Art and Architecture and the Imagination, (Cambridge Galleries: ABC
Art Books Canada, 2008)._
Alberto Manguel, _The Library at Night_ , (Yale University Press 2009).
Ray Hastings and Esther Shipman, eds. _Logotopia: The Library in Architecture
Art and the Imagination_. Cambridge Galleries / ABC Art Books Canada, 2008.
Jacques Rancière, _The Nights of Labour: The Workers’ Dream in Nineteenth
Century France,_ (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991).
Michel Foucault, “Different Spaces,” in _Aesthetics, Method, Epistemology_ ,
ed. James D. Faubion (New York: The New Press, 1998), 179; For Foucault on
language and heterotopias see _The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the
Human Sciences,_ (New York: Pantheon, 1970).
Ibid, xv.
In Foucault, “Different Spaces,” which was presented as a lecture to the
_Architecture Studies Circle_ in 1967, a few years after the writing of _The
Order of Things_.
Dockray
The Scan and the Export
2010
the image, corrects the contrast, crops out the use
less bits, sharpens the text, and occasionally even
attempts to read it. All of this computation wants
to repress any traces of reading and scanning, with
the obvious goal of returning to the pure book, or
an even more Platonic form.
That purified, originary version of the text
might be the e-book. Publishers are occasionally
skipping the act of printing altogether and selling
the files themselves, such that the words reserved
for “
well-scanned”books ultimately describe ebooks: clean, searchable, small (i.e., file size). Al
though it is perfectly understandable for a reader
to prefer aligned text without smudges or other
markings where “
paper”is nothing but a pure,
bright white, this movement towards the clean has
its consequences. Distinguished as a form by the
fact that it is produced, distributed, and consumed
digitally, the e-book never leaves the factory.
A minimal gap is, however, created between
the file that the producer uses and the one that
the consumer uses— imagine the cultural chaos
if the typical way of distributing books were as
Word documents!— through the process of export
ing. Whereas scanning is a complex process and
material transformation (which includes exporting
at the very end), exporting is merely converting
formats. But however minor an act, this conver
sion is what puts a halt to the writing and turns
the file into a product for reading. It is also at this
stage that forms of “
digital rights management”ate
applied in order to restrict copying and printing of
the file.
Sharing and copying texts is as old as books
themselves— actually, one could argue that this is
almost a definition of the book— but computers
and the Internet have only accelerated this
activity. From transcription to tracing to photocopying
to scanning, the labour and material costs involved
in producing a copy has fallen to nothing in our
present digital file situation. Once the scan has
generated a digitized version of some kind, say a
PDF, it easily replicates and circulates. This is not
aberrant behaviour, either, but normative comput
er use: copy and paste are two of the first choices
in any contextual menu. Personal file storage has
slowly been migrating onto computer networks,
particularly with the growth of mobile devices, so
Sean Dockray
The Scan and the Export
The scan is an ambivalent image. It oscillates
back and forth: between a physical page and a
digital file, between one reader and another, be
tween an economy of objects and an economy of
data. Scans are failures in terms of quality, neither
as “
readable”as the original book nor the inevi
table ebook, always containing too much visual
information or too little.
Technically speaking, it is by scanning that
one can make a digital representation of a physical
object, such as a book. When a representation of
that representation (the image) appears on a digital
display device, it hovers like a ghost, one world
haunting another. But it is not simply the object
asserting itself in the milieu of light, informa
tion, and electricity. Much more is encoded in
the image: indexes of past readings and the act of
scanning itself.
An incomplete inventory of modifications to
the book through reading and other typical events
in the life of the thing: folded pages, underlines,
marginal notes, erasures, personal symbolic sys
tems, coffee spills, signatures, stamps, tears, etc.
Intimacy between reader and text marking the
pages, suggesting some distant future palimpsest in
which the original text has finally given way to a
mass of negligible marks.
Whereas the effects of reading are cumulative,
the scan is a singular event. Pages are spread and
pressed flat against a sheet of glass. The binding
stretches, occasionally to the point of breaking.
A camera driven by a geared down motor slides
slowly down the surface of the page. Slight move
ment by the person scanning (who is also a scan
ner; this is a man-machine performance) before
the scan is complete produces a slight motion blur,
the type goes askew, maybe a finger enters the
frame of the image. The glass is rarely covered in
its entirety by the book and these windows into
the actual room where the scanning is done are
ultimately rendered as solid, censored black. After
the physical scanning process comes post-produc
tion. Software— automated or not— straightens
99
one's files are not always located on one's
equipment. The act of storing and retrieving shuffles
data across machines and state lines.
A public space is produced when something
is shared— which is to say, made public — but this
space is not the same everywhere or in all
circumstances. When music is played for a room full of
people, or rather when all those people are simply
sharing the room, something is being made public.
