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
Bibliography
Bady, Aaron. ‘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/.
Bailey, Lucy E. ‘The “Other” Syllabus: Rendering Teaching Politics Visible in the Graduate Pedagogy
Seminar’, Feminist Teacher 20.2 (2010): 139–56.
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/.
Chatelain, Marcia. ‘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-about-whatshappening-in-ferguson/379049/.
_____. ‘Teaching the #FergusonSyllabus’, Dissent Magazine, 28 November 2014, https://www.dissentmagazine.org/blog/teaching-ferguson-syllabus/.
Ciolkowski, Laura. ‘Rape Culture Syllabus’, Public Books, 15 October 2016, https://www.publicbooks.
org/rape-culture-syllabus/.
Connolly, N.D.B. and Keisha N. Blain. ‘Trump Syllabus 2.0’, Public Books, 28 June 2016, https://www.
publicbooks.org/trump-syllabus-2-0/.
Dockray, Sean, Benjamin Forster, and Public Office. ‘README.md’, HyperReadings, 15 February 2018,
https://samiz-dat.github.io/hyperreadings/.
Federici, Silvia, and Arlen Austin (eds) The New York Wages for Housework Committee 1972-1977: History, Theory, Documents, New York: Autonomedia, 2017.
Harney, Stefano, and Fred Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study, New York:
Autonomedia, 2013.
Heidebrink-Bruno, Adam. ‘Syllabus as Manifesto: A Critical Approach to Classroom Culture’, Hybrid
Pedagogy, 28 August 2014, http://hybridpedagogy.org/syllabus-manifesto-critical-approach-classroom-culture/.
Jenks, Angela. ‘It’s In The Syllabus’, Teaching Tools, Cultural Anthropology website, 30 June 2016,
https://culanth.org/fieldsights/910-it-s-in-the-syllabus/.
Larivière, Vincent, 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/.
Leckart, Steven. ‘The Stanford Education Experiment Could Change Higher Learning Forever’, Wired,
20 March 2012, https://www.wired.com/2012/03/ff_aiclass/.
Martin, Randy. Financialization Of Daily Life, Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2002.
Perlstein, Daniel. ‘Teaching Freedom: SNCC and the Creation of the Mississippi Freedom Schools’,
History of Education Quarterly 30.3 (Autumn 1990).
Roberts, Frank Leon. ‘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/.
Shirky, Clay. ‘Ontology Is Overrated: Categories, Links, and Tags’, 2005, http://shirky.com/writings/
herecomeseverybody/ontology_overrated.html.
‘The Rise (and Fall?) Of the MOOC’, Oxbridge Essays, 14 November 2017, https://www.oxbridgeessays.
com/blog/rise-fall-mooc/.
‘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/.
‘Wages for Housework: Pamphlets – Flyers – Photographs,’ MayDay Rooms, http://maydayrooms.org/
archives/wages-for-housework/wfhw-pamphlets-flyers-photographs/.
Williamson, Ben. ‘Number Crunching: Transforming Higher Education into “Performance Data”’,
Medium, 16 August 2018, https://medium.com/ussbriefs/number-crunching-transforming-highereducation-into-performance-data-9c23debc4cf7/.
Mattern
Library as Infrastructure
2014
# Library as Infrastructure
Reading room, social service center, innovation lab. How far can we stretch
the public library?
Shannon Mattern
June 2014
__Add to List
#### Share
* __
* __
* __
[](https://placesjournal.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/06
/mattern-library-infrastructure-1x.jpg)Left: Rijksmuseum Library, Amsterdam.
[Photo by[Ton Nolles](https://www.flickr.com/photos/tonnolles/9428619486/)]
Right: Google data center in Council Bluffs, Iowa. [Photo by Google/Connie
Zhou]
Melvil Dewey was a one-man Silicon Valley born a century before Steve Jobs. He
was the quintessential Industrial Age entrepreneur, but unlike the Carnegies
and Rockefellers, with their industries of heavy materiality and heavy labor,
Dewey sold ideas. His ambition revealed itself early: in 1876, shortly after
graduating from Amherst College, he copyrighted his library classification
scheme. That same year, he helped found the American Library Association,
served as founding editor of _Library_ _Journal_ , and launched the American
Metric Bureau, which campaigned for adoption of the metric system. He was 24
years old. He had already established the Library Bureau, a company that sold
(and helped standardize) library supplies, furniture, media display and
storage devices, and equipment for managing the circulation of collection
materials. Its catalog (which would later include another Dewey invention,
[the hanging vertical
file](http://books.google.com/books?id=_YuWb0uptwAC&pg=PA112&dq=vertical+file+%22library+bureau%22+date:1900-1900&lr=&as_brr=0#v=onepage&q=vertical%20file%20%22library%20bureau%22%20date%3A1900-1900&f=false))
represented the library as a “machine” of uplift and enlightenment that
enabled proto-Taylorist approaches to public education and the provision of
social services. As chief librarian at Columbia College, Dewey established the
first library school — called, notably, the School of Library _Economy_ —
whose first class was 85% female; then he brought the school to Albany, where
he directed the New York State Library. In his spare time, he founded the Lake
Placid Club and helped win the bid for the 1932 Winter Olympics.
Dewey was thus simultaneously in the furniture business, the office-supply
business, the consulting business, the publishing business, the education
business, the human resources business, and what we might today call the
“knowledge solutions” business. Not only did he recognize the potential for
monetizing and cross-promoting his work across these fields; he also saw that
each field would be the better for it. His career (which was not without its
[significant
controversies](http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=9A06E0D7163DE733A25755C1A9649C946497D6CF))
embodied a belief that classification systems and labeling standards and
furniture designs and people work best when they work towards the same end —
in other words, that intellectual and material systems and labor practices are
mutually constructed and mutually reinforcing.
Today’s libraries, Apple-era versions of the Dewey/Carnegie institution,
continue to materialize, at multiple scales, their underlying bureaucratic and
epistemic structures — from the design of their web interfaces to the
architecture of their buildings to the networking of their technical
infrastructures. This has been true of knowledge institutions throughout
history, and it will be true of our future institutions, too. I propose that
thinking about the library as a network of integrated, mutually reinforcing,
evolving _infrastructures_ — in particular, architectural, technological,
social, epistemological and ethical infrastructures — can help us better
identify what roles we want our libraries to serve, and what we can reasonably
expect of them. What ideas, values and social responsibilities can we scaffold
within the library’s material systems — its walls and wires, shelves and
servers?
[](https://placesjournal.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/mattern-library-
infrastructure-2x.jpg) Dictionary stands from the [Library Bureau’s 1890
catalog](http://books.google.com/books?id=rwdwAAAAIAAJ&dq=library+bureau+catalog+1890&source=gbs_navlinks_s).
## Library as Platform
For millennia libraries have acquired resources, organized them, preserved
them and made them accessible (or not) to patrons. But the [forms of those
resources](http://www.spl.org/prebuilt/cen_conceptbook/page16.htm) have
changed — from scrolls and codices; to LPs and LaserDiscs; to e-books,
electronic databases and open data sets. Libraries have had at least to
comprehend, if not become a key node within, evolving systems of media
production and distribution. Consider the medieval scriptoria where
manuscripts were produced; the evolution of the publishing industry and book
trade after Gutenberg; the rise of information technology and its webs of
wires, protocols and regulations. 1 At every stage, the contexts — spatial,
political, economic, cultural — in which libraries function have shifted; so
they are continuously [reinventing
themselves](http://www.spl.org/prebuilt/cen_conceptbook/page18.htm) and the
means by which they provide those vital information services.
Libraries have also assumed a host of ever-changing social and symbolic
functions. They have been expected to symbolize the eminence of a ruler or
state, to integrally link “knowledge” and “power” — and, more recently, to
serve as “community centers,” “public squares” or “think tanks.” Even those
seemingly modern metaphors have deep histories. The ancient Library of
Alexandria was a prototypical think tank, 2 and the early Carnegie buildings
of the 1880s were community centers with swimming pools and public baths,
bowling alleys, billiard rooms, even rifle ranges, as well as book stacks. 3
As the Carnegie funding program expanded internationally — to more than 2,500
libraries worldwide — secretary James Bertram standardized the design in his
1911 pamphlet “Notes on the Erection of Library Buildings,” which offered
grantees a choice of six models, believed to be the work of architect Edward
Tilton. Notably, they all included a lecture room.
In short, the library has always been a place where informational and social
infrastructures intersect within a physical infrastructure that (ideally)
supports that program.
