Graziano, Mars & Medak
Learning from #Syllabus
2019
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LEARNING FROM
#SYLLABUS
VALERIA GRAZIANO,
MARCELL MARS,
TOMISLAV MEDAK
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LEARNING FROM #SYLLABUS
VALERIA GRAZIANO, MARCELL MARS, TOMISLAV MEDAK
The syllabus is the manifesto of the 21st century.
—Sean Dockray and Benjamin Forster1
#Syllabus Struggles
In August 2014, Michael Brown, an 18-year-old boy living in Ferguson, Missouri,
was fatally shot by police officer Darren Wilson. Soon after, as the civil protests denouncing police brutality and institutional racism began to mount across the United
States, Dr. Marcia Chatelain, Associate Professor of History and African American
Studies at Georgetown University, launched an online call urging other academics
and teachers ‘to devote the first day of classes to a conversation about Ferguson’ and ‘to recommend texts, collaborate on conversation starters, and inspire
dialogue about some aspect of the Ferguson crisis.’2 Chatelain did so using the
hashtag #FergusonSyllabus.
Also in August 2014, using the hashtag #gamergate, groups of users on 4Chan,
8Chan, Twitter, and Reddit instigated a misogynistic harassment campaign against
game developers Zoë Quinn and Brianna Wu, media critic Anita Sarkeesian, as well as
a number of other female and feminist game producers, journalists, and critics. In the
following weeks, The New Inquiry editors and contributors compiled a reading list and
issued a call for suggestions for their ‘TNI Syllabus: Gaming and Feminism’.3
In June 2015, Donald Trump announced his candidacy for President of the United
States. In the weeks that followed, he became the presumptive Republican nominee,
and The Chronicle of Higher Education introduced the syllabus ‘Trump 101’.4 Historians N.D.B. Connolly and Keisha N. Blain found ‘Trump 101’ inadequate, ‘a mock college syllabus […] suffer[ing] from a number of egregious omissions and inaccuracies’,
failing to include ‘contributions of scholars of color and address the critical subjects
of Trump’s racism, sexism, and xenophobia’. They assembled ‘Trump Syllabus 2.0’.5
Soon after, in response to a video in which Trump engaged in ‘an extremely lewd
conversation about women’ with TV host Billy Bush, Laura Ciolkowski put together a
‘Rape Culture Syllabus’.6
1
2
3
4
5
6
Sean Dockray, Benjamin Forster, and Public Office, ‘README.md’, Hyperreadings, 15 February
2018, https://samiz-dat.github.io/hyperreadings/.
Marcia Chatelain, ‘Teaching the #FergusonSyllabus’, Dissent Magazine, 28 November 2014,
https://www.dissentmagazine.org/blog/teaching-ferguson-syllabus/.
‘TNI Syllabus: Gaming and Feminism’, The New Inquiry, 2 September 2014, https://thenewinquiry.
com/tni-syllabus-gaming-and-feminism/.
‘Trump 101’, The Chronicle of Higher Education, 19 June 2016, https://www.chronicle.com/article/
Trump-Syllabus/236824/.
N.D.B. Connolly and Keisha N. Blain, ‘Trump Syllabus 2.0’, Public Books, 28 June 2016, https://
www.publicbooks.org/trump-syllabus-2-0/.
Laura Ciolkowski, ‘Rape Culture Syllabus’, Public Books, 15 October 2016, https://www.
publicbooks.org/rape-culture-syllabus/.
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In April 2016, members of the Standing Rock Sioux tribe established the Sacred Stone
Camp and started the protest against the Dakota Access Pipeline, the construction of
which threatened the only water supply at the Standing Rock Reservation. The protest at the site of the pipeline became the largest gathering of native Americans in
the last 100 years and they earned significant international support for their ReZpect
Our Water campaign. As the struggle between protestors and the armed forces unfolded, a group of Indigenous scholars, activists, and supporters of the struggles of
First Nations people and persons of color, gathered under the name the NYC Stands
for Standing Rock Committee, put together #StandingRockSyllabus.7
The list of online syllabi created in response to political struggles has continued to
grow, and at present includes many more examples:
All Monuments Must Fall Syllabus
#Blkwomensyllabus
#BLMSyllabus
#BlackIslamSyllabus
#CharlestonSyllabus
#ColinKaepernickSyllabus
#ImmigrationSyllabus
Puerto Rico Syllabus (#PRSyllabus)
#SayHerNameSyllabus
Syllabus for White People to Educate Themselves
Syllabus: Women and Gender Non-Conforming People Writing about Tech
#WakandaSyllabus
What To Do Instead of Calling the Police: A Guide, A Syllabus, A Conversation, A
Process
#YourBaltimoreSyllabus
It would be hard to compile a comprehensive list of all the online syllabi that have
been created by social justice movements in the last five years, especially, but not
exclusively, those initiated in North America in the context of feminist and anti-racist
activism. In what is now a widely spread phenomenon, these political struggles use
social networks and resort to the hashtag template ‘#___Syllabus’ to issue calls for
the bottom-up aggregation of resources necessary for political analysis and pedagogy
centering on their concerns. For this reason, we’ll call this phenomenon ‘#Syllabus’.
During the same years that saw the spread of the #Syllabus phenomenon, university
course syllabi have also been transitioning online, often in a top-down process initiated
by academic institutions, which has seen the syllabus become a contested document
in the midst of increasing casualization of teaching labor, expansion of copyright protections, and technology-driven marketization of education.
In what follows, we retrace the development of the online syllabus in both of these
contexts, to investigate the politics enmeshed in this new media object. Our argument
7
‘#StandingRockSyllabus’, NYC Stands with Standing Rock, 11 October 2016, https://
nycstandswithstandingrock.wordpress.com/standingrocksyllabus/.
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is that, on the one hand, #Syllabus names the problem of contemporary political culture as pedagogical in nature, while, on the other hand, it also exposes academicized
critical pedagogy and intellectuality as insufficiently political in their relation to lived
social reality. Situating our own stakes as both activists and academics in the present
debate, we explore some ways in which the radical politics of #Syllabus could be supported to grow and develop as an articulation of solidarity between amateur librarians
and radical educators.
