If the appetite to read comes with reading, then open text archive Aaaaarg.org
is a great place to stimulate and sate your hunger. Here, Matthew Fuller talks
to long-term observer Sean Dockray about the behaviour of text and
bibliophiles in a text-circulation network
Sean Dockray is an artist and a member of the organising group for the LA
branch of The Public School, a geographically distributed and online platform
for the self-organisation of learning.1 Since its initiation by Telic Arts, an
organisation which Sean directs, The Public School has also been taken up as a
model in a number of cities in the USA and Europe.2
We met to discuss the growing phenomenon of text-sharing. Aaaaarg.org has
developed over the last few years as a crucial site for the sharing and
discussion of texts drawn from cultural theory, politics, philosophy, art and
related areas. Part of this discussion is about the circulation of texts,
scanned and uploaded to other sites that it provides links to. Since
participants in The Public School often draw from the uploads to form readers
or anthologies for specific classes or events series, this project provides a
useful perspective from which to talk about the nature of text in the present
era.
**Sean Dockray** **:** People usually talk about three key actors in
discussions about publishing, which all play fairly understandable roles:
readers; publishers; and authors.
**Matthew Fuller:** Perhaps it could be said that Aaaaarg.org suggests some
other actors that are necessary for a real culture of text; firstly that books
also have some specific kind of activity to themselves, even if in many cases
it is only a latent quality, of storage, of lying in wait and, secondly, that
within the site, there is also this other kind of work done, that of the
public reception and digestion, the response to the texts, their milieu, which
involves other texts, but also systems and organisations, and platforms, such
as Aaaaarg.
Image: A young Roland Barthes, with space on his bookshelf
**SD:** Where even the three actors aren't stable! The people that are using
the site are fulfilling some role that usually the publisher has been doing or
ought to be doing, like marketing or circulation.
**MF:** Well it needn't be seen as promotion necessarily. There's also this
kind of secondary work with critics, reviewers and so on - which we can say is
also taken on by universities, for instance, and reading groups, magazines,
reviews - that gives an additional life to the text or brings it particular
kinds of attention, certain kind of readerliness.
**SD:** Situates it within certain discourses, makes it intelligible in a way,
in a different way.
**MF:** Yes, exactly, there's this other category of life to the book, which
is that of the kind of milieu or the organisational structure in which it
circulates and the different kind of networks of reference that it implies and
generates. Then there's also the book itself, which has some kind of agency,
or at least resilience and salience, when you think about how certain books
have different life cycles of appearance and disappearance.
**SD:** Well, in a contemporary sense, you have something like _Nights of
Labour_ , by Ranci _è_ re - which is probably going to be republished or
reprinted imminently - but has been sort of invisible, out of print, until, by
surprise, it becomes much more visible within the art world or something.
**MF:** And it's also been interesting to see how the art world plays a role
in the reverberations of text which isn't the same as that in cultural theory
or philosophy. Certainly _Nights of Labour_ , something that is very close to
the role that cultural studies plays in the UK, but which (cultural studies)
has no real equivalent in France, so then, geographically and linguistically,
and therefore also in a certain sense conceptually, the life of a book
exhibits these weird delays and lags and accelerations, so that's a good
example. I'm interested in what role Aaaaarg plays in that kind of
proliferation, the kind of things that books do, where they go and how they
become manifest. So I think one of the things Aaaaarg does is to make books
active in different ways, to bring out a different kind of potential in
publishing.
**SD:** Yes, the debate has tended so far to get stuck in those three actors
because people tend to end up picking a pair and placing them in opposition to
one another, especially around intellectual property. The discussion is very
simplistic and ends up in that way, where it's the authors against readers, or
authors against their publishers, with the publishers often introducing
scarcity, where the authors don't want it to be - that's a common argument.
There's this situation where the record industry is suing its own audience.
That's typically the field now.
**MF:** So within that kind of discourse of these three figures, have there
been cases where you think it's valid that there needs to be some form of
scarcity in order for a publishing project to exist?
**SD:** It's obviously not for me to say that there does or doesn't need to be
scarcity but the scarcity that I think we're talking about functions in a
really specific way: it's usually within academic publishing, the book or
journal is being distributed to a few libraries and maybe 500 copies of it are
being printed, and then the price is something anywhere from $60 to $500, and
there's just sort of an assumption that the audience is very well defined and
stable and able to cope with that.
**MF:** Yeah, which recognises that the audiences may be stable as an
institutional form, but not that over time the individual parts of say that
library user population change in their relationship to the institution. If
you're a student for a few years and then you no longer have access, you lose
contact with that intellectual community...