Now we are seeing the rise of a new metaphor: the library as “platform” — a
buzzy word that refers to a base upon which developers create new
applications, technologies and processes. In an [influential 2012 article in
_Library Journal_](http://lj.libraryjournal.com/2012/09/future-of-libraries
/by-david-weinberger/), David Weinberger proposed that we think of libraries
as “open platforms” — not only for the creation of software, but also for the
development of knowledge and community. 4 Weinberger argued that libraries
should open up their entire collections, all their metadata, and any
technologies they’ve created, and allow anyone to build new products and
services on top of that foundation. The platform model, he wrote, “focuses our
attention away from the provisioning of resources to the foment” — the “messy,
rich networks of people and ideas” — that “those resources engender.” Thus the
ancient Library of Alexandria, part of a larger museum with botanical gardens,
laboratories, living quarters and dining halls, was a _platform_ not only for
the translation and copying of myriad texts and the compilation of a
magnificent collection, but also for the launch of works by Euclid,
Archimedes, Eratosthenes and their peers.
[![Domnique Perrault, La bibliothèque nationale de France, literally elevated
on a platform. \[Photo by Jean-Pierre
Dalbera\]](data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAAAAAP///yH5BAEAAAAALAAAAAABAAEAAAIBRAA7)![Domnique
Perrault, La bibliothèque nationale de France, literally elevated on a
platform. \[Photo by Jean-Pierre Dalbera\]](https://placesjournal.org/wp-
content/uploads/2014/06/mattern-library-infrastructure-3x-
1020x679.jpg)](https://placesjournal.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/mattern-
library-infrastructure-3x.jpg) Domnique Perrault, La bibliothèque nationale de
France, literally elevated on a platform. [Photo by [Jean-Pierre
Dalbera](https://www.flickr.com/photos/dalbera/4944528385/)]
Yet the platform metaphor has limitations. For one thing, it smacks of Silicon
Valley entrepreneurial epistemology, which prioritizes “monetizable”
“knowledge solutions.” Further, its association with new media tends to
bracket out the similarly generative capacities of low-tech, and even _non_
-technical, library resources. One key misperception of those who proclaim the
library’s obsolescence is that its function as a knowledge institution can be
reduced to its technical services and information offerings. Knowledge is
never solely a product of technology and the information it delivers.
Another problem with the platform model is the image it evokes: a flat, two-
dimensional stage on which resources are laid out for users to _do stuff
with_. The platform doesn’t have any implied depth, so we’re not inclined to
look underneath or behind it, or to question its structure. Weinberger
encourages us to “think of the library not as a portal we go through on
occasion but as infrastructure that is as ubiquitous and persistent as the
streets and sidewalks of a town.” It’s like a “canopy,” he says — or like a
“cloud.” But these metaphors are more poetic than critical; they obfuscate all
the wires, pulleys, lights and scaffolding that you inevitably find underneath
and above that stage — and the casting, staging and direction that determine
what happens _on_ the stage, and that allow it to function _as_ a stage.
Libraries are infrastructures not only because they are ubiquitous and
persistent, but also, and primarily, because they are made of interconnected
networks that undergird all that foment, that create what Pierre Bourdieu
would call “[structuring
structures](http://books.google.com/books?id=WvhSEMrNWHAC&lpg=PA72&ots=puRmifuGmb&dq=bourdieu%20%22structuring%20structures%22&pg=PA72#v=onepage)”
that support Weinberger’s “messy, rich networks of people and ideas.”
It can be instructive for our libraries’ publics — and critical for our
libraries’ leaders — to assess those structuring structures. In this age of
e-books, smartphones, firewalls, proprietary media platforms and digital
rights management; of atrophying mega-bookstores and resurgent independent
bookshops and a metastasizing Amazon; of Google Books and Google Search and
Google Glass; of economic disparity and the continuing privatization of public
space and services — which is simultaneously an age of democratized media
production and vibrant DIY and activist cultures — libraries play a critical
role as mediators, at the hub of all the hubbub. Thus we need to understand
how our libraries function _as_ , and as _part of_ , infrastructural ecologies
— as sites where spatial, technological, intellectual and social
infrastructures shape and inform one another. And we must consider how those
infrastructures can embody the epistemological, political, economic and
cultural values that we _want_ to define our communities. 5
[![Hammond, Beeby and Babka, Harold Washington Library Center, Chicago Public
Library. \[Photo by Robert Dawson, from Public Library: An American
Commons\]](data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAAAAAP///yH5BAEAAAAALAAAAAABAAEAAAIBRAA7)![Hammond,
Beeby and Babka, Harold Washington Library Center, Chicago Public Library.
\[Photo by Robert Dawson, from Public Library: An American
Commons\]](https://placesjournal.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/mattern-
library-infrastructure-4x.jpg)](https://placesjournal.org/wp-
content/uploads/2014/06/mattern-library-infrastructure-4x.jpg) Hammond, Beeby
and Babka, Harold Washington Library Center, Chicago Public Library. [Photo by
Robert Dawson, from _[Public Library: An American
Commons](https://placesjournal.org/article/public-library-an-american-
commons/)_ ]
## Library as Social Infrastructure
Public libraries are often seen as “opportunity institutions,” opening doors
to, and for, the disenfranchised. 6 People turn to libraries to access the
internet, take a GED class, get help with a resumé or job search, and seek
referrals to other community resources. A [recent
report](http://nycfuture.org/research/publications/branches-of-opportunity) by
the Center for an Urban Future highlighted the benefits to immigrants,
seniors, individuals searching for work, public school students and aspiring
entrepreneurs: “No other institution, public or private, does a better job of
reaching people who have been left behind in today’s economy, have failed to
reach their potential in the city’s public school system or who simply need
help navigating an increasingly complex world.” 7
The new Department of Outreach Services at the Brooklyn Public Library, for
instance, partners with other organizations to bring library resources to
seniors, school children and prison populations. The Queens Public Library
employs case managers who help patrons identify public benefits for which
they’re eligible. “These are all things that someone could dub as social
services,” said Queens Library president Thomas Galante, “but they’re not. … A
public library today has information to improve people’s lives. We are an
enabler; we are a connector.” 8
Partly because of their skill in reaching populations that others miss,
libraries have recently reported record circulation and visitation, despite
severe budget cuts, decreased hours and the [threatened closure or
sale](http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/civic-group-city-bail-cash-strapped-
brooklyn-public-library-system-mired-300-million-repair-article-1.1748855) of
“underperforming” branches. 9 Meanwhile the Pew Research Center has released a
[series of studies](http://libraries.pewinternet.org/) about the materials and
services Americans want their libraries to provide. [Among the
findings](http://libraries.pewinternet.org/2013/12/11/libraries-in-
communities/): 90 percent of respondents say the closure of their local public
library would have an impact on their community, and 63 percent describe that
impact as “major.”
[![Toyo Ito, Sendai Mediatheque. \[Photo by Forgemind
Archimedia\]](data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAAAAAP///yH5BAEAAAAALAAAAAABAAEAAAIBRAA7)![Toyo
Ito, Sendai Mediatheque. \[Photo by Forgemind
Archimedia\]](https://placesjournal.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/mattern-
library-infrastructure-5x-1020x757.jpg)](https://placesjournal.org/wp-
content/uploads/2014/06/mattern-library-infrastructure-5x.jpg)Toyo Ito, Sendai
Mediatheque. [Photo by [Forgemind
Archimedia](https://www.flickr.com/photos/eager/11996856324/)]
Libraries also bring communities together in times of calamity or disaster.
Toyo Ito, architect of the acclaimed [Sendai
Mediatheque](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sendai_Mediatheque), recalled that
after the 2011 earthquake in Japan, local officials reopened the library
quickly even though it had sustained minor damage, “because it functions as a
kind of cultural refuge in the city.” He continued, “Most people who use the
building are not going there just to read a book or watch a film; many of them
probably do not have any definite purpose at all. They go just to be part of
the community in the building.” 10
We need to attend more closely to such “social infrastructures,” the
“facilities and conditions that allow connection between people,” says
sociologist Eric Klinenberg. In [a recent
interview](http://urbanomnibus.net/2013/10/toward-a-stronger-social-
infrastructure-a-conversation-with-eric-klinenberg/), he argued that urban
resilience can be measured not only by the condition of transit systems and
basic utilities and communication networks, but also by the condition of
parks, libraries and community organizations: “open, accessible, and welcoming
public places where residents can congregate and provide social support during
times of need but also every day.” 11 In his book _Heat Wave_ , Klinenberg
noted that a vital public culture in Chicago neighborhoods drew people out of
sweltering apartments during the 1995 heat wave, and into cooler public
spaces, thus saving lives.