#Syllabus in Historical Context: Social Movements and Self-Education
When Professor Chatelain launched her call for #FergusonSyllabus, she was mainly
addressing a community of fellow educators:
I knew Ferguson would be a challenge for teachers: When schools opened across
the country, how were they going to talk about what happened? My idea was simple, but has resonated across the country: Reach out to the educators who use
Twitter. Ask them to commit to talking about Ferguson on the first day of classes.
Suggest a book, an article, a film, a song, a piece of artwork, or an assignment that
speaks to some aspect of Ferguson. Use the hashtag: #FergusonSyllabus.8
Her call had a much greater resonance than she had originally anticipated as it reached
beyond the limits of the academic community. #FergusonSyllabus had both a significant impact in shaping the analysis and the response to the shooting of Michael
Brown, and in inspiring the many other #Syllabus calls that soon followed.
The #Syllabus phenomenon comprises different approaches and modes of operating. In some cases, the material is clearly claimed as the creation of a single individual, as in the case of #BlackLivesMatterSyllabus, which is prefaced on the project’s
landing page by a warning to readers that ‘material compiled in this syllabus should
not be duplicated without proper citation and attribution.’9 A very different position on
intellectual property has been embraced by other #Syllabus interventions that have
chosen a more commoning stance. #StandingRockSyllabus, for instance, is introduced as a crowd-sourced process and as a useful ‘tool to access research usually
kept behind paywalls.’10
The different workflows, modes of engagements, and positioning in relation to
intellectual property make #Syllabus readable as symptomatic of the multiplicity
that composes social justice movements. There is something old school—quite
literally—about the idea of calling a list of online resources a ‘syllabus’; a certain
quaintness, evoking thoughts of teachers and homework. This is worthy of investigation especially if contrasted with the attention dedicated to other online cultural
phenomena such as memes or fake news. Could it be that the online syllabus offers
8
9
10
Marcia Chatelain, ‘How to Teach Kids About What’s Happening in Ferguson’, The Atlantic, 25
August 2014, https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2014/08/how-to-teach-kids-aboutwhats-happening-in-ferguson/379049/.
Frank Leon Roberts, ‘Black Lives Matter: Race, Resistance, and Populist Protest’, 2016, http://
www.blacklivesmattersyllabus.com/fall2016/.
‘#StandingRockSyllabus’, NYC Stands with Standing Rock, 11 October 2016, https://
nycstandswithstandingrock.wordpress.com/standingrocksyllabus/.
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a useful, fresh format precisely for the characteristics that foreground its connections to older pedagogical traditions and techniques, predating digital cultures?
#Syllabus can indeed be analyzed as falling within a long lineage of pedagogical tools
created by social movements to support processes of political subjectivation and the
building of collective consciousness. Activists and militant organizers have time and
again created and used various textual media objects—such as handouts, pamphlets,
cookbooks, readers, or manifestos—to facilitate a shared political analysis and foment
mass political mobilization.
In the context of the US, anti-racist movements have historically placed great emphasis on critical pedagogy and self-education. In 1964, the Council of Federated Organizations (an alliance of civil rights initiatives) and the Student Nonviolent
Coordinating Committee (SNCC), created a network of 41 temporary alternative
schools in Mississippi. Recently, the Freedom Library Project, a campaign born out
of #FergusonSyllabus to finance under-resourced pedagogical initiatives, openly
referenced this as a source of inspiration. The Freedom Summer Project of 1964
brought hundreds of activists, students, and scholars (many of whom were white)
from the north of the country to teach topics and issues that the discriminatory
state schools would not offer to black students. In the words of an SNCC report,
Freedom Schools were established following the belief that ‘education—facts to
use and freedom to use them—is the basis of democracy’,11 a conviction echoed
by the ethos of contemporary #Syllabus initiatives.
Bob Moses, a civil rights movement leader who was the head of the literary skills initiative in Mississippi, recalls the movement’s interest, at the time, in teaching methods
that used the very production of teaching materials as a pedagogical tool:
I had gotten hold of a text and was using it with some adults […] and noticed that
they couldn’t handle it because the pictures weren’t suited to what they knew […]
That got me into thinking about developing something closer to what people were
doing. What I was interested in was the idea of training SNCC workers to develop
material with the people we were working with.12
It is significant that for him the actual use of the materials the group created was much
less important than the process of producing the teaching materials together. This focus
on what could be named as a ‘pedagogy of teaching’, or perhaps more accurately ‘the
pedagogy of preparing teaching materials’, is also a relevant mechanism at play in the
current #Syllabus initiatives, as their crowdsourcing encourages different kinds of people
to contribute what they feel might be relevant resources for the broader movement.
Alongside the crucial import of radical black organizing, another relevant genealogy in
which to place #Syllabus would be the international feminist movement and, in particular, the strategies developed in the 70s campaign Wages for Housework, spearheaded
11
12
Daniel Perlstein, ‘Teaching Freedom: SNCC and the Creation of the Mississippi Freedom Schools’,
History of Education Quarterly 30.3 (Autumn 1990): 302.
Perlstein, ‘Teaching Freedom’: 306.
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by Selma James and Silvia Federici. The Wages for Housework campaign drove home
the point that unwaged reproductive labor provides a foundation for capitalist exploitation. They wanted to encourage women to denaturalize and question the accepted
division of labor into remunerated work outside the house and labor of love within
the confines of domesticity, discussing taboo topics such as ‘prostitution as socialized housework’ and ‘forced sterilization’ as issues impacting poor, often racialized,
women. The organizing efforts of Wages for Housework held political pedagogy at their
core. They understood that that pedagogy required:
having literature and other materials available to explain our goals, all written in a
language that women can understand. We also need different types of documents,
some more theoretical, others circulating information about struggles. It is important
that we have documents for women who have never had any political experience.
This is why our priority is to write a popular pamphlet that we can distribute massively and for free—because women have no money.13
The obstacles faced by the Wages for Housework campaign were many, beginning
with the issue of how to reach a dispersed constituency of isolated housewives
and how to keep the revolutionary message at the core of their claims accessible
to different groups. In order to tackle these challenges, the organizers developed
a number of innovative communication tactics and pedagogical tools, including
strategies to gain mainstream media coverage, pamphlets and leaflets translated
into different languages,14 a storefront shop in Brooklyn, and promotional tables at
local events.
Freedom Schools and the Wages for Housework campaign are only two amongst
the many examples of the critical pedagogies developed within social movements.