**SD:** Then people just kind of have to cling to that intellectual community.
So when scarcity functions like that, I can't think of any reason why that
_needs_ to happen. Obviously it needs to happen in the sense that there's a
relatively stable balance that wants to perpetuate itself, but what you're
asking is something else.
**MF:** Well there are contexts where the publisher isn't within that academic
system of very high costs, sustained by volunteer labour by academics, the
classic peer review system, but if you think of more of a trade publisher like
a left or a movement or underground publisher, whose books are being
circulated on Aaaaarg...
**SD:** They're in a much more precarious position obviously than a university
press whose economics are quite different, and with the volunteer labour or
the authors are being subsidised by salary - you have to look at the entire
system rather than just the publication. But in a situation where the
publisher is much more precarious and relying on sales and a swing in one
direction or another makes them unable to pay the rent on a storage facility,
one can definitely see why some sort of predictability is helpful and
necessary.
**MF:** So that leads me to wonder whether there are models of publishing that
are emerging that work with online distribution, or with the kind of thing
that Aaaaarg does specifically. Are there particular kinds of publishing
initiatives that really work well in this kind of context where free digital
circulation is understood as an a priori, or is it always in this kind of
parasitic or cyclical relationship?
**SD:** I have no idea how well they work actually; I don't know how well,
say, Australian publisher re.press, works for example. 3 I like a lot of what
they publish, it's given visibility when re.press distributes it and that's a
lot of what a publisher's role seems to be (and what Aaaaarg does as well).
But are you asking how well it works in terms of economics?
**MF:** Well, just whether there's new forms of publishing emerging that work
well in this context that cut out some of the problems ?
**SD:** Well, there's also the blog. Certain academic discourses, philosophy
being one, that are carried out on blogs really work to a certain extent, in
that there is an immediacy to ideas, their reception and response. But there's
other problems, such as the way in which, over time, the posts quickly get
forgotten. In this sense, a publication, a book, is kind of nice. It
crystallises and stays around.
**MF:** That's what I'm thinking, that the book is a particular kind of thing
which has it's own quality as a form of media. I also wonder whether there
might be intermediate texts, unfinished texts, draft texts that might
circulate via Aaaaarg for instance or other systems. That, at least to me,
would be kind of unsatisfactory but might have some other kind of life and
readership to it. You know, as you say, the blog is a collection of relatively
occasional texts, or texts that are a work in progress, but something like
Aaaaarg perhaps depends upon texts that are finished, that are absolutely the
crystallisation of a particular thought.
Image: The Tree of Knowledge as imagined by Hans Sebald Beham in his 1543
engraving _Adam and Eve_
**SD:** Aaaaarg is definitely not a futuristic model. I mean, it occurs at a
specific time, which is while we're living in a situation where books exist
effectively as a limited edition. They can travel the world and reach certain
places, and yet the readership is greatly outpacing the spread and
availability of the books themselves. So there's a disjunction there, and
that's obviously why Aaaaarg is so popular. Because often there are maybe no
copies of a certain book within 400 miles of a person that's looking for it,
but then they can find it on that website, so while we're in that situation it
works.
**MF:** So it's partly based on a kind of asymmetry, that's spatial, that's
about the territories of publishers and distributors, and also a kind of
asymmetry of economics?
**SD:** Yeah, yeah. But others too. I remember when I was affiliated with a
university and I had JSTOR access and all these things and then I left my job
and then at some point not too long after that my proxy access expired and I
no longer had access to those articles which now would cost $30 a pop just to
even preview. That's obviously another asymmetry, even though, geographically
speaking, I'm in an identical position, just that my subject position has
shifted from affiliated to unaffiliated.
**MF:** There's also this interesting way in which Aaaaarg has gained
different constituencies globally, you can see the kind of shift in the texts
being put up. It seems to me anyway there are more texts coming from non-
western authors. This kind of asymmetry generates a flux. We're getting new
alliances between texts and you can see new bibliographies emerge.
**SD:** Yeah, the original community was very American and European and
gradually people were signing up at other places in order to have access to a
lot of these texts that didn't reach their libraries or their book stores or
whatever. But then there is a danger of US and European thought becoming
central. A globalisation where a certain mode of thought ends up just erasing
what's going on already in the cities where people are signing up, that's a
horrible possible future.
**MF:** But that's already something that's _not_ happening in some ways?
**SD:** Exactly, that's what seems to be happening now. It goes on to
translations that are being put up and then texts that are coming from outside
of the set of US and western authors and so, in a way, it flows back in the
other direction. This hasn't always been so visible, maybe it will begin to
happen some more. But think of the way people can list different texts
together as ‘issues' - a way that you can make arbitrary groupings - and
they're very subjective, you can make an issue named anything and just lump a
bunch of texts in there. But because, with each text, you can see what other
issues people have also put it in, it creates a trace of its use. You can see
that sometimes the issues are named after the reading groups, people are using
the issues format as a collecting tool, they might gather all Portuguese
translations, or The Public School uses them for classes. At other times it's
just one person organising their dissertation research but you see the wildly
different ways that one individual text can be used.