The need for physical spaces that promote a vibrant social infrastructure
presents many design opportunities, and some libraries are devising innovative
solutions. Brooklyn and other cultural institutions have
[partnered](http://www.informationforfamilies.org/Theres_No_Place_Like_Home/Jobs_68.html)
with the [Uni](http://www.theuniproject.org/find-the-uni/), a modular,
portable library that [I wrote about earlier in this
journal](https://placesjournal.org/article/marginalia-little-libraries-in-the-
urban-margins/). And modular solutions — kits of parts — are under
consideration in a design study sponsored by the Center for an Urban Future
and the Architectural League of New York, which aims to [reimagine New York
City’s library branches](http://urbanomnibus.net/2014/06/request-for-
qualifications-re-envisioning-branch-libraries/) so that they can more
efficiently and effectively serve their communities. CUF also plans to
publish, at the end of June, an audit of, and a proposal for, New York’s three
library systems. 12 _New York Times_ architecture critic Michael Kimmelman,
reflecting on the roles played by New York libraries [during recent
hurricanes](http://www.npr.org/2013/08/12/210541233/for-disasters-pack-a
-first-aid-kit-bottled-water-and-a-library-card), goes so far as to
[suggest](http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/03/arts/design/next-time-libraries-
could-be-our-shelters-from-the-storm.html) that the city’s branch libraries,
which have “become our de facto community centers,” “could be designed in the
future with electrical systems out of harm’s way and set up with backup
generators and solar panels, even kitchens and wireless mesh networks.” 13
[![Bobst Library, New York University, after Hurricane Sandy. \[Photos by
bettyx1138\]](data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAAAAAP///yH5BAEAAAAALAAAAAABAAEAAAIBRAA7)![Bobst
Library, New York University, after Hurricane Sandy. \[Photos by
bettyx1138\]](https://placesjournal.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/mattern-
library-infrastructure-6x-1020x551.jpg)](https://placesjournal.org/wp-
content/uploads/2014/06/mattern-library-infrastructure-6x.jpg) Bobst Library,
New York University, after Hurricane Sandy. [Photos by
[bettyx1138](https://www.flickr.com/photos/bettyx1138/8151244029/)]
But is it too much to expect our libraries to serve as soup kitchens and
recovery centers when they have so many other responsibilities? The library’s
broad mandate means that it often picks up the slack when other institutions
fall short. “It never ceases to amaze me just what libraries are looked upon
to provide,” says Ruth Faklis, director of the Prairie Trail Public Library
District in suburban Chicago:
> This includes, but is not limited to, [serving as] keepers of the homeless …
while simultaneously offering latch-key children a safe and activity-filled
haven. We have been asked to be voter-registration sites, warming stations,
notaries, technology-terrorism watchdogs, senior social-gathering centers,
election sites, substitute sitters during teacher strikes, and the latest —
postmasters. These requests of society are ever evolving. Funding is not
generally attached to these magnanimous suggestions, and when it is, it does
not cover actual costs of the additional burden, thus stretching the library’s
budget even further. I know of no other government entity that is asked to
take on additional responsibilities not necessarily aligned with its mission.
13
In a Metafilter discussion about funding cuts in California, one librarian
offered this poignant lament:
> Every day at my job I helped people just barely survive. … Forget trying to
be the “people’s university” and create a body of well informed citizens.
Instead I helped people navigate through the degrading hoops of modern online
society, fighting for scraps from the plate, and then kicking back afterwards
by pretending to have a farm on Facebook.
[ Read the whole story](http://www.metafilter.com/112698/California-
Dreamin#4183210). It’s quite a punch to the stomach. Given the effort
librarians expend in promoting basic literacies, how much more can this social
infrastructure support? Should we welcome the “design challenge” to engineer
technical and architectural infrastructures to accommodate an ever-
diversifying program — or should we consider that we might have stretched this
program to its limit, and that no physical infrastructure can effectively
scaffold such a motley collection of social services?
Again, we need to look to the infrastructural ecology — the larger network of
public services and knowledge institutions of which each library is a part.
How might towns, cities and regions assess what their various public (and
private) institutions are uniquely qualified and sufficiently resourced to do,
and then deploy those resources most effectively? Should we regard the library
as the territory of the civic _mind_ and ask other social services to attend
to the civic _body_? The assignment of social responsibility isn’t so black
and white — nor are the boundaries between mind and body, cognition and affect
— but libraries do need to collaborate with other institutions to determine
how they leverage the resources of the infrastructural ecology to serve their
publics, with each institution and organization contributing what it’s best
equipped to contribute — and each operating with a clear sense of its mission
and obligation.
Libraries have a natural affinity with cultural institutions. Just this
spring, New York Mayor Bill de Blasio [appointed Tom
Finkelpearl](http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/07/arts/design/mayor-de-blasio-
names-tom-finkelpearl-of-the-queens-museum.html?_r=1) as the city’s new
Commissioner of Cultural Affairs. A former president of the Queens Museum,
Finkelpearl oversaw the first phase of a renovation by Grimshaw Architects,
which, in its next phase, will incorporate a Queens Public Library branch — an
effective pairing, given the commitment of both institutions to education and
local culture. Similarly, Lincoln Center houses the New York Public Library
for the Performing Arts. As commissioner, Finkelpearl could broaden support
for mixed-use development that strengthens infrastructural ecologies. The
[CUF/Architectural League project](http://urbanomnibus.net/2014/06/request-
for-qualifications-re-envisioning-branch-libraries/) is also considering how
collaborative partnerships can inform library program and design.
[![Bohlin Cywinski Jackson, Ballard Library and Neighborhood Service Center,
Seattle. \[Photo by Jules
Antonio\]](data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAAAAAP///yH5BAEAAAAALAAAAAABAAEAAAIBRAA7)![Bohlin
Cywinski Jackson, Ballard Library and Neighborhood Service Center, Seattle.
\[Photo by Jules Antonio\]](https://placesjournal.org/wp-
content/uploads/2014/06/mattern-library-infrastructure-7x-
1020x724.jpg)](https://placesjournal.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/mattern-
library-infrastructure-7x.jpg)Bohlin Cywinski Jackson, Ballard Library and
Neighborhood Service Center, Seattle. [Photo by [Jules
Antonio](https://www.flickr.com/photos/julesantonio/8152446538/)]
I’ve recently returned from Seattle, where I revisited [OMA’s Central
Library](https://placesjournal.org/article/seattle-central-library-civic-
architecture-in-the-age-of-media/) on its 10th anniversary and toured several
new branch libraries. 15 Under the 1998 bond measure “Libraries for All,”
citizens voted to tax themselves to support construction of the Central
Library and four new branches, and to upgrade _every_ branch in the system.
The [vibrant, sweeping Ballard branch](http://www.archdaily.com/100821
/ballard-library-and-neighborhood-service-center-bohlin-cywinski-jackson/)
(2005), by Bohlin Cywinski Jackson, includes a separate entrance for the
Ballard Neighborhood Service Center, a “[little city
hall](http://www.seattle.gov/neighborhood-service-centers)“ where residents
can find information about public services, get pet licenses, pay utility
bills, and apply for passports and city jobs. While the librarians undoubtedly
field questions about such services, they’re also able to refer patrons next
door, where city employees are better equipped to meet their needs — thus
affording the library staff more time to answer reference questions and host
writing groups and children’s story hours.
Seattle’s City Librarian, Marcellus Turner, is big on partnerships —with
cultural institutions, like local theaters, as well as commercial
collaborators, like the Seahawks football team. 16 After taking the helm in
2011, he identified [five service priorities](http://www.spl.org/about-the-
library/mission-statement) — youth and early learning, technology and access,
community engagement, Seattle culture and history, and re-imagined spaces —
and tasked working groups with developing proposals for how the library can
better address those needs. Each group must consider marketing, funding, staff
deployment and partnership opportunities that “leverage what we have with what
[the partners] have.” For instance, “Libraries that focus on early-childhood
education might employ educators, academicians, or teachers to help us with
research into early-childhood learning and teaching.” 17
The “design challenge” is to consider what physical infrastructures would be
needed to accommodate such partnerships. 18 Many libraries have continued
along a path laid by library innovators from Ptolemy to Carnegie, renovating
their buildings to incorporate public gathering, multi-use, and even
commercial spaces. In Seattle’s Ballard branch, a large meeting room hosts
regular author readings and a vibrant writing group that typically attracts 30
or more participants. In Salt Lake City, the [library
plaza](http://www.slcpl.lib.ut.us/shops) features an artist co-op, a radio
station, a community writing center, the Library Store, and a few cafes — all
private businesses whose ethos is consistent with the library’s. The New York
Public Library has [recently announced](http://www.nypl.org/press/press-
release/april-30-2014/new-york-public-library-opens-doors-coursera-students)
that some of its branches will serve as “learning hubs” for Coursera, the
provider of “massive open online courses.” And many libraries have classrooms
and labs where they offer regular technical training courses.