The #Syllabus phenomenon clearly stands in the lineage of this history, yet we should
also highlight its specificity in relation to the contemporary political context in which it
emerged. The #Syllabus acknowledges that since the 70s—and also due to students’
participation in protests and their display of solidarity with other political movements—
subjects such as Marxist critical theory, women studies, gender studies, and African
American studies, together with some of the principles first developed in critical pedagogy, have become integrated into the educational system. The fact that many initiators of #Syllabus initiatives are women and Black academics speaks to this historical
shift as an achievement of that period of struggles. However, the very necessity felt by
these educators to kick-start their #Syllabus campaigns outside the confines of academia simultaneously reveals the difficulties they encounter within the current privatized and exclusionary educational complex.
13
14
Silvia Federici and Arlen Austin (eds) The New York Wages for Housework Committee 1972-1977:
History, Theory and Documents. New York: Autonomedia, 2017: 37.
Some of the flyers and pamphlets were digitized by MayDay Rooms, ‘a safe haven for historical
material linked to social movements, experimental culture and the radical expression of
marginalised figures and groups’ in London, and can be found in their online archive: ‘Wages
for Housework: Pamphlets – Flyers – Photographs’, MayDay Rooms, http://maydayrooms.org/
archives/wages-for-housework/wfhw-pamphlets-flyers-photographs/.
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#Syllabus as a Media Object
Besides its contextualization within the historical legacy of previous grassroots mobilizations, it is also necessary to discuss #Syllabus as a new media object in its own
right, in order to fully grasp its relevance for the future politics of knowledge production and transmission.
If we were to describe this object, a #Syllabus would be an ordered list of links to
scholarly texts, news reports, and audiovisual media, mostly aggregated through a
participatory and iterative process, and created in response to political events indicative of larger conditions of structural oppression. Still, as we have seen, #Syllabus
as a media object doesn’t follow a strict format. It varies based on the initial vision
of their initiators, political causes, and social composition of the relevant struggle.
Nor does it follow the format of traditional academic syllabi. While a list of learning
resources is at the heart of any syllabus, a boilerplate university syllabus typically
also includes objectives, a timetable, attendance, coursework, examination, and an
outline of the grading system used for the given course. Relieved of these institutional
requirements, the #Syllabus typically includes only a reading list and a hashtag. The
reading list provides resources for understanding what is relevant to the here and
now, while the hashtag provides a way to disseminate across social networks the call
to both collectively edit and teach what is relevant to the here and now. Both the list
and the hashtag are specificities and formal features of the contemporary (internet)
culture and therefore merit further exploration in relation to the social dynamics at
play in #Syllabus initiatives.
The different phases of the internet’s development approached the problem of the
discoverability of relevant information in different ways. In the early days, the Gopher
protocol organized information into a hierarchical file tree. With the rise of World Wide
Web (WWW), Yahoo tried to employ experts to classify and catalog the internet into
a directory of links. That seemed to be a successful approach for a while, but then
Google (founded in 1998) came along and started to use a webgraph of links to rank
the importance of web pages relative to a given search query.
In 2005, Clay Shirky wrote the essay ‘Ontology is Overrated: Categories, Links and
Tags’,15 developed from his earlier talk ‘Folksonomies and Tags: The Rise of User-Developed Classification’. Shirky used Yahoo’s attempt to categorize the WWW to argue
against any attempt to classify a vast heterogenous body of information into a single
hierarchical categorical system. In his words: ‘[Yahoo] missed [...] that, if you’ve got
enough links, you don’t need the hierarchy anymore. There is no shelf. There is no file
system. The links alone are enough.’ Those words resonated with many. By following
simple formatting rules, we, the internet users, whom Time magazine named Person of
the Year in 2006, proved that it is possible to collectively write the largest encyclopedia
ever. But, even beyond that, and as per Shirky’s argument, if enough of us organized
our own snippets of the vast body of the internet, we could replace old canons, hierarchies, and ontologies with folksonomies, social bookmarks, and (hash)tags.
15
Clay Shirky, ‘Ontology Is Overrated: Categories, Links, and Tags’, 2005, http://shirky.com/writings/
herecomeseverybody/ontology_overrated.html.
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Very few who lived through those times would have thought that only a few years later
most user-driven services would be acquired by a small number of successful companies and then be shut down. Or, that Google would decide not to include the biggest
hashtag-driven platform, Twitter, into its search index and that the search results on
its first page would only come from a handful of usual suspects: media conglomerates, Wikipedia, Facebook, LinkedIn, Amazon, Reddit, Quora. Or, that Twitter would
become the main channel for the racist, misogynist, fascist escapades of the President
of United States.
This internet folk naivety—stoked by an equally enthusiastic, venture-capital-backed
startup culture—was not just naivety. This was also a period of massive experimental
use of these emerging platforms. Therefore, this history would merit to be properly
revisited and researched. In this text, however, we can only hint to this history: to contextualize how the hashtag as a formalization initially emerged, and how with time the
user-driven web lost some of its potential. Nonetheless, hashtags today still succeed in
propagating political mobilizations in the network environment. Some will say that this
propagation is nothing but a reflection of the internet as a propaganda machine, and
there’s no denying that hashtags do serve a propaganda function. However, it equally
matters that hashtags retain the capacity to shape coordination and self-organization,
and they are therefore a reflection of the internet as an organization machine.
As mentioned, #Syllabus as a media object is an ordered list of links to resources.
In the long history of knowledge retrieval systems and attempts to help users find
relevant information from big archives, the list on the internet continues in the tradition of the index card catalog in libraries, of charts in the music industry, or mixtapes
and playlists in popular culture, helping people tell their stories of what is relevant and
what isn’t through an ordered sequence of items. The list (as a format) together with
the hashtag find themselves in the list (pun intended) of the most iconic media objects
of the internet. In the network media environment, being smart in creating new lists
became the way to displace old lists of relevance, the way to dismantle canons, the
way to unlearn. The way to become relevant.
The Academic Syllabus Migrates Online
#Syllabus interventions are a challenge issued by political struggles to educators as
they expose a fundamental contradiction in the operations of academia. While critical pedagogies of yesteryear’s social movements have become integrated into the
education system, the radical lessons that these pedagogies teach students don’t
easily reconcile with their experience: professional practice courses, the rethoric of
employability and compulsory internships, where what they learn is merely instrumental, leaves them wondering how on earth they are to apply their Marxism or feminism
to their everyday lives?