**MF:** So the issue creates a new form of paratext to the text, acting as a
kind of meta-index, they're a new form of publication themselves. To publish a
bibliography that actively links to the text itself is pretty cool. That also
makes me think within the structures of Aaaaarg it seems that certain parts of
the library are almost at breaking point - for instance the alphabetical
structure.
**SD:** Which is funny because it hasn't always been that alphabetical
structure either, it used to just be everything on one page, and then at some
point it was just taking too long for the page to load up A-Z. And today A is
as long as the entire index used to be, so yeah these questions of density and
scale are there but they've always been dealt with in a very ad hoc kind of
way, dealing with problems as they come. I'm sure that will happen. There
hasn't always been a search and, in a way, the issues, along with
alphabetising, became ways of creating more manageable lists, but even now the
list of issues is gigantic. These are problems of scale.
**MF:** So I guess there's also this kind of question that emerges in the
debate on reading habits and reading practices, this question of the breadth
of reading that people are engaging in. Do you see anything emerging in
Aaaaarg that suggests a new consistency of handling reading material? Is there
a specific quality, say, of the issues? For instance, some of them seem quite
focused, and others are very broad. They may provide insights into how new
forms of relationships to intellectual material may be emerging that we don't
quite yet know how to handle or recognise. This may be related to the lament
for the classic disciplinary road of deep reading of specific materials with a
relatively focused footprint whereas, it is argued, the net is encouraging a
much wider kind of sampling of materials with not necessarily so much depth.
**SD:** It's partially driven by people simply being in the system, in the
same way that the library structures our relationship to text, the net does it
in another way. One comment I've heard is that there's too much stuff on
Aaaaarg, which wasn't always the case. It used to be that I read every single
thing that was posted because it was slow enough and the things were short
enough that my response was, ‘Oh something new, great!' and I would read it.
But now, obviously that is totally impossible, there's too much; but in a way
that's just the state of things. It does seem like certain tactics of making
sense of things, of keeping things away and letting things in and queuing
things for reading later become just a necessary part of even navigating. It's
just the terrain at the moment, but this is only one instance. Even when I was
at the university and going to libraries, I ended up with huge stacks of books
and I'd just buy books that I was never going to read just to have them
available in my library, so I don't think feeling overwhelmed by books is
particularly new, just maybe the scale of it is. In terms of how people
actually conduct themselves and deal with that reality, it's difficult to say.
I think the issues are one of the few places where you would see any sort of
visible answers on Aaaaarg, otherwise it's totally anecdotal. At The Public
School we have organised classes in relationship to some of the issues, and
then we use the classes to also figure out what texts we are going to be
reading in the future, to make new issues and new classes. So it becomes an
organising group, reading and working its way through subject matter and
material, then revisiting that library and seeing what needs to be there.
**MF:** I want to follow that kind of strand of habits of accumulation,
sorting, deferring and so on. I wonder, what is a kind of characteristic or
unusual reading behavior? For instance are there people who download the
entire list? Or do you see people being relatively selective? How does the
mania of the net, with this constant churning of data, map over to forms of
bibliomania?
**SD:** Well, in Aaaaarg it's again very specific. Anecdotally again, I have
heard from people how much they download and sometimes they're very selective,
they just see something that's interesting and download it, other times they
download everything and occasionally I hear about this mania of mirroring the
whole site. What I mean about being specific to Aaaaarg is that a lot of the
mania isn't driven by just the need to have everything; it's driven by the
acknowledgement that the source is going to disappear at some point. That
sense of impending disappearance is always there, so I think that drives a lot
of people to download everything because, you know, it's happened a couple
times where it's just gone down or moved or something like that.
**MF:** It's true, it feels like something that is there even for a few weeks
or a few months. By a sheer fluke it could last another year, who knows.
**SD:** It's a different kind of mania, and usually we get lost in this
thinking that people need to possess everything but there is this weird
preservation instinct that people have, which is slightly different. The
dominant sensibility of Aaaaarg at the beginning was the highly partial and
subjective nature to the contents and that is something I would want to
preserve, which is why I never thought it to be particularly exciting to have
lots of high quality metadata - it doesn't have the publication date, it
doesn't have all the great metadata that say Amazon might provide. The system
is pretty dismal in that way, but I don't mind that so much. I read something
on the Internet which said it was like being in the porn section of a video
store with all black text on white labels, it was an absolutely beautiful way
of describing it. Originally Aaaaarg was about trading just those particular
moments in a text that really struck you as important, that you wanted other
people to read so it would be very short, definitely partial, it wasn't a
completist project, although some people maybe treat it in that way now. They
treat it as a thing that wants to devour everything. That's definitely not the
way that I have seen it.