Capitalism itself is a massive mechanism for
making things public, for appropriating materials,
people, and knowledge and subjecting them to its
logic. On the other hand, a circulating library, or a
library with a reading room, creates a public space
around the availability of books and other forms of
material knowledge. And even books being sold
through shops create a particular kind of public,
which is quite different from the public that is
formed by bootlegging those same books.
ft would appear that publicness is not simply a
question of state control or the absence of money.
Those categorical definitions offer very little to
help think about digital files and their native
tendency to replicate and travel across networks.
What kinds of public spaces are these, coming into
the foreground by an incessant circulation of data?
Tw o paradigmatic forms of publicness can be
described through the lens of the scan and the
export, two methods for producing a digital text.
Although neither method necessarily results in a
file that must be distributed, such files typically
are. In the case of the export, the system of
distribution tends to be through official, secure
digital repositories; limited previews provide a
small window into the content, which is ultimately
accessible only through the interface of the
shopping cart. On the other hand, the scan is
created by and moves between individuals, often
via improvised and itinerant distribution systems.
The scan travels from person to person, like a
virus. As long as it passes between people, that
common space between them stays alive. That
space might be contagious; it might break out into
something quite persuasive, an intimate publicness
becoming more common.
The scan is an image of a thing and is therefore
different from the thing (it is digital, not physical,
and it includes indexes of reading and scanning),
whereas a copy of the export is essentially identical
to the export. Here is one reason there will exist
many variations of a scan for a particular text,
while there will be one approved version (always a
clean one) of the export. A person may hold in his
or her possession a scan of a book but, no matter
what publishers may claim, the scan will never be
the book. Even if one was to inspect two files and
find them to be identical in every observable and
measurable quality, it may be revealed that these
are in fact different after all: one is a legitimate
copy and the other is not. Legitimacy in this case
has nothing whatsoever to do with internal traits,
such as fidelity to the original, but with external
ones, namely, records of economic transactions in
customer databases.
In practical terms, this means that a digital
book must be purchased by every single reader.
Unlike the book, which is commonly purchased,
read, then handed it off to a friend (who then
shares it with another friend and so on until it
comes to rest on someone’
s bookshelf) the digital
book is not transferable, by design and by law.
If ownership is fundamentally the capacity to give
something away, these books are never truly ours.
The intimate, transient publics that emerge out
of passing a book around are here eclipsed by a
singular, more inclusive public in which everyone
relates to his or her individual (identical) file.
Recently, with the popularization of digital
book readers (a device for another man-machine
pairing), the picture of this kind of publicness has
come into greater definition. Although a group of
people might all possess the same file, they will be
viewing that file through their particular readers,
which means surprisingly that they might all be
seeing something different. With variations built
into the device (in resolution, size, colour, display
technology) or afforded to the user (perhaps to
change font size or other flexible design ele
ments), familiar forms of orientation within the
writing disappear as it loses the historical struc
ture of the book and becomes pure, continuous
text. For example, page numbers give way to the
more abstract concept of a "location" when the
file is derived from the export as opposed to the
scan, from the text data as opposed to the
physical object. The act of reading in a group is also
100
different ways. An analogy: they are not prints
from the same negative, but entirely different
photographs of the same subject. Our scans are
variations, perhaps competing (if we scanned the
same pages from the same edition), but, more
likely, functioning in parallel.
Gompletists prefer the export, which has a
number of advantages from their perspective:
the whole book is usually kept intact as one unit,
the file; file sizes are smaller because the files are
based more on the text than an image; the file is
found by searching (the Internet) as opposed to
searching through stacks, bookstores, and attics; it
is at least theoretically possible to have every file.
Each file is complete and the same everywhere,
such that there should be no need for variations.
At present, there are important examples of where
variations do occur, notably efforts to improve
metadata, transcode out of proprietary formats,
and to strip DRM restrictions. One imagines an
imminent future where variations proliferate based
on an additive reading— a reader makes highlights,
notations, and marginal arguments and then
redistributes the file such that someone's
"reading" of a particular text would generate its own public,
the logic of the scan infiltrating the export.
different — "Turn to page 24" is followed by the
sound of a race of collective page flipping, while
"Go to location 2136" leads to finger taps and
caresses on plastic. Factions based on who has the
same edition of a book are now replaced by those
with people who have the same reading device.
If historical structures within the book are
made abstract then so are those organizing
structures outside of the book. In other words, it's not
simply that the book has become the digital book
reader, but that the reader now contains the
library itself! Public libraries are on the brink of be
ing outmoded; books are either not being acquired
or they are moving into deep storage; and physical
spaces are being reclaimed as cafes, restaurants,
auditoriums, and gift shops. Even the concept
of donation is thrown into question: when most
public libraries were being initiated a century ago,
it was often women's clubs that donated their
collections to establish the institution; it is difficult to
imagine a corresponding form of cultural sharing
of texts within the legal framework of the export.