Cognitive dissonance is at the basis of degrees in the liberal arts. And to make things
worse, the marketization of higher education, the growing fees and the privatization
of research has placed universities in a position where they increasingly struggle to
provide institutional space for critical interventions in social reality. As universities become more dependent on the ‘customer satisfaction’ of their students for survival, they
steer away from heated political topics or from supporting faculty members who might
decide to engage with them. Borrowing the words of Stefano Harney and Fred Moten,
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‘policy posits curriculum against study’,16 creating the paradoxical situation wherein
today’s universities are places in which it is possible to do almost everything except
study. What Harney and Moten propose instead is the re-appropriation of the diffuse
capacity of knowledge generation that stems from the collective processes of selforganization and commoning. As Moten puts it: ‘When I think about the way we use the
term ‘study,’ I think we are committed to the idea that study is what you do with other
people.’17 And it is this practice of sharing a common repertoire—what Moten and
Harney call ‘rehearsal’18—that is crucially constitutive of a crowdsourced #Syllabus.
This contradiction and the tensions it brings to contemporary neoliberal academia can
be symptomatically observed in the recent evolution of the traditional academic syllabus. As a double consequence of (some) critical pedagogies becoming incorporated
into the teaching process and universities striving to reduce their liability risks, academic syllabi have become increasingly complex and extensive documents. They are
now understood as both a ‘social contract’ between the teachers and their students,
and ‘terms of service’19 between the institution providing educational services and the
students increasingly framed as sovereign consumers making choices in the market of
educational services. The growing official import of the syllabus has had the effect that
educators have started to reflect on how the syllabus translates the power dynamics
into their classroom. For instance, the critical pedagogue Adam Heidebrink-Bruno has
demanded that the syllabus be re-conceived as a manifesto20—a document making
these concerns explicit. And indeed, many academics have started to experiment with
the form and purpose of the syllabus, opening it up to a process of co-conceptualization with their students, or proposing ‘the other syllabus’21 to disrupt asymmetries.
At the same time, universities are unsurprisingly moving their syllabi online. A migration
that can be read as indicative of three larger structural shifts in academia.
First, the push to make syllabi available online, initiated in the US, reinforces the differential effects of reputation economy. It is the Ivy League universities and their professorial star system that can harness the syllabus to advertise the originality of their
scholarship, while the underfunded public universities and junior academics are burdened with teaching the required essentials. This practice is tied up with the replication
in academia of the different valorization between what is considered to be the labor of
production (research) and that of social reproduction (teaching). The low esteem (and
corresponding lower rewards and remuneration) for the kinds of intellectual labors that
can be considered labors of care—editing journals, reviewing papers or marking, for
instance—fits perfectly well with the gendered legacies of the academic institution.
Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study, New York:
Autonomedia, 2013, p. 81.
17 Harney and Moten, The Undercommons, p. 110.
18 Harney and Moten, The Undercommons, p. 110.
19 Angela Jenks, ‘It’s In The Syllabus’, Teaching Tools, Cultural Anthropology website, 30 June 2016,
https://culanth.org/fieldsights/910-it-s-in-the-syllabu/.
20 Adam Heidebrink-Bruno, ‘Syllabus as Manifesto: A Critical Approach to Classroom Culture’,
Hybrid Pedagogy, 28 August 2014, http://hybridpedagogy.org/syllabus-manifesto-criticalapproach-classroom-culture/.
21 Lucy E. Bailey, ‘The “Other” Syllabus: Rendering Teaching Politics Visible in the Graduate
Pedagogy Seminar’, Feminist Teacher 20.2 (2010): 139–56.
16
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Second, with the withdrawal of resources to pay precarious and casualized academics during their ‘prep’ time (that is, the time in which they can develop new
course material, including assembling new lists of references, updating their courses as well as the methodologies through which they might deliver these), syllabi
now assume an ambivalent role between the tendencies for collectivization and
individualization of insecurity. The reading lists contained in syllabi are not covered
by copyrights; they are like playlists or recipes, which historically had the effect of
encouraging educators to exchange lesson plans and make their course outlines
freely available as a valuable knowledge common. Yet, in the current climate where
universities compete against each other, the authorial function is being extended
to these materials too. Recently, US universities have been leading a trend towards
the interpretation of the syllabus as copyrightable material, an interpretation that
opened up, as would be expected, a number of debates over who is a syllabus’
rightful owner, whether the academics themselves or their employers. If the latter interpretation were to prevail, this would enable universities to easily replace
academics while retaining their contributions to the pedagogical offer. The fruits of
a teacher’s labor could thus be turned into instruments of their own deskilling and
casualization: why would universities pay someone to write a course when they can
recycle someone else’s syllabus and get a PhD student or a precarious post doc to
teach the same class at a fraction of the price?
This tendency to introduce a logic of property therefore spurs competitive individualism and erasure of contributions from others. Thus, crowdsourcing the syllabus
in the context of growing precarization of labor risks remaining a partial process,
as it might heighten the anxieties of those educators who do not enjoy the security
of a stable job and who are therefore the most susceptible to the false promises of
copyright enforcement and authorship understood as a competitive, small entrepreneurial activity. However, when inserted in the context of live, broader political
struggles, the opening up of the syllabus could and should be an encouragement
to go in the opposite direction, providing a ground to legitimize the collective nature
of the educational process and to make all academic resources available without
copyright restrictions, while devising ways to secure the proper attribution and the
just remuneration of everyone’s labor.
The introduction of the logic of property is hard to challenge as it is furthered by commercial academic publishers. Oligopolists, such as Elsevier, are not only notorious for
using copyright protections to extract usurious profits from the mostly free labor of
those who write, peer review, and edit academic journals,22 but they are now developing all sorts of metadata, metrics, and workflow systems that are increasingly becoming central for teaching and research. In addition to their publishing business, Elsevier
has expanded its ‘research intelligence’ offering, which now encompasses a whole
range of digital services, including the Scopus citation database; Mendeley reference
manager; the research performance analytics tools SciVal and Research Metrics; the
centralized research management system Pure; the institutional repository and pub-
22 Vincent Larivière, Stefanie Haustein, and Philippe Mongeon, ‘The Oligopoly of Academic
Publishers in the Digital Era’, PLoS ONE 10.6 (10 June 2015),https://journals.plos.org/plosone/
article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0127502/.