**MF:** And it's so idiosyncratic I mean, you know it's certainly possible
that it could be read in a canonical mode, you can see that there's that
tendency there, of the core of Adorno or Agamben, to take the a's for
instance. But of the more contemporary stuff it's very varied, that's what's
nice about it as well. Alongside all the stuff that has a very long-term
existence, like historical books that may be over a hundred years old, what
turns up there is often unexpected, but certainly not random or
uninterpretable.
Image: French art historian André Malraux lays out his _Musée Imaginaire_ ,
1947
**SD:** It's interesting to think a little bit about what people choose to
upload, because it's not easy to upload something. It takes a good deal of
time to scan a book. I mean obviously some things are uploaded which are, have
always been, digital. (I wrote something about this recently about the scan
and the export - the scan being something that comes out of a labour in
relationship to an object, to the book, and the export is something where the
whole life of the text has sort of been digital from production to circulation
and reception). I happen to think of Aaaaarg in the realm of the scan and the
bootleg. When someone actually scans something they're potentially spending
hours because they're doing the work on the book they're doing something with
software, they're uploading.
**MF:** You could say with PDFs they have to be searchable texts?
**SD:** I'm sure a lot of people would prefer that. Even I would prefer it a
lot of the time. But again there is the idiosyncratic nature of what appears,
and there is also the idiosyncratic nature of the technical quality and
sometimes it's clear that the person that uploads something just has no real
experience of scanning anything. It's kind of an inevitable outcome. There are
movie sharing sites that are really good about quality control both in the
metadata and what gets up; but I think that if you follow that to the end,
then basically you arrive at the exported version being the Platonic text, the
impossible, perfect, clear, searchable, small - totally eliminating any trace
of what is interesting, the hand of reading and scanning, and this is what you
see with a lot of the texts on Aaaaarg. You see the hand of the person who's
read that book in the past, you see the hand of the person who scanned it.
Literally, their hand is in the scan. This attention to the labour of both
reading and redistributing, it's important to still have that.
**MF:** You could also find that in different ways for instance with a pdf, a
pdf that was bought directly as an ebook that's digitally watermarked will
have traces of the purchaser coded in there. So then there's also this work of
stripping out that data which will become a new kind of labour. So it doesn't
have this kind of humanistic refrain, the actual hand, the touch of the
labour. This is perhaps more interesting, the work of the code that strips it
out, so it's also kind of recognising that code as part of the milieu.
**SD:** Yeah, that is a good point, although I don't know that it's more
interesting labour.
**MF:** On a related note, The Public School as a model is interesting in that
it's kind of a convention, it has a set of rules, an infrastructure, a
website, it has a very modular being. Participants operate with a simple
organisational grammar which allows them to say ‘I want to learn this' or ‘I
want to teach this' and to draw in others on that basis. There's lots of
proposals for classes, some of them don't get taken up, but it's a process and
a set of resources which allow this aggregation of interest to occur. I just
wonder how you saw that kind of ethos of modularity in a way, as a set of
minimum rules or set of minimum capacities that allow a particular set of
things occur?
**SD:** This may not respond directly to what you were just talking about, but
there's various points of entry to the school and also having something that
people feel they can take on as their own and I think the minimal structure
invites quite a lot of projection as to what that means and what's possible
with it. If it's not doing what you want it to do or you think, ‘I'm not sure
what it is', there's the sense that you can somehow redirect it.
**MF:** It's also interesting that projection itself can become a technical
feature so in a way the work of the imagination is done also through this kind
of tuning of the software structure. The governance that was handled by the
technical infrastructure actually elicits this kind of projection, elicits the
imagination in an interesting way.
**SD:** Yeah, yeah, I totally agree and, not to put too much emphasis on the
software, although I think that there's good reason to look at both the
software and the conceptual diagram of the school itself, but really in a way
it would grind to a halt if it weren't for the very traditional labour of
people - like an organising committee. In LA there's usually around eight of
us (now Jordan Biren, Solomon Bothwell, Vladada Gallegos, Liz Glynn, Naoko
Miyano, Caleb Waldorf, and me) who are deeply involved in making that
translation of these wishes - thrown onto the website that somehow attract the
other people - into actual classes.
**MF:** What does the committee do?
**SD:** Even that's hard to describe and that's what makes it hard to set up.
It's always very particular to even a single idea, to a single class proposal.