[![Moshe Safdie, Salt Lake City Public Library. \[Photo by Pedro
Szekely\]](data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAAAAAP///yH5BAEAAAAALAAAAAABAAEAAAIBRAA7)![Moshe
Safdie, Salt Lake City Public Library. \[Photo by Pedro
Szekely\]](https://placesjournal.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/mattern-
library-infrastructure-8x-1020x678.jpg)](https://placesjournal.org/wp-
content/uploads/2014/06/mattern-library-infrastructure-8x.jpg)Moshe Safdie,
Salt Lake City Public Library. [Photo by [Pedro
Szekely](https://www.flickr.com/photos/pedrosz/5139398125/)]
These entrepreneurial models reflect what seems to be an increasingly
widespread sentiment: that while libraries continue to serve a vital role as
“opportunity institutions” for the disenfranchised, this cannot be their
primary self-justification. They cannot duplicate the responsibilities of our
community centers and social service agencies. “Their narrative” — or what I’d
call an “epistemic framing,” by which I mean the way the library packages its
program as a knowledge institution, and the infrastructures that support it —
“must include everyone,” says the University of Michigan’s Kristin
Fontichiaro. 19 What programs and services are consistent with an institution
dedicated to lifelong learning? Should libraries be reconceived as hubs for
civic engagement, where communities can discuss local issues, create media,
and archive community history? 20 Should they incorporate media production
studios, maker-spaces and hacker labs, repositioning themselves in an evolving
ecology of information and educational infrastructures?
These new social functions — which may require new physical infrastructures to
support them — broaden the library’s narrative to include _everyone_ , not
only the “have-nots.” This is not to say that the library should abandon the
needy and focus on an elite patron group; rather, the library should
incorporate the “enfranchised” as a key public, both so that the institution
can reinforce its mission as a social infrastructure for an inclusive public,
_and_ so that privileged, educated users can bring their knowledge and talents
_to_ the library and offer them up as social-infrastructural resources.
Many among this well-resourced population — those who have jobs and home
internet access and can navigate the government bureaucracy with relative ease
— already see themselves as part of the library’s public. They regard the
library as a space of openness, egalitarianism and freedom (in multiple senses
of the term), within a proprietary, commercial, segregated and surveilled
landscape. They understand that no matter how well-connected they are, [they
actually _don’t_ have the world at their
fingertips](https://placesjournal.org/article/marginalia-little-libraries-in-
the-urban-margins/) — that “material protected by stringent copyright and held
in proprietary databases is often inaccessible outside libraries” and that,
“as digital rights management becomes ever more complicated, we … rely even
more on our libraries to help us navigate an increasingly fractured and
litigious digital terrain.” 21 And they recognize that they cannot depend on
Google to organize the world’s information. As the librarian noted in [that
discussion](http://www.metafilter.com/112698/California-Dreamin#4183210) on
Metafilter:
> The [American Library Association] has a proven history of commitment to
intellectual freedom. The public service that we’ve been replaced with has a
spotty history of “not being evil.” When we’re gone, you middle class, you
wealthy, you tech-savvy, who will fight for that with no profit motivation?
Even if you never step foot in our doors, and all of your media comes to a
brightly lit screen, we’re still working for you.
The library’s social infrastructure thus benefits even those who don’t have an
immediate need for its space or its services.
[![David Adjaye, Francis Gregory Neighborhood Library, Washington, D.C.
\[Photo by Edmund
Sumner\]](data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAAAAAP///yH5BAEAAAAALAAAAAABAAEAAAIBRAA7)![David
Adjaye, Francis Gregory Neighborhood Library, Washington, D.C. \[Photo by
Edmund Sumner\]](https://placesjournal.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/mattern-
library-infrastructure-9x-1020x694.jpg)](https://placesjournal.org/wp-
content/uploads/2014/06/mattern-library-infrastructure-9x.jpg)David Adjaye,
Francis Gregory Neighborhood Library, Washington, D.C. [Photo by Edmund
Sumner]
Finally, we must acknowledge the library’s role as a civic landmark — a symbol
of what a community values highly enough to place on a prominent site, to
materialize in dignified architecture that communicates its openness to
everyone, and to support with sufficient public funding despite the fact that
it’ll never make a profit. A well-designed library — a contextually-designed
library — can reflect a community’s character back to itself, clarifying who
it is, in all its multiplicity, and what it stands for. 22 David Adjaye’s
[Bellevue](http://www.archdaily.com/258098/bellevue-library-adjaye-
associates/) and [Francis Gregory](http://www.archdaily.com/258109/francis-
gregory-library-adjaye-associates/) branch libraries, in historically
underserved neighborhoods of Washington D.C., have been lauded for performing
precisely this function. [As Sarah Williams Goldhagen
writes](http://www.newrepublic.com/article/112443/revolution-your-community-
library):
> Adjaye is so attuned to the nuances of urban context that one might be hard
pressed to identify them as the work of one designer. Francis Gregory is steel
and glass, Bellevue is concrete and wood. Francis Gregory presents a single
monolithic volume, Bellevue an irregular accretion of concrete pavilions.
Context drives the aesthetic.
His designs “make of this humble municipal building an arena for social
interaction, …a distinctive civic icon that helps build a sense of common
identity.” This kind of social infrastructure serves a vital need for an
entire community.
[![Stacks at the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building, New York Public Library.
\[Published in a 1911 issue of Scientific
American\]](data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAAAAAP///yH5BAEAAAAALAAAAAABAAEAAAIBRAA7)![Stacks
at the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building, New York Public Library. \[Published in
a 1911 issue of Scientific American\]](https://placesjournal.org/wp-
content/uploads/2014/06/mattern-library-infrastructure-
10x.jpg)](https://placesjournal.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/mattern-
library-infrastructure-10x.jpg)Stacks at the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building,
New York Public Library. [Published in a 1911 issue of _Scientific American_ ]
## Library as Technological-Intellectual Infrastructure
Of course, we must not forget the library collection itself. The old-fashioned
bookstack was [at the center of the recent
debate](http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424127887323751104578151653883688578)
over the proposed renovation of the New York Public Library’s Schwartzman
Building on 42nd Street, which was
[cancelled](http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/08/arts/design/public-library-
abandons-plan-to-revamp-42nd-street-building.html) last month after more than
a year of lawsuits and protests. This storage infrastructure, and the delivery
system it accommodates, have tremendous significance even in a digital age.
For scholars, the stacks represent near-instant access to any materials within
the extensive collection. Architectural historians defended the historical
significance of the stacks, and engineers argued that they are critical to the
structural integrity of the building.
The way a library’s collection is stored and made accessible shapes the
intellectual infrastructure of the institution. The Seattle Public Library
uses [translucent acrylic
bookcases](http://blog.spacesaver.com/StoragesolvedwithSpacesaver/bid/33285
/You-re-not-going-crazy-Library-book-stacks-ARE-cool) made by Spacesaver — and
even here this seemingly mundane, utilitarian consideration cultivates a
character, an ambience, that reflects the library’s identity and its
intellectual values. It might sound corny, but the luminescent glow permeating
the stacks acts as a beacon, a welcoming gesture. There are still many
contemporary libraries that privilege — perhaps even fetishize — the book and
the bookstack: take MVRDV’s [Book
Mountain](http://www.mvrdv.nl/projects/spijkenisse/) (2012), for a town in the
Netherlands; or TAX arquitectura’s [Biblioteca Jose
Vasconcelos](http://www.designboom.com/architecture/biblioteca-vasconcelos-by-
tax-arquitectura-alberto-kalach/) (2006) in Mexico City.
Stacks occupy a different, though also fetishized, space in Helmut Jahn’s
[Mansueto Library](http://www.archdaily.com/143532/joe-and-rika-mansueto-
library-murphy-jahn/) (2011) at the University of Chicago, which mixes diverse
infrastructures to accommodate media of varying materialities: a grand reading
room, a conservation department, a digitization department, and [a
subterranean warehouse of books retrieved by
robot](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ESCxYchCaWI&feature=youtu.be). (It’s
worth noting that Boston and other libraries contained [book
railways](http://libraryhistorybuff.blogspot.com/2010/12/book-retrieval-
systems.html) and conveyer belt retrieval systems — proto-robots — a century
ago.) Snøhetta’s [James B. Hunt Jr.
Library](http://www.ncsu.edu/huntlibrary/watch/) (2013) at North Carolina
State University also incorporates a robotic storage and retrieval system, so
that the library can store more books on site, as well as meet its goal of
providing seating for 20 percent of the student population. 23 Here the
patrons come before the collection.