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lishing platform Bepress; and, last but not least, grant discovery and funding flow tools
Funding Institutional and Elsevier Funding Solutions. Given how central digital services
are becoming in today’s universities, whoever owns these platforms is the university.
Third, the migration online of the academic syllabus falls into larger efforts by universities to ‘disrupt’ the educational system through digital technologies. The introduction
of virtual learning environments has led to lesson plans, slides, notes, and syllabi becoming items to be deposited with the institution. The doors of public higher education are being opened to commercial qualification providers by means of the rise in
metrics-based management, digital platforming of university services, and transformation of students into consumers empowered to make ‘real-time’ decisions on how to
spend their student debt.23 Such neoliberalization masquerading behind digitization
is nowhere more evident than in the hype that was generated around Massive Open
Online Courses (MOOCs), exactly at the height of the last economic crisis.
MOOCs developed gradually from the Massachusetts Institute of Techology’s (MIT) initial experiments with opening up its teaching materials to the public through the OpenCourseWare project in 2001. By 2011, MOOCs were saluted as a full-on democratization of access to ‘Ivy-League-caliber education [for] the world’s poor.’24 And yet, their
promise quickly deflated following extremely low completion rates (as low as 5%).25
Believing that in fifty years there will be no more than 10 institutions globally delivering
higher education,26 by the end of 2013 Sebastian Thrun (Google’s celebrated roboticist
who in 2012 founded the for-profit MOOC platform Udacity), had to admit that Udacity
offered a ‘lousy product’ that proved to be a total failure with ‘students from difficult
neighborhoods, without good access to computers, and with all kinds of challenges in
their lives.’27 Critic Aaron Bady has thus rightfully argued that:
[MOOCs] demonstrate what the technology is not good at: accreditation and mass
education. The MOOC rewards self-directed learners who have the resources and
privilege that allow them to pursue learning for its own sake [...] MOOCs are also a
really poor way to make educational resources available to underserved and underprivileged communities, which has been the historical mission of public education.28
Indeed, the ‘historical mission of public education’ was always and remains to this
day highly contested terrain—the very idea of a public good being under attack by
dominant managerial techniques that try to redefine it, driving what Randy Martin
23 Ben Williamson, ‘Number Crunching: Transforming Higher Education into “Performance Data”’,
Medium, 16 August 2018, https://medium.com/ussbriefs/number-crunching-transforming-highereducation-into-performance-data-9c23debc4cf7.
24 Max Chafkin, ‘Udacity’s Sebastian Thrun, Godfather Of Free Online Education, Changes Course’,
FastCompany, 14 November 2013, https://www.fastcompany.com/3021473/udacity-sebastianthrun-uphill-climb/.
25 ‘The Rise (and Fall?) Of the MOOC’, Oxbridge Essays, 14 November 2017, https://www.
oxbridgeessays.com/blog/rise-fall-mooc/.
26 Steven Leckart, ‘The Stanford Education Experiment Could Change Higher Learning Forever’,
Wired, 20 March 2012, https://www.wired.com/2012/03/ff_aiclass/.
27 Chafkin, ‘Udacity’s Sebastian Thrun’.
28 Aaron Bady, ‘The MOOC Moment and the End of Reform’, Liberal Education 99.4 (Fall 2013),
https://www.aacu.org/publications-research/periodicals/mooc-moment-and-end-reform.
126
STATE MACHINES
aptly called the ‘financialization of daily life.’29 The failure of MOOCs finally points to a
broader question, also impacting the vicissitudes of #Syllabus: Where will actual study
practices find refuge in the social, once the social is made directly productive for capital at all times? Where will study actually ‘take place’, in the literal sense of the phrase,
claiming the resources that it needs for co-creation in terms of time, labor, and love?
Learning from #Syllabus
What have we learned from the #Syllabus phenomenon?
The syllabus is the manifesto of 21st century.
Political struggles against structural discrimination, oppression, and violence in the
present are continuing the legacy of critical pedagogies of earlier social movements
that coupled the process of political subjectivation with that of collective education.
By creating effective pedagogical tools, movements have brought educators and students into the fold of their struggles. In the context of our new network environment,
political struggles have produced a new media object: #Syllabus, a crowdsourced list
of resources—historic and present—relevant to a cause. By doing so, these struggles
adapt, resist, and live in and against the networks dominated by techno-capital, with
all of the difficulties and contradictions that entails.
What have we learned from the academic syllabus migrating online?
In the contemporary university, critical pedagogy is clashing head-on with the digitization of higher education. Education that should empower and research that should
emancipate are increasingly left out in the cold due to the data-driven marketization
of academia, short-cutting the goals of teaching and research to satisfy the fluctuating demands of labor market and financial speculation. Resistance against the capture of data, research workflows, and scholarship by means of digitization is a key
struggle for the future of mass intellectuality beyond exclusions of class, disability,
gender, and race.
What have we learned from #Syllabus as a media object?
As old formats transform into new media objects, the digital network environment defines the conditions in which these new media objects try to adjust, resist, and live. A
right intuition can intervene and change the landscape—not necessarily for the good,
particularly if the imperatives of capital accumulation and social control prevail. We
thus need to re-appropriate the process of production and distribution of #Syllabus
as a media object in its totality. We need to build tools to collectively control the workflows that are becoming the infrastructures on top of which we collaboratively produce
knowledge that is vital for us to adjust, resist, and live. In order to successfully intervene in the world, every aspect of production and distribution of these new media objects becomes relevant. Every single aspect counts. The order of items in a list counts.
The timestamp of every version of the list counts. The name of every contributor to
29 Randy Martin, Financialization Of Daily Life, Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2002.
ACTIONS
127
every version of the list counts. Furthermore, the workflow to keep track of all of these
aspects is another complex media object—a software tool of its own—with its own order and its own versions. It is a recursive process of creating an autonomous ecology.
#Syllabus can be conceived as a recursive process of versioning lists, pointing to textual, audiovisual, or other resources. With all of the linked resources publicly accessible to all; with all versions of the lists editable by all; with all of the edits attributable to
their contributors; with all versions, all linked resources, all attributions preservable by
all, just such an autonomous ecology can be made for #Syllabus. In fact, Sean Dockray, Benjamin Forster, and Public Office have already proposed such a methodology in
their Hyperreadings, a forkable readme.md plaintext document on GitHub. They write:
A text that by its nature points to other texts, the syllabus is already a relational
document acknowledging its own position within a living field of knowledge. It is
decidedly not self-contained, however it often circulates as if it were.