In general it'd be things like scheduling, finding an instructor if an
instructor is what's required for that class. Sometimes it's more about
finding someone who will facilitate, other times it's rounding up materials.
But it could be helping an open proposal take some specific form. Sometimes
it's scanning things and putting them on Aaaaarg. Sometimes, there will be a
proposal - I proposed a class in the very, very beginning on messianic time, I
wanted to take a class on it - and it didn't happen until more than a year and
a half later.
**MF:** Well that's messianic time for you.
**SD:** That and the internet. But other times it will be only a week later.
You know we did one on the Egyptian revolution and its historical context,
something which demanded a very quick turnaround. Sometimes the committee is
going to classes and there will be a new conflict that arises within a class,
that they then redirect into the website for a future proposal, which becomes
another class: a point of friction where it's not just like next, and next,
and next, but rather it's a knot that people can't quite untie, something that
you want to spend more time with, but you may want to move on to other things
immediately, so instead you postpone that to the next class. A lot of The
Public School works like that: it's finding momentum then following it. A lot
of our classes are quite short, but we try and string them together. The
committee are the ones that orchestrate that. In terms of governance, it is
run collectively, although with the committee, every few months people drop
off and new people come on. There are some people who've been on for years.
Other people who stay on just for that point of time that feels right for
them. Usually, people come on to the committee because they come to a lot of
classes, they start to take an interest in the project and before they know it
they're administering it.
**Matthew Fuller's <[m.fuller@gold.ac.uk](mailto:m.fuller@gold.ac.uk)> most
recent book, _Elephant and Castle_ , is forthcoming from Autonomedia. **
**He is collated at**
**Footnotes**
1
2 [http://telic.info/ ](http://telic.info/)
3
Mars, Medak & Sekulic
Taken Literally
2016
Taken literally
Marcell Mars
Tomislav Medak
Dubravka Sekulic
Free people united in building a society of
equals, embracing those whom previous
efforts have failed to recognize, are the historical foundation of the struggle against
enslavement, exploitation, discrimination
and cynicism. Building a society has never
been an easy-going pastime.
During the turbulent 20th century,
different trajectories of social transformation moved within the horizon set by
the revolutions of the 18th and 19th century: equality, brotherhood and liberty
– and class struggle. The 20th century experimented with various combinations
of economic and social rationales in the
arrangement of social reproduction. The
processes of struggle, negotiation, empowerment and inclusion of discriminated social groups constantly complexified and
dynamised the basic concepts regulating
social relations. However, after the process
of intensive socialisation in the form of either welfare state or socialism that dominated a good part of the 20th century, the
end of the century was marked by a return
in the regulation of social relations back
to the model of market domination and
private appropriation. Such simplification
and fall from complexity into a formulaic
state of affairs is not merely a symptom
of overall exhaustion, loss of imagination
and lacking perspective on further social
development, but rather indicates a cynical
abandonment of the effort to build society,
its idea, its vision – and, as some would
want, of society altogether.
In this article, we wish to revisit the
evolution of regulation of ownership in the
field of intellectual production and housing
as two examples of the historical dead-end
in which we find ourselves.
T H E C A P I TA L I S T M O D E
O F P RO D U C T I O N
According to the text-book definition, the
capitalist mode of production is the first
historical organisation of socio-economic relations in which appropriation of the
surplus from producers does not depend
on force, but rather on neutral laws of economic processes on the basis of which the
capitalist and the worker enter voluntarily
into a relation of production. While under
feudalism it was the aristocratic oligopoly
on violence that secured a hereditary hierarchy of appropriation, under capitalism the
neutral logic of appropriation was secured
by the state monopoly on violence. However, given that the early capitalist relations
in the English country-side did not emerge
outside the existing feudal inequalities, and
that the process of generalisation of capitalist relations, particularly after the rise of industrialisation, resulted in even greater and
even more hardened stratification, the state
monopoly on violence securing the neutral
logic of appropriation ended up mostly securing the hereditary hierarchy of appropriation. Although in the new social formation
neither the capitalist nor the worker was born
capitalist or born worker, the capitalist would
rarely become a worker and the worker a capitalist even rarer. However, under conditions
where the state monopoly on violence could
no longer coerce workers to voluntarily sell
their labour and where their resistance to
accept existing class relations could be
229
expressed in the withdrawal of their labour
power from the production process, their
consent would become a problem for the existing social model. That problem found its
resolution through a series of conflicts that
have resulted in historical concessions and
gains of class struggle ranging from guaranteed labor rights, through institutions of the
welfare state, to socialism.