[![Rem Koolhaas/OMA, Seattle Central Library, Spacesaver bookshelves. \[Photo
by
brewbooks\]](data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAAAAAP///yH5BAEAAAAALAAAAAABAAEAAAIBRAA7)![Rem
Koolhaas/OMA, Seattle Central Library, Spacesaver bookshelves. \[Photo by
brewbooks\]](https://placesjournal.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/mattern-
library-infrastructure-11x.jpg)](https://placesjournal.org/wp-
content/uploads/2014/06/mattern-library-infrastructure-11x.jpg)Rem
Koolhaas/OMA, Seattle Central Library, Spacesaver bookshelves. [Photo by
[brewbooks](https://www.flickr.com/photos/brewbooks/4472712525/)]
[![MVRDV, Book Mountain, Spijkenisse, The Netherlands. \[Photo via
MVRDV\]](data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAAAAAP///yH5BAEAAAAALAAAAAABAAEAAAIBRAA7)![MVRDV,
Book Mountain, Spijkenisse, The Netherlands. \[Photo via
MVRDV\]](https://placesjournal.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/mattern-library-
infrastructure-12x.jpg)](https://placesjournal.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/06
/mattern-library-infrastructure-12x.jpg)MVRDV, Book Mountain, Spijkenisse, The
Netherlands. [Photo via MVRDV]
[![TAX, Biblioteca Vasconcelos, Mexico City. \[Photo by
Clinker\]](data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAAAAAP///yH5BAEAAAAALAAAAAABAAEAAAIBRAA7)![TAX,
Biblioteca Vasconcelos, Mexico City. \[Photo by
Clinker\]](https://placesjournal.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/mattern-
library-infrastructure-13x.jpg)](https://placesjournal.org/wp-
content/uploads/2014/06/mattern-library-infrastructure-13x.jpg)TAX, Biblioteca
Vasconcelos, Mexico City. [Photo by
[Clinker](https://www.flickr.com/photos/photos_clinker/295038829/)]
[![Helmut Jahn, Mansueto Library, University of Chicago, reading room above
underground stacks. \[Photo by Eric Allix
Rogers\]](data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAAAAAP///yH5BAEAAAAALAAAAAABAAEAAAIBRAA7)![Helmut
Jahn, Mansueto Library, University of Chicago, reading room above underground
stacks. \[Photo by Eric Allix Rogers\]](https://placesjournal.org/wp-
content/uploads/2014/06/mattern-library-infrastructure-
14x.jpg)](https://placesjournal.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/mattern-
library-infrastructure-14x.jpg)Helmut Jahn, Mansueto Library, University of
Chicago, reading room above underground stacks. [Photo by [Eric Allix
Rogers](https://www.flickr.com/photos/reallyboring/5766873063/)]
[![Mansueto Library stacks. \[Photo by Corey
Seeman\]](data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAAAAAP///yH5BAEAAAAALAAAAAABAAEAAAIBRAA7)![Mansueto
Library stacks. \[Photo by Corey Seeman\]](https://placesjournal.org/wp-
content/uploads/2014/06/mattern-library-infrastructure-
15x.jpg)](https://placesjournal.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/mattern-
library-infrastructure-15x.jpg)Mansueto Library stacks. [Photo by [Corey
Seeman](https://www.flickr.com/photos/cseeman/14148827344/)]
Back in the early aughts, when I spent a summer touring libraries, the
institutions on the leading edge were integrating media production facilities,
recognizing that media “consumption” and “creation” lie on a gradient of
knowledge production. Today there’s a lot of talk about — [and action
around](http://www.infodocket.com/2013/12/16/results-of-makerspaces-in-
libraries-study-released/) — integrating hacker labs and maker-spaces. 24 As
Anne Balsamo explains, these sites offer opportunities — embodied, often
inter-generational learning experiences that are integral to the development
of a “technological imagination” — that are rarely offered in formal learning
institutions. 25
The Hunt Library has a maker-space, a GameLab, various other production labs
and studios, an immersion theater, and, rather eyebrow-raisingly, an Apple
Technology Showcase (named after library donors whose surname is Apple, with
an intentional pun on the electronics company). 26 One might think major
funding is needed for those kinds of programs, but the trend actually began in
2011 in tiny Fayetteville, New York (pop. 4,373), thought to be [the first
public library](http://www.forbes.com/sites/tjmccue/2011/11/15/first-public-
library-to-create-a-maker-space/) to have incorporated a maker-space. The
following year, the Carnegie Libraries of Pittsburgh — which for years has
hosted film competitions, gaming tournaments, and media-making projects for
youth — [launched](http://www.libraryasincubatorproject.org/?p=6653), with
Google and Heinz Foundation support, [The
Labs](http://www.clpgh.org/teens/events/programs/thelabs/): weekly workshops
at three locations where teenagers can access equipment, software and mentors.
Around the same time, Chattanooga — a city blessed with a [super-high-speed
municipal fiber network](http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-
switch/wp/2013/09/17/how-chattanooga-beat-google-fiber-by-half-a-decade/) —
opened its lauded [4th Floor](http://chattlibrary.org/4th-floor), a
12,000-square foot “public laboratory and educational facility” that “supports
the production, connection, and sharing of knowledge by offering access to
tools and instruction.” Those tools include 3D printers, laser cutters and
vinyl cutters, and the instruction includes everything from tech classes, to
incubator projects for female tech entrepreneurs, to [business pitch
competitions](http://www.nooga.com/158480/hundreds-attend-will-this-float-
business-pitch-event/).
Last year, the Brooklyn Public Library, just a couple blocks from where I
live, opened its [Levy Info
Commons](http://www.bklynlibrary.org/locations/central/infocommons), which
includes space for laptop users and lots of desktop machines featuring
creative software suites; seven reserveable teleconference-ready meeting
rooms, including one that doubles as a recording studio; and a training lab,
which offers an array of digital media workshops led by a local arts and
design organization and also invites patrons to lead their own courses. A
typical month on their robust event calendar includes resume editing
workshops, a Creative Business Tech prototyping workshop, individual meetings
with business counselors, Teen Tech tutorials, computer classes for seniors,
workshops on podcasting and oral history and “adaptive gaming” for people with
disabilities, and even an audio-recording and editing workshop targeted to
poets, to help them disseminate their work in new formats. Also last year, the
Martin Luther King, Jr., Memorial Library in Washington, D.C., opened its
[Digital Commons](http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2013/08/07
/the-digital-age-is-forcing-libraries-to-change-heres-what-that-looks-like/),
where patrons can use a print-on-demand bookmaking machine, a 3D printer, and
a co-working space known as the “Dream Lab,” or try out a variety of e-book
readers. The Chicago Public Library partnered with the Museum of Science and
Industry to open [a pop-up maker lab](http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013/07
/3d-printing-for-all-inside-chicago-librarys-new-pop-up-maker-lab/) featuring
open-source design software, laser cutters, a milling machine, and (of course)
3D printers — not one, but _three_.
[![Chattanooga Public Library, 4th Floor. \[Photo by Larry
Miller\]](data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAAAAAP///yH5BAEAAAAALAAAAAABAAEAAAIBRAA7)![Chattanooga
Public Library, 4th Floor. \[Photo by Larry
Miller\]](https://placesjournal.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/mattern-
library-infrastructure-17x-1020x680.jpg)](https://placesjournal.org/wp-
content/uploads/2014/06/mattern-library-infrastructure-17x.jpg) Chattanooga
Public Library, 4th Floor. [Photo by [Larry
Miller](https://www.flickr.com/photos/drmillerlg/9228431656/sizes/l)]
[![Snøhetta, James B. Hunt, Jr. Library, North Carolina State University,
MakerBot in Apple Technology Showcase. \[Photo by Mal
Booth\]](data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAAAAAP///yH5BAEAAAAALAAAAAABAAEAAAIBRAA7)![Snøhetta,
James B. Hunt, Jr. Library, North Carolina State University, MakerBot in Apple
Technology Showcase. \[Photo by Mal Booth\]](https://placesjournal.org/wp-
content/uploads/2014/06/mattern-library-infrastructure-16x-
1020x680.jpg)](https://placesjournal.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/mattern-
library-infrastructure-16x.jpg)Snøhetta, James B. Hunt, Jr. Library, North
Carolina State University, MakerBot in Apple Technology Showcase. [Photo by
[Mal Booth](https://www.flickr.com/photos/malbooth/10401308096/sizes/l)]
[![Hunt Library, iPearl Immersion Theater. \[Photo by Payton
Chung\]](data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAAAAAP///yH5BAEAAAAALAAAAAABAAEAAAIBRAA7)![Hunt
Library, iPearl Immersion Theater. \[Photo by Payton
Chung\]](https://placesjournal.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/mattern-library-
infrastructure-18x-1020x573.jpg)](https://placesjournal.org/wp-
content/uploads/2014/06/mattern-library-infrastructure-18x.jpg)Hunt Library,
iPearl Immersion Theater. [Photo by [Payton
Chung](https://www.flickr.com/photos/paytonc/8758630775/sizes/l)]
Some have proposed that libraries — following in the tradition of Alexandria’s
“think tank,” and compelled by a desire to “democratize entrepreneurship” —
make for ideal [co-working or incubator
spaces](http://www.citylab.com/work/2013/02/why-libraries-should-be-next-
great-startup-incubators/4733/), where patrons with diverse skill sets can
organize themselves into start-ups-for-the-people. 27 Others recommend that
librarians entrepreneurialize _themselves_ , rebranding themselves as
professional consultants in a complex information economy. Librarians, in this
view, are uniquely qualified digital literacy tutors; experts in “copyright
compliance, licensing, privacy, information use, and ethics”; gurus of
“aligning … programs with collections, space, and resources”; skilled creators
of “custom ontologies, vocabularies, taxonomies” and structured data; adept
practitioners of data mining. 28 Others recommend that libraries get into the
content production business. In the face of increasing pressure to rent and
license proprietary digital content with stringent use policies, why don’t
libraries do more to promote the creation of independent media or develop
their own free, open-source technologies? Not many libraries have the time and
resources to undertake such endeavors, but [NYPL
Labs](http://www.nypl.org/collections/labs) and Harvard’s [Library Test
Kitchen](http://www.librarytestkitchen.org/), have demonstrated what’s
possible when even back-of-house library spaces become sites of technological
praxis. Unfortunately, those innovative projects are typically hidden behind
the interface (as with so much library labor). Why not bring those operations
to the front of the building, as part of the public program?