If a syllabus circulated as a HyperReadings document, then it could point directly to the texts and other media that it aggregates. But just as easily as it circulates, a HyperReadings syllabus could be forked into new versions: the syllabus
is changed because there is a new essay out, or because of a political disagreement, or because following the syllabus produced new suggestions. These forks
become a family tree where one can follow branches and trace epistemological
mutations.30
It is in line with this vision, which we share with the HyperReadings crew, and in line
with our analysis, that we, as amateur librarians, activists, and educators, make our
promise beyond the limits of this text.
The workflow that we are bootstrapping here will keep in mind every aspect of the media object syllabus (order, timestamp, contributor, version changes), allowing diversity
via forking and branching, and making sure that every reference listed in a syllabus
will find its reference in a catalog which will lead to the actual material, in digital form,
needed for the syllabus.
Against the enclosures of copyright, we will continue building shadow libraries and
archives of struggles, providing access to resources needed for the collective processes of education.
Against the corporate platforming of workflows and metadata, we will work with social
movements, political initiatives, educators, and researchers to aggregate, annotate,
version, and preserve lists of resources.
Against the extractivism of academia, we will take care of the material conditions that
are needed for such collective thinking to take place, both on- and offline.
30 Sean Dockray, Benjamin Forster, and Public Office, ‘README.md’, Hyperreadings, 15 February
2018, https://samiz-dat.github.io/hyperreadings/.
128
STATE MACHINES
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Chafkin, Max. ‘Udacity’s Sebastian Thrun, Godfather Of Free Online Education, Changes Course’,
FastCompany, 14 November 2013, https://www.fastcompany.com/3021473/udacity-sebastianthrun-uphill-climb/.
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blacklivesmattersyllabus.com/fall2016/.
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herecomeseverybody/ontology_overrated.html.
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tni-syllabus-gaming-and-feminism/.
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Trump-Syllabus/236824/.
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Dockray & Liang
Sharing Instinct: An Annotation of the Social Contract Through Shadow Libraries
2015
# Sean Dockray & Lawrence Liang — Sharing Instinct: An Annotation of the
Social Contract Through Shadow Libraries
![](/site/assets/files/1289/timbuktu_ng_ancient-manuscripts.jpg) Abdel Kader
Haïdara, a librarian who smuggled hundreds of thousands of manuscripts from
jihadist-occupied Timbuktu to safety in Bamako, stands with ancient volumes
from Timbuktu packed into metal trunks. Photo: Brent Stirton/Getty Images.
_Foederis aequas Dicamus leges _
(Let us make fair terms for the compact.)
—Virgil’s _Aeneid_ , XI
Man was born free, and everywhere he is in chains.1All excerpts from _The
Social Contract_ are from Jean-Jacques Rousseau, _The Social Contract: And,
The First and Second Discourses_, ed. Susan Dunn and Gita May (New Haven, CT:
Yale University Press, 2002).
> _June 30, 2015_
>
> _Dear Sean,_
>
> _I have been asked by Raqs Media Collective to contribute to a special
ongoing issue of _e-flux journal _that is part of the Venice Biennale. Raqs’s
section in the issue rethinks Rousseau’s social contract and the possibility
of its being rewritten, as a way of imagining social bonds and solidarities
that can help instigate and affirm a vision of the world as a space of
potential._
>
> _I was wondering if you would join me in a conversation on shadow libraries
and social contracts. The entire universe of the book-sharing communities
seems to offer the possibility of rethinking the terms of the social contract
and its associated terms (consent, general will, private interest, and so on).
While the rise in book sharing is at one level a technological phenomenon (a
library of 100,000 books put in PDF format can presently fit on a one-terabyte
drive that costs less than seventy-five dollars), it is also about how we
think of transformations in social relations mediated by sharing books._
>
> _If the striking image of books in preprint revolution was of being “in
chains,” as Rousseau puts it, I am prompted to wonder about the contemporary
conflict between the digital and mechanisms of control. Are books born free
but are everywhere in chains, or is it the case that they have been set free?
In which case are they writing new social contracts?_
>
> _I was curious about whether you, as the founder of _[
_Aaaaarg.org_](http://aaaaarg.org/) _, had the idea of a social contract in
mind, or even a community, when you started?_
>
> _Lawrence_
**Book I, Chapter VI : The Social Pact**
To find a form of association that may defend and protect with the whole force
of the community the person and property of every associate, and by means of
which each, joining together with all, may nevertheless obey only himself, and
remain as free as before.’’ Such is the fundamental problem to which the
social contract provides the solution.
We can reduce it to the following terms: ‘‘Each of us puts in common his
person and all his power under the supreme direction of the general will; and
in return each member becomes an indivisible part of the whole.’’
> _June 30, 2015_
>
> _Dear Lawrence,_
>
> _I am just listing a few ideas to put things out there and am happy to try
other approaches:_
>
> _—To think about the two kinds of structure that digital libraries take:
either each library is shared by many user-librarians or there is a library
for each person, shared with all the others. It’s a technological design
question, yes, but it also suggests different social contracts?_
>
> _—What is subtracted when we subtract your capacity/right to share a book
with others, when every one of us must approach the market anew to come into
contact with it? But to take a stab at misappropriating the terms you’ve
listed, consent, what libraries do I consent to? Usually the consent needs to
come from the library, in the form of a card or something, but we don’t ask
enough what we want, maybe. Also what about a social contract of books? Does a
book consent to being in a library? What rights does it have or expect?_
>
> _I really loved the math equation Rousseau used to arrive at the general
will: if you subtract the pluses and minuses of particular wills that cancel
each other out, then the general will is the sum of the differences! But why
does the general need to be the lowest common denominator—certainly there are
more appropriate mathematical concepts that have been developed in the past
few hundred years?_
>
> _Sean_
**Book I, Chapter II: Primitive Societies**
This common liberty is a consequence of man’s nature. His first law is to
attend to his own survival, his first concerns are those he owes to himself;
and as soon as he reaches the age of rationality, being sole judge of how to
survive, he becomes his own master.
It is the relation of things and not of men that constitutes war; and since
the state of war cannot arise from simple personal relations, but only from
real relations, private war—war between man and man—cannot exist either in the
state of nature, where there is no settled ownership, or in the social state,
where everything is under the authority of the laws.