Instead, publishers might enter into a contract
directly with the government to allow access to
files from computers within the premises of the
library building. This fate seems counter-intuitive,
considering the potential for distribution latent
in the underlying technology, but even more so
when compared to the "traveling libraries" at the
turn of the twentieth century, which were literally
small boxes that brought books to places without
libraries (most often, rural communities).
Many scans, in fact, are made from library
books, which are identified through a stamp or a
sticker somewhere. (It is not difficult to see how
the scan is closely related to the photocopy, such
that they are now mutually evolving technolo
gies.) Although it circulates digitally, like the
export, the scan is rooted in the object and is
never complete. In a basic sense, scanning is slow
and time-consuming (photocopies were slow and
expensive), and it requires that choices are made
about what to focus on. A scan of an entire book
is rare— really a labour of love and endurance;
instead, scanners excerpt from books, pulling out
the most interesting, compelling, difficult-to-find,
or useful bits. They skip pages. The scan is partial,
subjective. You and I will scan the same book in
About the Author
Sean Dockray is a Los Angeles-based artist. He is a
co-director of Telic Arts Exchange and has initiated several
collaborative projects including AAAARG.ORG and The
Public School. He recently co-organized There is
nothing less passive than the act of fleeing, a 13-day seminar at
various sites in Berlin organized through The Public School
that discussed the promises, pitfalls, and possibilities for
extra-institutionality.
101
t often the starting-point is an idea composed of
a group of centrally aroused sensations due to simultaneous
excitation of a group
This would probably
in every case he in large part the result of association by
contiguity in terms of the older classification, although
there might be some part played by the immediate
excitation of the separatefP pby an external stimulus. Starting
from this given mass of central elements, all change comes
from the fact that some of the elements disappear and are
replaced by others through a second series of associations
by contiguity. The parts of the original idea which remain
serve as the excitants for the new elements which arise.
The nature of the process is exactly like that by which
the elements of the first idea were excited, and no new
process comes in. These successive associations are thus
really in their mechanism but a series of simultaneous
associations in which the elements that make up the different
ideas are constantly changing, but with some elements
that persist from idea to idea. There is thus a constant
flux of the ideas, but there is always a part of each idea
that persists over into the next and serves to start the
mechanism of revival There is never an entire stoppage
in the course of the ideas, never an absolute break in the
series, but the second idea is joined to the one that precedes
by an identical element in each.
124
A short time later, this control of urban noise had been implemented almost
everywhere, or at least in the politically best-controlled cities, where repetition
is most advanced.
We see noise reappear, however, in exemplary fashion at certain ritualized
moments: in these instances, the horn emerges as a derivative form of violence
masked by festival. All we have to do is observe how noise proliferates in echo
at such times to get a hint of what the epidemic proliferation of the essential
violence can be like. The noise of car horns on New Year's Eve is, to my mind,
for the drivers an unconscious substitute for Carnival, itself a substitute for the
Dionysian festival preceding the sacrifice. A rare moment, when the hierarchies
are masked behind the windshields and a harmless civil war temporarily breaks
out throughout the city.
Temporarily. For silence and the centralized monopoly on the emission,
audition and surveillance of noise are afterward reimposed. This is an essential
control, because if effective it represses the emergence of a new order and a
challenge to repetition.
103
Thus, with the ball, we are all possible victims; we all expose our
selves to this danger and we escape back and forth of "I."
The "I" in the game is a token exchanged. And
this passing, this network of passes, these vicariances of subjects weave
the collection. I am I now, a subject, that is to say, exposed to being
thrown down, exposed to falling, to being placed beneath the compact
mass of the others; then you take the relay, you are substituted for "I"
and become it; later on, it is he who gives it to you, his work done, his
danger finished, his part of the collective constructed. The "we" is made
by the bursts and occultations of the "I." The "we" is made by passing
the "I." By exchanging the "I." And by substitution and vicariance of
the "I."
That immediately appears easy to think about. Everyone carries
his stone, and the wall is built. Everyone carries his "I," and the "we" is
built. This addition is idiotic and resembles a political speech. No.
104
But then let them say it clearly:
The practice of happiness is subversive when it becom es collective.
Our will tor happiness and liberation is their terror, and they react by terrorizing
us with prison, when the repression of work, of the patriarchal family, and of sex
ism is not enough.
But then let them say it clearly:
To conspire means to breathe together.
And that is what we are accused of, they want to prevent us from breathing
because we have refused to breathe In Isolation, in their asphyxiating places of
work, in their individuating familial relationships, in their atomizing houses.