The fundamental property relation
in the capitalist mode of production is that
the worker has an exclusive ownership over
his/her own labour power, while the capitalist has ownership over the means of production. By purchasing the worker's labour
power, the capitalist obtains the exclusive
right to appropriate the entire product of
worker's labour. However, as the regulation
of property in such unconditional formulaic
form quickly results in deep inequalities, it
could not be maintained beyond the early
days of capitalism. Resulting class struggles
and compromises would achieve a series of
conditions that would successively complexify the property relations.
Therefore, the issue of private property – which goods do we have the right to
call our own to the exclusion of others: our
clothes, the flat in which we live, means of
production, profit from the production process, the beach upon which we wish to enjoy
ourselves alone or to utilise by renting it out,
unused land in our neighbourhood – is not
merely a question of the optimal economic
allocation of goods, but also a question of
social rights and emancipatory opportunities that are required in order secure the
continuous consent of society's members to
its organisational arrangements.
230
Taken literally
OW NER S H I P R EG I M ES
Both the concept of private property over
land and the concept of copyright and
intellectual property have their shared
evolutionary beginnings during the early capitalism in England, at a time when
the newly emerging capitalist class was
building up its position in relation to the
aristocracy and the Church. In both cases, new actors entered into the processes
of political articulation, decision-making
and redistribution of power. However, the
basic process of ( re )defining relations has
remained ( until today ) a spatial demarcation: the question of who is excluded or
remains outside and how.
① In the early period of trade in books, after
the invention of the printing press in the 15th
century, the exclusive rights to commercial
exploitation of written works were obtained
through special permits from the Royal Censors, issued solely to politically loyal printers.
The copyright itself was constituted only in
the 17th century. It's economic function is to
unambiguously establish the ownership title
over the products of intellectual labour. Once
that title is established, there is a person with
whose consent the publisher can proceed in
commodifying and distributing the work to
the exclusion of others from its exploitation.
And while that right to economic benefit was
exclusively that of the publishers at the outset, as authors became increasingl aware that
the income from books guaranteed then an
autonomy from the sponsorship of the King
and the aristocracy, in the 19th century copyright gradually transformed into a legal right
that protected both the author and the publisher in equal measure. The patent rights underwent a similar development. They were
standardised in the 17th century as a precondition for industrial development, and were
soon established as a balance between the
rights of the individual-inventor and the
commercial interest of the manufacturer.
However, the balance of interests between the productive creative individuals
and corporations handling production and
distribution did not last long and, with
time, that balance started to lean further
towards protecting the interests of the corporations. With the growing complexity of
companies and their growing dependence
on intellectual property rights as instruments in 20th century competitive struggles, the economic aspect of intellectual
property increasingly passed to the corporation, while the author/inventor was
left only with the moral and reputational
element. The growing importance of intellectual property rights for the capitalist
economy has been evident over the last
three decades in the regular expansions of
the subject matter and duration of protection, but, most important of all – within
the larger process of integration of the capitalist world-system – in the global harmonisation and enforcement of rights protection. Despite the fact that the interests of
authors and the interests of corporations,
of the global south and the global north, of
the public interest and the corporate interest do not fall together, we are being given
a global and uniform – formulaic – rule of
the abstract logic of ownership, notwithstanding the diverging circumstances and
interests of different societies in the context of uneven development.
No-one is surprised today that, in
spite of their initial promises, the technological advances brought by the Internet,
once saddled with the existing copyright
regulation, did not enhance and expand
access to knowledge. But that dysfunction
is nowhere more evident than in academic publishing. This is a global industry of
the size of music recording industry dominated by an oligopoly of five major commercial publishers: Reed Elsevier, Taylor
& Francis, Springer, Wiley-Blackwell and
Sage. While scientists write their papers,
do peer-reviews and edit journals for free,
these publishers have over past decades
taken advantage of their oligopolistic position to raise the rates of subscriptions they
sell mostly to publicly financed libraries at
academic institutions, so that the majority of libraries, even in the rich centres of
the global north, are unable to afford access to many journals. The fantastic profit
margins of over 30% that these publishers
reap from year to year are premised on denying access to scientific publications and
the latest developments in science not only
to the general public, but also students and
scholars around the world. Although that
oligopoly rests largely on the rights of the
authors, the authors receive no benefit
from that copyright. An even greater irony is, if they want to make their work open
access to others, the authors themselves or
the institutions that have financed the underlying research through the proxy of the
author are obliged to pay additionally to
the publishers for that ‘service’. ×
231
② With proliferation of enclosures and
signposts prohibiting access, picturesque
rural arcadias became landscapes of capitalistic exploitation. Those evicted by the
process of enclosure moved to the cities
and became wage workers. Far away from
the parts of the cities around the factories,
where working families lived squeezed
into one room with no natural light and
ventilation, areas of the city sprang up in
which the capitalists built their mansions.