> _July 1, 2015_
>
> _Dear Lawrence,_
>
> _Unlike a logic of exchange, or of offer and return with its demands for
reciprocity, the logic of sharing doesn’t ask its members for anything in
return. There are no guarantees that the one who gives a book will get back
anything, whether that is money, an equivalent book, or even a token of
gratitude. Similarly, there is nothing to prevent someone from taking without
giving. I think a logic of sharing will look positively illogical across the
course of its existence. But to me, this is part of the appeal: that it can
accommodate behaviors and relationships that might be impossible within the
market._
>
> _But if there is a lack of a contract governing specific exchanges, then
there is something at another level that defines and organizes the space of
sharing, that governs its boundaries, and that establishes inclusions and
exclusions. Is this something ethics? Identity? Already I am appealing to
something that itself would be shared, and would this sharing precede the
material sharing of, for example, a library? Or would the shared
ethics/identity/whatever be a symptom of the practice of sharing? Well, this
is perhaps the conclusion that anthropologists might come to when trying to
explain the sharing practices of hunter-gatherer societies, but a library?_
>
> _Sean_
>
>
>
> _July 1, 2015_
>
> _Hi Sean,_
>
> _I liked your question of what might account for a sharing instinct when it
comes to books, and whether we appeal to something that already exists as a
shared ethics or identity, or is sharing the basis of a shared
ethics/identity? I have to say that while I have never thought of my own book-
collecting through the analogy of hunter-gatherers, the more I think about it,
the more sense it makes to me. Linguistically we always speak of going on book
hunts and my daily trawling through the various shadow libraries online does
seem to function by way of a hunting-gathering mentality._
>
> _Often I download books I know that I will never personally read because I
know that it may either be of interest to someone else, or that the place of a
library is the cave where one gathers what one has hunted down, not just for
oneself but for others. I also like that we are using so-called primitive
metaphors to account for twenty-first-century digital practices, because it
allows us the possibility of linking these practices to a primal instinct of
sharing, which precedes our encounter with the social norms that classify and
partition that instinct (legal, illegal, authorized, and so on). _
>
> _I don’t know if you remember the meeting that we had in Mumbai a few years
ago—among the other participants, we had an academic from Delhi as an
interlocutor. He expressed an absolute terror at what he saw as the “tyranny
of availability” in online libraries. In light of the immense number of books
available in electronic copies and on our computers or hard discs, he felt
overwhelmed and compared his discomfort with that of being inside a large
library and not knowing what to do. Interestingly, he regularly writes asking
me to supply him with books that he can’t find or does not have access to._
>
> _This got me thinking about the idea of a library and what it may mean, in
its classical sense and its digital sense. An encounter with any library,
especially when it manifests itself physically, is one where you encounter
your own finitude in the face of what seems like the infinity of knowledge.
But personally this sense of awe has also been tinged with an immense
excitement and possibility. The head rush of wanting to jump from a book on
forgotten swear words to an intellectual biography of Benjamin, and the
tingling anticipation as you walk out of the library with ten books, captures
for me more than any other experience the essence of the word potential._
>
> _I have a modest personal library of around four thousand books, which I
know will be kind of difficult for me to finish in my lifetime even if I stop
adding any new books, and yet the impulse to add books to our unending list
never fades. And if you think about this in terms of the number of books that
reside on our computers, then the idea of using numbers becomes a little
pointless, and we need some other way or measure to make sense of our
experience._
>
> _Lawrence_
**Book I, Chapter VII: The Sovereign**
Every individual can, as a man, have a particular will contrary to, or
divergent from, the general will which he has as a citizen; his private
interest may appear to him quite different from the common interest; his
absolute and naturally independent existence may make him envisage what he
owes to the common cause as a gratuitous contribution, the loss of which would
be less harmful to others than the payment of it would be onerous to him.
> _July 12, 2015_
>
> _Hi Sean,_
>
> _There is no symbol that to my mind captures the regulated nature of the
library more than that of the board that hushes you with its capitalized
SILENCE. Marianne Constable says, “One can acknowledge the figure of silence
in the library and its persistence, even as one may wonder what a silent
library would be, whether libraries ever are silent, and what the various
silences—if any—in a library could be.”_
>
> _If I had to think about the nature of the social contract and the
possibilities of its rewriting from the site of the library one encounters
another set of silent rules and norms. If social contracts are narrative
compacts that establish a political community under the sign of a sovereign
collective called the people, libraries also aspire to establish an authority
in the name of the readers and to that extent they share a common constitutive
character. But just as there is a foundational scandal of absence at the heart
of the social contract that presumes our collective consent (what Derrida
describes as the absence of the people and the presence of their signature)
there seems to be a similar silence in the world of libraries where readers
rarely determine the architecture, the logic, or the rules of the library._
>
> _So libraries have often mirrored, rather than inverted, power relations
that underlie the social contracts that they almost underwrite._ _In contrast
I am wondering if the various shadow libraries that have burgeoned online, the
portable personal libraries that are shared offline: Whether all of them
reimagine the social contract of libraries, and try to create a more insurgent
imagination of the library?_
>
> _Lawrence_
>
>
>
> _July 13, 2015_
>
> _Hi Lawrence,_
>
> _As you know, I’m very interested in structures that allow the people within
ways to meaningfully reconfigure them. This is distinct from participation or
interaction, where the structures are inquisitive or responsive, but not
fundamentally changeable._
>
> _I appreciate the idea that a library might have, not just a collection of
books or a system of organizing, but its own social contract. In the case of
Aaaaarg, as you noticed, it is not explicit. Not only is there no statement as
such, there was never a process prior to the library in which something like a
social contract was designed._
>
> _I did ask users to write out a short statement of their reason for joining
Aaaaarg and have around fifty thousand of these expressions of intention. I
think it’s more interesting to think of the social contract, or at least a
"general will," in terms of those. If Rousseau distinguished between the will
of all and the general will, in a way that could be illustrated by the catalog
of reasons for joining Aaaaarg. Whereas the will of all might be a sum of all
the reasons, the general will would be the sum of what remains after you "take
away the pluses and minuses that cancel one another." I haven’t done the math,
but I don’t think the general will, the general reason, goes beyond a desire
for access._
>
> _To summarize a few significant groupings:_
>
> _—To think outside institutions; _
> _—To find things that one cannot find; _
> _—To have a place to share things;_
> _—To act out a position against intellectual property; _
> _—A love of books (in whatever form)._
>
> _What I do see as common across these groupings is that the desire for
access is, more specifically, a desire to have a relationship with texts and
others that is not mediated by market relations._
>
> _In my original conception of the site, it would be something like a
collective commonplace. Like commonplacing, the excerpts that people would
keep were those parts of texts that seemed particularly useful, that produced
a spark that one wanted to share. This is important: that it was the
experience of being electrified in some way that people were sharing and not a
book as such. Over time, things changed and the shared objects became more
complete so to say, and less “subjective,” but I hope that there is still that
spark. But, at this point, I realize that I am just another one of the many
wills, and just one designer of whatever social contract is underlying the
library._
>
> _So, again—What is the social contract? It wasn’t determined in advance and
it is not written in any about section or FAQ. I would say that it is, like
the library itself, something that is growing and evolving over time, wouldn’t
you?_
>
> _Sean_
**Book II, Chapter VIII : The People**
As an architect, before erecting a large edifice, examines and tests the soil
in order to see whether it can support the weight, so a wise lawgiver does not
begin by drawing up laws that are good in themselves, but considers first
whether the people for whom he designs them are fit to maintain them.