Of course, with all these new activities come new spatial requirements.
Library buildings must incorporate a wide variety of furniture arrangements,
lighting designs, acoustical conditions, etc., to accommodate multiple sensory
registers, modes of working, postures and more. Librarians and designers are
now acknowledging — and designing _for_ , rather than designing _out_ —
activities that make noise and can occasionally be a bit messy. I did a study
several years ago on the evolution of library sounds and found widespread
recognition that knowledge-making doesn’t readily happen when “shhh!” is the
prevailing rule. 29
These new physical infrastructures create space for an epistemology embracing
the integration of knowledge consumption and production, of thinking and
making. Yet sometimes I have to wonder, given all the hoopla over “making”:
_are_ tools of computational fabrication really the holy grail of the
knowledge economy? What _knowledge_ is produced when I churn out, say, a
keychain on a MakerBot? I worry that the boosterism surrounding such projects
— and the much-deserved acclaim they’ve received for “rebranding” the library
— glosses over the neoliberal values that these technologies sometimes embody.
Neoliberalism channels the pursuit of individual freedom through property
rights and free markets 30 — and what better way to express yourself than by
3D-printing a bust of your own head at the library, or using the library’s CNC
router to launch your customizable cutting board business on Etsy? While
librarians have long been advocates of free and democratic access to
information, I trust — I hope — that they’re helping their patrons to
cultivate a [critical perspective](https://placesjournal.org/article
/tedification-versus-edification/) regarding [the politics of “technological
innovation”](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Californian_Ideology) — and the
potential instrumentalism of makerhood. Sure, Dewey was part of this
instrumentalist tradition, too. But our contemporary pursuit of “innovation”
promotes the idea that “making new stuff” = “producing knowledge,” which can
be a dangerous falsehood.
Library staff might want to take up the critique of “innovation,” too. Each
new Google product release, new mobile technology development, new e-reader
launch brings new opportunities for the library to innovate in response. And
while “keeping current” is a crucial goal, it’s important to place that
pursuit in a larger cultural, political-economic and institutional context.
Striving to stay technologically relevant can backfire when it means merely
responding to the profit-driven innovations of commercial media; we see these
mistakes — innovation for innovation’s sake — in the [ed-
tech](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Educational_technology) arena quite often.
[![George Peabody Library, The John Hopkins University. \[Photo by Thomas
Guignard\]](data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAAAAAP///yH5BAEAAAAALAAAAAABAAEAAAIBRAA7)![George
Peabody Library, The John Hopkins University. \[Photo by Thomas
Guignard\]](https://placesjournal.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/mattern-
library-infrastructure-19x-1020x680.jpg)](https://placesjournal.org/wp-
content/uploads/2014/06/mattern-library-infrastructure-19x.jpg)George Peabody
Library, The John Hopkins University. [Photo by [Thomas
Guignard](https://www.flickr.com/photos/timtom/5304555668/)]
## Reading across the Infrastructural Ecology
Libraries need to stay focused on their long-term cultural goals — which
should hold true regardless of what Google decides to do tomorrow — and on
their place within the larger infrastructural ecology. They also need to
consider how their various infrastructural identities map onto each other, or
don’t. Can an institution whose technical and physical infrastructure is
governed by the pursuit of innovation also fulfill its obligations as a social
infrastructure serving the disenfranchised? What ethics are embodied in the
single-minded pursuit of “the latest” technologies, or the equation of
learning with entrepreneurialism?
As Zadie Smith [argued
beautifully](http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2012/jun/02/north-west-
london-blues/) in the _New York Review of Books_ , we risk losing the
library’s role as a “different kind of social reality (of the three
dimensional kind), which by its very existence teaches a system of values
beyond the fiscal.” 31 Barbara Fister, a librarian at Gustavus Adolphus
College, offered an [equally eloquent
plea](http://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/library-babel-fish/some-assumptions-
about-libraries#sthash.jwJlhrsD.dpbs) for the library as a space of exception:
> Libraries are not, or at least should not be, engines of productivity. If
anything, they should slow people down and seduce them with the unexpected,
the irrelevant, the odd and the unexplainable. Productivity is a destructive
way to justify the individual’s value in a system that is naturally communal,
not an individualistic or entrepreneurial zero-sum game to be won by the most
industrious. 32
Libraries, she argued, “will always be at a disadvantage” to Google and Amazon
because they value privacy; they refuse to exploit users’ private data to
improve the search experience. Yet libraries’ failure to compete in
_efficiency_ is what affords them the opportunity to offer a “different kind
of social reality.” I’d venture that there _is_ room for entrepreneurial
learning in the library, but there also has to be room for that alternate
reality where knowledge needn’t have monetary value, where learning isn’t
driven by a profit motive. We can accommodate both spaces for entrepreneurship
_and_ spaces of exception, provided the institution has a strong _epistemic
framing_ that encompasses both. This means that the library needs to know how
to read _itself_ as a social-technical-intellectual infrastructure.
It’s particularly important to cultivate these critical capacities — the
ability to “read” our libraries’ multiple infrastructures and the politics and
ethics they embody — when the concrete infrastructures look like San Antonio’s
[BiblioTech](http://bexarbibliotech.org/), a “bookless” library featuring
10,000 e-books, downloadable via the 3M Cloud App; 600 circulating “stripped
down” 3M e-readers; 200 “enhanced” tablets for kids; and, for use on-site, 48
computers, plus laptops and iPads. The library, which opened last fall, also
offers computer classes and meeting space, but it’s all locked within a
proprietary platformed world.
[![Bexar County BiblioTech, San Antonio, Texas. \[Photo by Bexar
BiblioTech\]](data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAAAAAP///yH5BAEAAAAALAAAAAABAAEAAAIBRAA7)![Bexar
County BiblioTech, San Antonio, Texas. \[Photo by Bexar
BiblioTech\]](https://placesjournal.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/mattern-
library-infrastructure-21x-1020x573.jpg)](https://placesjournal.org/wp-
content/uploads/2014/06/mattern-library-infrastructure-21x.jpg)Bexar County
BiblioTech, San Antonio, Texas. [Photo by Bexar BiblioTech]
[![Screenshot of the library’s fully digital collection. \[Photo by Bexar
BiblioTech\]](data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAAAAAP///yH5BAEAAAAALAAAAAABAAEAAAIBRAA7)![Screenshot
of the library’s fully digital collection. \[Photo by Bexar
BiblioTech\]](https://placesjournal.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/mattern-
library-infrastructure-20x.jpg)](https://placesjournal.org/wp-
content/uploads/2014/06/mattern-library-infrastructure-20x.jpg)Screenshot of
the library’s fully digital collection. [Photo by Bexar BiblioTech]
In libraries like BiblioTech — and the [Digital Public Library of
America](http://dp.la/) — the collection itself is off-site. Do _patrons_
wonder where, exactly, all those books and periodicals and cloud-based
materials _live_? What’s under, or floating above, the “platform”? Do they
think about the algorithms that lead them to particular library materials, and
the conduits and protocols through which they access them? Do they consider
what it means to supplant bookstacks with server stacks — whose metal racks we
can’t kick, lights we can’t adjust, knobs we can’t fiddle with? Do they think
about the librarians negotiating access licenses and adding metadata to
“digital assets,” or the engineers maintaining the servers? With the
increasing recession of these technical infrastructures — and the human labor
that supports them — further off-site, [behind the
interface](https://placesjournal.org/article/interfacing-urban-intelligence/),
deeper inside the black box, how can we understand the ways in which those
structures structure our intellect and sociality?
We need to develop — both among library patrons and librarians themselves —
new critical capacities to understand the _distributed_ physical, technical
and social architectures that scaffold our institutions of knowledge and
program our values. And we must consider where those infrastructures intersect
— where they should be, and perhaps aren’t, mutually reinforcing one another.
When do our social obligations compromise our intellectual aspirations, or
vice versa? And when do those social or intellectual aspirations for the
library exceed — or fail to fully exploit — the capacities of our
architectural and technological infrastructures? Ultimately, we need to ensure
that we have a strong epistemological framework — a narrative that explains
how the library promotes learning and stewards knowledge — so that everything
hangs together, so there’s some institutional coherence. We need to sync the
library’s intersecting infrastructures so that they work together to support
our shared intellectual and ethical goals.