At that time, the very possibility of participation in political life was conditioned
on private property, thus excluding and
discriminating by legal means entire social
groups. Women had neither the right to
property ownership nor inheritance rights.
Engels' description of the humiliating
living conditions of Manchester workers in
the 19th century pointed to the catastrophic
effects of industrialisation on the situation
of working class ( e.g. lower pay than during
the pre-industrial era ) and indicated that
the housing problem was not a direct consequence of exploitation but rather a problem
arising from inequitable redistribution of
assets. The idea that living quarters for the
workers could be pleasant, healthy and safe
places in which privacy was possible and
that that was not the exclusive right of the
rich, became an integral part of the struggle
for labor rights, and part of the consciousness of progressive, socially-minded architects and all others dedicated to solving the
housing problem.
Just as joining forces was as the
foundation of their struggle for labor and
political rights, joining forces was and has
remained the mechanism for addressing the
232
Taken literally
inadequate housing conditions. As early as
during the 19th century, Dutch working class
and impoverished bourgeoisie joined forces
in forming housing co-operatives and housing societies, squatting and building without permits on the edges of the cities. The
workers' struggle, enlightened bourgeoisie,
continued industrial development, as well
as the phenomenon of Utopian socialist-capitalists like Jean-Baptiste André Godin, who, for example, under the influence
of Charles Fourier's ideas, built a palace for
workers – the Familistery, all these exerted
pressure on the system and contributed to
the improvement of housing conditions for
workers. Still, the dominant model continued to replicate the rentier system in which
even those with inadequate housing found
someone to whom they could rent out a segment of their housing unit.
The general social collapse after
World War I, the Socialist Revolution and
the coming to power in certain European
cities of the social-democrats brought new
urban strategies. In ‘red’ Vienna, initially
under the urban planning leadership of
Otto Neurath, socially just housing policy
and provision of adequate housing was regarded as the city's responsibility. The city
considered the workers who were impoverished by the war and who sought a way out
of their homelessness by building housing
themselves and tilling gardens as a phenomenon that should be integrated, and
not as an error that needed to be rectified.
Sweden throughout the 1930s continued
with its right to housing policy and served
as an example right up until the mid-1970s
both to the socialist and ( capitalist ) wel-
fare states. The idea of ( private ) ownership became complexified with the idea
of social ownership ( in Yugoslavia ) and
public/social housing elsewhere, but since
the bureaucratic-technological system responsible for implementation was almost
exclusively linked with the State, housing
ended up in unwieldy complicated systems
in which there was under-investment in
maintenance. That crisis was exploited as
an excuse to impose as necessary paradigmatic changes that we today regard as the
beginning of neo-liberal policies.
At the beginning of the 1980s in
Great Britain, Margaret Thatcher created an atmosphere of a state of emergency
around the issue of housing ownership
and, with the passing of the Housing Act
in 1980, reform was set in motion that
would deeply transform the lives of the
Brits. The promises of a better life merely
based on the opportunity to buy and become a ( private ) owner never materialised.
The transition from the ‘right to housing’ and the ‘right to ( participation in the
market through ) purchase’ left housing
to the market. There the prices first fell
drastically at the beginning of the 1990s.
That was followed by a financialisation
and speculation on the property market
making housing space in cities like London primarily an avenue of investment, a
currency, a tax haven and a mechanism
by which the rich could store their wealth.
In today's generation, working and lower
classes, even sometimes the upper middle
class can no longer even dream of buying
a flat in London. ×
P L AT F O R M I SAT I O N
Social ownership and housing – understood both literally as living space, but
also as the articulation of the right to decent life for all members of society – which
was already under attack for decades prior,
would be caught completely unprepared
for the information revolution and its
zero marginal cost economy. Take for
example the internet innovation: after a
brief period of comradely couch-surfing,
the company AirBnB in an even shorter period transformed from the service
allowing small enterprising home owners to rent out their vacant rooms into a
catalyst for amassing the ownership over
housing stock with the sole purpose of
renting it out through AirBnb. In the
last phase of that transformation, new
start-ups appeared that offered to the
newly consolidated feudal lords the service of easier management of their housing ‘fleet’, where the innovative approach
boils down to the summoning of service
workers who, just like Uber drivers, seek
out blue dots on their smart-phone maps
desperately rushing – in fear of bad rating,
for a minimal fee and no taxes paid – to
turn up there before their equally precarious competition does. With these innovations, the residents end up being offered
shorter and shorter but increasingly more
expensive contracts on rental, while in a
worse case the flats are left unoccupied
because the rich owner-investors have
realised that an unoccupied flat is a more
profitable deal than a risky investment in
a market in crisis.