> _July 15, 2015_
>
> _Lawrence,_
>
> _There are many different ways of organizing a library, of structuring it,
and it’s the same for online libraries. I think the most interesting
conversation would not be to bemoan the digital for overloading our ability to
be discerning, or to criticize it for not conforming to the kind of economy
that we expected publishing to have, or become nostalgic for book smells; but
to actually really wonder what it is that could make these libraries great,
places that will be missed in the future if they go away. To me, this is the
most depressing thing about the unfortunate fact that digital shadow libraries
have to operate somewhat below the radar: it introduces a precariousness that
doesn’t allow imagination to really expand, as it becomes stuck on techniques
of evasion, distribution, and redundancy. But what does it mean when a library
functions transnationally? When its contents can be searched? When reading
interfaces aren’t bound by the book form? When its contents can be referenced
from anywhere?_
>
> _What I wanted when building Aaaaarg.org the first time was to make it
useful, in the absolute fullest sense of the word, something for people who
saw books not just as things you buy to read because they’re enjoyable, but as
things you need to have a sense of self, of orientation in the world, to learn
your language and join in the conversation you are a part of—a library for
people who related to books like that._
>
> _Sean_
>
>
>
> _July 17, 2015_
>
> _Hi Sean_,
>
> _To pick up on the reasons that people give for joining Aaaaarg.org: even
though Aaaaarg.org is not bound by a social contract, we do see the
outlines—through common interests and motivations—of a fuzzy sense of a
community. And the thing with fuzzy communities is that they don’t necessarily
need to be defined with the same clarity as enumerated communities, like
nations, do. Sudipta Kaviraj, who used the term fuzzy communities, also speaks
of a “narrative contract”—perhaps a useful way to think about how to make
sense of the bibliophilic motivations and intentions, or what you describe as
the “desire to have a relationship with texts and others that is not mediated
by market relations.”_
>
> _This seems a perfectly reasonable motivation except that it is one that
would be deemed impossible at the very least, and absurd at worst by those for
whom the world of books and ideas can only be mediated by the market. And it’s
this idea of the absurd and the illogical that I would like to think a little
bit about via the idea of the ludic, a term that I think might be useful to
deploy while thinking of ways of rewriting the social contract: a ludic
contract, if you will, entered into through routes allowed by ludic libraries.
_
>
> _If we trace the word ludic back to its French and Latin roots, we find it
going back to the idea of playing (from Latin _ludere _"to play" or _ludique
_“spontaneously playful”), but today it has mutated into most popular usage
(ludicrous) generally used in relation to an idea that is so impossible it
seems absurd. And more often than not the term conveys an absurdity associated
with a deviation from well-established norms including utility, seriousness,
purpose, and property._
>
> _But what if our participation in various forms of book sharing was less
like an invitation to enter a social contract, and more like an invitation to
play? But play what, you may ask, since the term play has childish and
sometimes frivolous connotation to it? And we are talking here about serious
business. Gadamer proposes that rather than the idea of fun and games, we can
think with the analogy of a cycle, suggesting that it was important not to
tighten the nuts on the axle too much, or else the wheel could not turn. “It
has to have some play in it … and not too much play, or the wheel will fall
off. It was all about _spielraum _, ‘play-room,’ some room for play. It needs
space.” _
>
> _The ludic, or the invitation to the ludic in this account, is first and
foremost a necessary relief—just as playing is—from constraining situations
and circumstances. They could be physical, monetary, or out of sheer
nonavailability (thus the desire for access could be thought of as a tactical
maneuver to create openings). They could be philosophical constraints
(epistemological, disciplinary), social constraints (divisions of class, work,
and leisure time). At any rate all efforts at participating in shadow
libraries seem propelled by an instinct to exceed the boundaries of the self
however defined, and to make some room for play or to create a “ludic
spaciousness,” as it were. _
>
> _The spatial metaphor is also related to the bounded/unbounded (another name
for freedom I guess) and to the extent that the unbounded allows us a way into
our impossible selves; they share a space with dreams, but rarely do we think
of the violation of the right to access as fundamentally being a violation of
our right to dream. Your compilation of the reasons that people wanted to join
Aaaaarg may well be thought of as an archive of one-sentence-long dreams of
the ludic library. _
>
> _If for Bachelard the house protects the dreamer, the library for me is a
ludic shelter, which brings me back to an interesting coincidence. I don’t
know what it is that prompted you to choose the name Aaaaarg.org; I don’t know
if you are aware it binds you irrevocably (to use the legal language of
contracts) with one of the very few theorists of the ludic, the Dutch
philosopher Johan Huizinga, who coined the word _homo ludens _(as against the
more functional, scientific homo sapiens or functional homo faber). In his
1938 text Huizinga observes that “the fun of playing, resists all analysis,
all logical interpretation,” and as a concept it cannot be reduced to any
other mental category. He feels that no language really has an exact
equivalent to the word fun but the closest he comes in his own language is the
Dutch word _aardigkeit, _so the line between aaaarg and aaard may have well
have been dreamt of before Aaaaarg.org even started._
>
> _More soon,_
>
> _Lawrence_
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