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###### Author's Note
I’d like to thank the students in my “Archives, Libraries and Databases”
seminar and my “Digital Archives” studio at The New School, who’ve given me
much food for thought over the years. Thanks, too, to my colleagues at the
[Architectural League of New York](http://archleague.org/) and the [Center for
an Urban Future](http://nycfuture.org/). I owe a debt of gratitude also to
Gabrielle Dean, her students, and her colleagues at Johns Hopkins, who gave me
an opportunity to share a preliminary draft of this work. They, along with my
colleagues Julie Foulkes and Aleksandra Wagner, offered feedback for which I’m
very grateful.
###### Notes
1. See Matthew Battles, _Library: An Unquiet History_ (New York: W.W. Norton, 2003); Lionel Casson, _Libraries in the Ancient World_ (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001); Fred Lerner, _The Story of Libraries_ (New York: Continuum, 1999).
2. Casson explains that when Alexandria was a brand new city in the third century B.C., its founders enticed intellectuals to the city — in an attempt to establish it as a cultural center — with the famous Museum, “a figurative temple for the muses, a place for cultivating the arts they symbolized. It was an ancient version of a think-tank: the members, consisting of noted writers, poets, scientists, and scholars, were appointed by the Ptolemies for life and enjoyed a handsome salary, tax exemption … free lodging, and food. … It was for them that the Ptolemies founded the library of Alexandria” [33-34].
3. Donald Oehlerts, _Books and Blueprints: Building America’s Public Libraries_ (New York: Greenwood Press, 1991): 62.
4. David Weinberger, “[Library as Platform](http://lj.libraryjournal.com/2012/09/future-of-libraries/by-david-weinberger/),” _Library Journal_ (September 4, 2012).
5. For more on “infrastructural ecologies,” see Reyner Banham, _Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies_ (Berkeley, University of California Press, 2009 [1971]); Alan Latham, Derek McCormack, Kim McNamara and Donald McNeil, _Key Concepts in Urban Geography_ (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2009): 32; Ming Xu and Josh P. Newell, “[Infrastructure Ecology: A Conceptual Mode for Understanding Urban Sustainability](http://css.snre.umich.edu/publication/infrastructure-ecology-conceptual-model-understanding-urban-sustainability),” Sixth International Conference of the International Society for Industrial Ecology (ISIE) Proceedings, Berkeley, CA, June 7-10, 2011; Anu Ramaswami, Christopher Weible, Deborah Main, Tanya Heikkila, Saba Siddiki, Andrew Duvail, Andrew Pattison and Meghan Bernard, “A Social-Ecological-Infrastructural Systems Framework for Interdisciplinary Study of Sustainable City Systems,” _Journal of Industrial Ecology_ 16:6 (December 2012): 801-13. Most references to infrastructural ecologies — and there are few — pertain to systems at the urban scale, but I believe a library is a sufficiently complicated institution, residing at nexus of myriad networks, that it constitutes an infrastructural ecology in its own right.
6. Center for an Urban Future, [“Opportunity Institutions” Conference](http://nycfuture.org/events/event/opportunity-institutions) (March 11, 2013). See also Jesse Hicks and Julie Dressner’s video “[Libraries Now: A Day in the Life of NYC’s Branches](http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2014/05/libraries-now-new-york-video.html)” (May 16, 2014).
7. Center for an Urban Future, _[Branches of Opportunity](http://nycfuture.org/research/publications/branches-of-opportunity)_ (January 2013): 3.
8. Quoted in Katie Gilbert, “[What Is a Library?](http://narrative.ly/long-live-the-book/what-is-a-library/)” _Narratively_ (January 2, 2014).
9. Real estate sales are among the most controversial elements in the New York Public Library’s much-disputed Central Library Plan, which is premised on the sale of the library’s Mid-Manhattan branch and its Science, Industry and Business Library. See Scott Sherman, “[The Hidden History of New York City’s Central Library Plan](http://www.thenation.com/article/175966/hidden-history-new-york-citys-central-library-plan),” _The Nation_ (August 28, 2013).
10. Toyo Ito, “The Building After,” _Artforum_ (September 2013).
11. Eric Klinenberg, “[Toward a Stronger Social Infrastructure: A Conversation with Eric Klinenberg](http://urbanomnibus.net/2013/10/toward-a-stronger-social-infrastructure-a-conversation-with-eric-klinenberg/),” _Urban Omnibus_ (October 16, 2013).
12. I’m a member of the organizing team for this project, and I hope to write more about its outcomes in a future article for this journal.
13. Michael Kimmelman, “[Next Time, Libraries Could Be Our Shelters From the Storm](http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/03/arts/design/next-time-libraries-could-be-our-shelters-from-the-storm.html),” _New York Times_ (October 2, 2013).
14. Ruth Faklis, in Joseph Janes, Ed., _Library 2020: Today’s Leading Visionaries Describe Tomorrow’s Library_ (Lanham: Scarecrow Press, 2013): 96-7.
15. The Seattle Central Library was a focus of [my first book](http://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/the-new-downtown-library), on public library design. See _The New Downtown Library: Designing With Communities_ (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007).
16. Personal communication with Marcellus Turner, March 21, 2014.
17. Marcellus Turner in _Library 2020_ : 92.
18. Ken Worpole addresses library partnerships, and their implications for design in his _Contemporary Library Architecture: A Planning and Design Guide_ (New York: Routledge, 2013). The book offers a comprehensive look the public roles that libraries serve, and how they inform library planning and design.
19. Kristin Fontichiaro in _Library 2020_ : 8.
20. See Bill Ptacek in _Library 2020_ : 119.
21. The quotations are from my earlier article for Places, “[Marginalia: Little Libraries in the Urban Margins](http://places.designobserver.com/feature/little-libraries-and-tactical-urbanism/33968/).” Within mass-digitization projects like Google Books, as Elisabeth Jones explains, “works that are still in copyright but out of print and works of indeterminate copyright status and/or ownership” will fall between the cracks (in _Library 2020_ : 17).
22. I dedicate a chapter in _The New Downtown Library_ to what makes a library “contextual” — and I address just how slippery that term can be.
23. This sentence was amended after publication to note the multiple motives of implementing the bookBot storage and retrieval system; its compact storage allowed the library to reintegrate some collections that were formerly stored off-site. The library has also developed a Virtual Browse catalog system, which aims to promote virtual discovery that isn’t possible in the physical stacks.
24. According to a late 2013 web-based survey of libraries, 41 percent of respondents provide maker-spaces or maker activities in their libraries, and 36 percent plan to create such spaces in the near future. Most maker-spaces, 51 percent, are in public libraries; 36 percent are in academic libraries; and 9 percent are in school libraries. And among the most popular technologies or technological processes supported in those spaces are computer workstations (67 percent), 3D printers (46 percent), photo editing (45 percent), video editing (43 percent), computer programming/software (39 percent). 33 oercent accommodated digital music recording; 31 percent accommodated 3D modeling, and 30 percent featured work with Arduino and Raspberry Pi circuit boards (Gary Price, “[Results From ‘Makerspaces in Libraries’ Study Released](http://www.infodocket.com/2013/12/16/results-of-makerspaces-in-libraries-study-released/),” _Library Journal_ (December 16, 2013). See also James Mitchell, “[Beyond the Maker Space](http://lj.libraryjournal.com/2014/05/opinion/backtalk/beyond-the-maker-space-backtalk/),” _Library Journal_ (May 27, 2014).
25. Anne Balsamo, “[Videos and Frameworks for ‘Tinkering’ in a Digital Age](http://spotlight.macfound.org/blog/entry/anne-balsamo-tinkering-videos/),” Spotlight on Digital Media and Learning (January 30, 2009).
26. This sentence was amended after publication to note that the Apple Technology Showcase was named after former NCSU faculty member Dr. J. Lawrence Apple and his wife, Ella Apple; in an email to the author, library director Carolyn Argentati wrote that the corporate pun was intentional.
27. Emily Badger, “[Why Libraries Should Be the Next Great Start-Up Incubators](http://www.citylab.com/work/2013/02/why-libraries-should-be-next-great-startup-incubators/4733/),” _Atlantic Cities_ (February 19, 2003).
28. Stephen Abram in _Library 2020_ : 46; Courtney Greene in _Library 2020_ : 51.
29. See my “[Resonant Texts: Sounds of the Contemporary American Public Library](http://www.wordsinspace.net/publications/Mattern_Senses%20and%20Society.pdf),” _The Senses & Society_ 2:3 (Fall 2007): 277-302.
30. See David Harvey, _A Brief History of Neoliberalism_ (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005).
31. Zadie Smith, “[The North West London Blues](http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2012/jun/02/north-west-london-blues/),” _New York Review of Books_ Blog (June 2, 2012).
32. Barbara Fister, “Some Assumptions About Libraries,” Inside Higher Ed (January 2, 2014).
###### __Cite
Shannon Mattern, "Library as Infrastructure," _Places Journal_ , June 2014.