233
The information revolution stepped out
onto the historical stage with the promise
of radical democratisation of communication, culture and politics. Anyone could
become the media and address the global
public, emancipate from the constrictive
space of identity, and obtain access to entire
knowledge of the world. However, instead
of resulting in democratising and emancipatory processes, with the handing over of
Internet and technological innovation to the
market in 1990s it resulted in the gradual
disruption of previous social arrangements
in the allocation of goods and in the intensification of the commodification process.
That trajectory reached its full-blown development in the form of Internet platforms
that simultaneously enabled old owners of
goods to control more closely their accessibility and permited new owners to seek out
new forms of commercial exploitation. Take
for example Google Books, where the process of digitization of the entire printed culture of the world resulted in no more than
ad and retail space where only few books
can be accessed for free. Or Amazon Kinde,
where the owner of the platform has such
dramatic control over books that on behest
of copyright holders it can remotely delete
a purchased copy of a book, as quite indicatively happened in 2009 with Orwell's 1984.
The promised technological innovation that
would bring a new turn of the complexity in
the social allocation of goods resulted in a
simplification and reduction of everything
into private property.
The history of resistance to such extreme forms of enclosure of culture and
knowledge is only a bit younger than the
234
Taken literally
processes of commodification themselves
that had begun with the rise of trade in
books. As early as the French Revolution,
the confiscation of books from the libraries
of clergy and aristocracy and their transfer
into national and provincial libraries signalled that the right of access to knowledge
was a pre-condition for full participation
in society. For its part, the British labor
movement of the mid-19th century had to
resort to opening workers' reading-rooms,
projects of proletarian self-education and
the class struggle in order to achieve the
establishment of the institution of public
libraries financed by taxes, and the right
thereby for access to knowledge and culture for all members of society.
SHAD OW P U B L I C L I B R A R I ES
Public library as a space of exemption from
commodification of knowledge and culture
is an institution that complexifies the unconditional and formulaic application of
intellectual property rights, making them
conditional on the public interest that all
members of the society have the right of
access to knowledge. However, with the
transition to the digital, public libraries
have been radically limited in acquiring
anything they could later provide a decommodified access to. Publishers do not
wish to sell electronic books to libraries,
and when they do decide to give them a
lending licence, that licence runs out after 26 lendings. Closed platforms for electronic publications where the publishers
technologically control both the medium
and the ways the work can be used take us
back to the original and not very well-conceived metaphor of ownership – anyone
who owns the land can literally control
everything that happens on that land –
even if that land is the collective process
of writing and reading. Such limited space
for the activity of public libraries is in radical contrast to the potentials for universal
access to all of culture and knowledge that
digital distribution could make possible
at a very low cost, but with considerable
change in the regulation of intellectual production in society.
Since such change would not be in the
interest of formulaic application of intellectual property, acts of civil disobedience to
that regime have over the last twenty years
created a number of 'shadow public libraries'
that provide universal access to knowledge
and culture in the digital domain in the way
that the public libraries are not allowed to:
Library Genesis, Science Hub, Aaaaarg,
Monoskop, Memory of the World or Ubuweb. They all have a simple objective – to
provide access to books, journals and digitised knowledge to all who find themselves
outside the rich academic institutions of the
West and who do not have the privilege of
institutional access.
These shadow public libraries bravely remind society of all the watershed moments in the struggles and negotiations
that have resulted in the establishment
of social institutions, so as to first enable
the transition from what was an unjust,
discriminating and exploitative to a better society, and later guarantee that these
gains would not be dismantled or rescinded. That reminder is, however, more than a
mere hacker pastime, just as the reactions
of the corporations are not easy-going at
all: in mid-2015, Reed Elsevier initiated
a court case against Library Genesis and
Science Hub and by the end of 2015 the
court in New York issued a preliminary
injunction ordering the shut-down of
their domains and access to the servers. At
the same time, a court case was brought
against Aaaaarg in Quebec.
Shadow public libraries are also a
reminder of how technological complexity does not have to be harnessed only in
the conversion of socialised resources back
into the simplified formulaic logic of private property, how we can take technology
in our hands, in the hands of society that is
not dismantling its own foundations, but
rather taking care of and preserving what
is worthwhile and already built – and thus
building itself further. But, most powerfully shadow public libraries are a reminder to us of how the focus and objective of
our efforts should not be a world that can
be readily managed algorithmically, but a
world in which our much greater achievement is the right guaranteed by institutions – envisioned, demanded, struggled
for and negotiated – a society. Platformisation, corporate concentration, financialisation and speculation, although complex
in themselves, are in the function of the
process of de-socialisation. Only by the
re-introduction of the complexity of socialised management and collective re-appropriation of resources can technological
complexity in a world of escalating expropriation be given the perspective of universal sisterhood, equality and liberation.