There is a crime I confess I have committed:
It is the attack against the separation of life and desire, against sexism in Interindividual relationships, against the reduction of life to the payment of a salary.
105
Counterpublics
The stronger modification of ... analysis — one in which
he has shown little interest, though it is clearly of major
significance in the critical analysis of gender and sexuality — is that some
publics are defined by their tension with a larger public. Their
participants are marked off from persons or citizens in general.
Discussion within such a public is understood to contravene the rules
obtaining in the world at large, being structured by alternative dis
positions or protocols, making different assumptions about what
can be said or what goes without saying. This kind of public is, in
effect, a counterpublic: it maintains at some level, conscious or
not, an awareness of its subordinate status. The sexual cultures of
gay men or of lesbians would be one kind of example, but so would
camp discourse or the media of women's culture. A counterpublic
in this sense is usually related to a subculture, but there are
important differences between these concepts. A counterpublic, against
the background of the public sphere, enables a horizon of opinion
and exchange] its exchanges remain distinct from authority and
can have a critical relation to power; its extent is in principle
indefinite, because it is not based on a precise demography but
mediated by print, theater, diffuse networks of talk, commerce, and ...
106
The term slang, which is less broad than language variety is described
by ... as a label that is frequently used to denote
certain informal or faddish usages of nearly anyone in the speech community.
However, slang, while subject to rapid change, is widespread and
familiar to a large number of speakers, unlike Polari. The terms jargon
and argot perhaps signify more what Polari stands for. as they are asso
ciated with group membership and are used to serve as affirmation or
solidarity with other members. Both terms refer to "obscure or secret
language’or language of a particular occupational group ...
While jargon tends to refer to an occupational sociolect,
or a vocabulary particular to a field, argot is more concerned with language
varieties where speakers wish to conceal either themselves or aspects of
their communication from non-members. Although argot is perhaps the
most useful term considered so far in relation to Polari. there exists a
more developed theory that concentrates on stigmatised groups, and could
have been created with Polari specifically in mind: anti-language.
For ..., anti-language was to anti-society what language
was to society. An anti-society is a counter-culture, a society within a
society, a conscious alternative to society, existing by resisting either
pas-sively or by more hostile, destructive means. Anti-languages are
generated by anti-societies and in their simplest forms arc partially relexicalised
languages, consisting of the same grammar but a different vocabulary
... in areas central to the activities ot subcultures.
Therefore a subculture based around illegal drug use would have words tor
drugs, the psychological effects of drugs, the police, money and so on. In
anti-languages the social values of words and phrases tend to be more
emphasised than in mainstream languages.
... found that 41 per cent of the criminals he
interviewed cave "the need for secrecy" as an important reason lor using
an anti-language, while 38 per cent listed 'verbal art'. However ...
in his account of the anti-language or grypserka of Polish
prisoners. describes how, for the prisoners, their identity was threatened and
the creation of an anti-society provided a means by wtnclt an alternative
social structure (or reality) could be constructed, becoming the source of
a second identity tor the prisoners.
107
Streetwalker theorists cultivate the ability to sustain and create hangouts by hanging
out. Hangouts are highly fluid, worldly, nonsanctioned,
communicative, occupations of space, contestatory retreats for the
passing on of knowledge, for the tactical-strategic fashioning
of multivocal sense, of enigm atic vocabularies and gestures,
for the development of keen commentaries on structural
pressures and gaps, spaces of complex and open-ended recognition.
Hangouts are spaces that cannot be kept captive by the
private / public split. They are worldly, contestatory concrete
spaces within geographies sieged by and in defiance of logics
and structures of domination.20 The streetwalker theorist
walks in illegitim ate refusal to legitimate oppressive
arrangements and logics.
Common
108
As we apprehend it, the process of instituting com
munism can only take the form of a collection of
acts of communisation, of making common such-and-such
space, such-and-such machine, such-and-such knowledge.
That is to say, the elaboration
of the mode of sharing that attaches to them.
Insurrection itself is just an accelerator, a decisive
moment in the process.
... is a collection of places, infrastructures,
communised means; and the dreams, bodies,
murmurs, thoughts, desires that circulate among those
places, the use of those means, the sharing of those
infrastructures.
The notion of ... responds to the necessity of
a minimal formalisation, which makes us accessible
as well as allows us to remain invisible. It belongs
to the communist way that we explain to ourselves
and formulate the basis of our sharing. So that the
most recent arrival is, at the very least, the equal of
the elder.
Whatever singularity, which wants to appropriate be longing itself,
its own being-in-language, and thus rejects all identity and every
condition of belonging, is the principal enemy of the State. Wherever these
singularities peacefully demonstrate their being in common there will be a
Tiananmen, and, sooner or later, the tanks will appear.