Accessed 09 Jun 2019.
Adema & Hall
The political nature of the book: on artists' books and radical open access
2013
The political nature of the book: on artists' books and radical open access
Adema, J. and Hall, G.
Author post-print (accepted) deposited in CURVE September 2013
Original citation & hyperlink:
Adema, J. and Hall, G. (2013). The political nature of the book: on artists' books and radical
open access. New Formations, volume 78 (1): 138-156
http://dx.doi.org/10.3898/NewF.78.07.2013
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons
Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/), which permits
unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original
work is properly cited.
This document is the author’s post-print version of the journal article, incorporating any
revisions agreed during the peer-review process. Some differences between the published
version and this version may remain and you are advised to consult the published version
if you wish to cite from it.
CURVE is the Institutional Repository for Coventry University
http://curve.coventry.ac.uk/open
Abstract
In this article we argue that the medium of the book can be a material and
conceptual means, both of criticising capitalism’s commodification of knowledge (for
example, in the form of the commercial incorporation of open access by feral and
predatory publishers), and of opening up a space for thinking about politics. The
book, then, is a political medium. As the history of the artist’s book shows, it can be
used to question, intervene in and disturb existing practices and institutions, and even
offer radical, counter-institutional alternatives. If the book’s potential to question and
disturb existing practices and institutions includes those associated with liberal
democracy and the neoliberal knowledge economy (as is apparent from some of the
more radical interventions occurring today under the name of open access), it also
includes politics and with it the very idea of democracy. In other words, the book is a
medium that can (and should) be ‘rethought to serve new ends’; a medium through
which politics itself can be rethought in an ongoing manner.
Janneke Adema is a PhD student at Coventry University, writing a dissertation on the
future of the scholarly monograph. She is the author of the OAPEN report Overview
of Open Access Models for eBooks in the Humanities and Social Sciences (2010) and
has published in The International Journal of Cultural Studies, New Media & Society,
New Review of Academic Librarianship; Krisis: Journal for Contemporary
Philosophy; Scholarly and Research Communication; and LOGOS; and co-edited a
living book on Symbiosis (Open Humanities Press, 2011). Her research can be
followed on www.openreflections.wordpress.com.
Gary Hall is Professor of Media and Performing Arts and Director of the Centre for
Disruptive Media at Coventry University, UK. He is author of Culture in Bits
(Continuum, 2002) and Digitize This Book! (Minnesota UP, 2008). His work has
appeared in numerous journals, including Angelaki, Cultural Studies, The Oxford
Literary Review, Parallax and Radical Philosophy. He is also founding co-editor of
the open access journal Culture Machine (http://www.culturemachine.net), and co-
1
founder of Open Humanities Press (http://www.openhumanitiespress.org). More
details are available on his website http://www.garyhall.info.
THE POLITICAL NATURE OF THE BOOK: ON ARTISTS’ BOOKS AND
RADICAL OPEN ACCESS
Janneke Adema and Gary Hall
INTRODUCTION
The medium of the book plays a double role in art and academia, functioning not only
as a material object but also as a concept-laden metaphor. Since it is a medium
through which an alternative future for art, academia and even society can be enacted
and imagined, materially and conceptually, we can even go so far as to say that, in its
ontological instability with regard to what it is and what it conveys, the book serves a
political function. In short, the book can be ‘rethought to serve new ends’. 1 At the
same time, the medium of the book remains subject to a number of constraints: in
terms of its material form, structure, characteristics and dimensions; and also in terms
of the political economies, institutions and practices in which it is historically
embedded. Consequently, if it is to continue to be able to serve ‘new ends’ as a
medium through which politics itself can be rethought – although this is still a big if –
then the material and cultural constitution of the book needs to be continually
1
Johanna Drucker, The Century of Artists’ Books, 2nd ed., Granary Books, New York, 2004,
p49.
2
reviewed, reevaluated and reconceived. In order to explore critically this ‘political
nature of the book’, as we propose to think of it, along with many of the fundamental
ideas on which the book as both a concept and a material object is based, this essay
endeavours to demonstrate how developments undergone by the artist’s book in the
1960s and 1970s can help us to understand some of the changes the scholarly
monograph is experiencing now, at a time when its mode of production, distribution,
organisation and consumption is shifting from analogue to digital and from codex to
net. In what follows we will thus argue that a reading of the history of the artist’s
book can be generative for reimagining the future of the scholarly monograph, both
with respect to the latter’s potential form and materiality in the digital age, and with
respect to its relation to the economic system in which book production, distribution,
organisation and consumption takes place. Issues of access and experimentation are
crucial to any such future, we will suggest, if the critical potentiality of the book is to
remain open to new political, economic and intellectual contingencies.
THE HISTORY OF THE ARTIST’S BOOK
With the rise to prominence of digital publishing today, the material conditions of
book production, distribution, organisation and consumption are undergoing a rapid
and potentially profound transformation. The academic world is one arena in which
digital publishing is having a particularly strong impact. Here, the transition from
print to digital, along with the rise of self-publishing (Blurb, Scribd) and the use of
social media and social networks (Facebook, Twitter, Academia.edu) to communicate
and share scholarly research, has lead to the development of a whole host of
alternative publication and circulation systems for academic thought and knowledge.
3
Nowhere have such changes to the material conditions of the academic book been
rendered more powerfully apparent than in the emergence and continuing rise to
prominence of the open access movement. With its exploration of different ways of
publishing, circulating and consuming academic work (specifically, more open,
Gratis, Libre ways of doing so), and of different systems for governing, reviewing,
accrediting and legitimising that work, open access is frequently held as offering a
radical challenge to the more established academic publishing industry. Witness the
recent positioning in the mainstream media of the boycott of those publishers of
scholarly journals – Elsevier in particular – who charge extremely high subscription
prices and who refuse to allow authors to make their work freely available online on
an open access basis, in terms of an ‘Academic Spring’. Yet more potentially radical
still is the occupation of the new material conditions of academic book production,
distribution, organization and consumption by those open access advocates who are
currently experimenting with the form and concept of the book, with a view to both
circumventing and placing in question the very print-based system of scholarly
communication – complete with its ideas of quality, stability and authority – on
which so much of the academic institution rests.
In the light of the above, our argument in this essay is that some of these more
potentially radical, experimental developments in open access book publishing can be
related on the level of political and cultural significance to transformations undergone
in a previous era by the artist’s book. As a consequence, the history of the latter can
help us to explore in more depth and detail than would otherwise be possible the
relation in open access between experimenting with the medium of the book on a
4
material and conceptual level on the one hand, and enacting political alternatives in a
broader sense on the other. Within the specific context of 1960s and 1970s
counterculture, the artist’s book was arguably able to fill a certain political void,
providing a means of democratising and subverting existing institutions by
distributing an increasingly cheap and accessible medium (the book), and in the
process using this medium in order to reimagine what art is and how it can be
accessed and viewed. While artists grasped and worked through that relation between
the political, conceptual and material aspects of the book several decades ago, thanks
to the emergence of open access online journals, archives, blogs, wikis and free textsharing networks one of the main places in which this relation is being explored today
is indeed in the realm of academic publishing. 2
In order to begin thinking through some of the developments in publishing that are
currently being delved into under the banner of open access, then, let us pause for a
moment to reflect on some of the general characteristics of those earlier experiments
with the medium of the book that were performed by artists. Listed below are six key
areas in which artists’ books can be said to offer guidance for academic publishing in
the digital age, not just on a pragmatic level but on a conceptual and political level
too.
1) The Circumvention of Established Institutions
2
The relation in academic publishing between the political, conceptual and material aspects
of the book has of course been investigated at certain points in the past, albeit to varying
degrees and extents. For one example, see the ‘Working Papers’ and other forms of stencilled
gray literature that were produced and distributed by the Birmingham Centre for
Contemporary Cultural Studies in the 1960s and 1970s, as discussed by Ted Striphas and
Mark Hayward in their contribution to this issue.
5
According to the art theorist Lucy Lippard, the main reason the book has proved to be
so attractive as an artistic medium has to do with the fact that artists’ books are
‘considered by many the easiest way out of the art world and into the hearth of a
broader audience.’ 3 Books certainly became an increasingly popular medium of
artistic expression in Europe and the United States in the 1960s and 1970s. This was
largely due to their perceived potential to subvert the (commercial, profit-driven)
gallery system and to politicise artistic practice - to briefly introduce some of the
different yet as we can see clearly related arguments that follow - with the book
becoming a ‘democratic multiple’ that breached the walls held to be separating socalled high and low culture. Many artist-led and artist-controlled initiatives, such as
US-based Franklin Furnace, Printed Matter and Something Else Press, were
established during this period to provide a forum for artists excluded from the
traditional institutions of the gallery and the museum. Artists’ books played an
extremely important part in the rise of these independent art structures and publishing
ventures. 4 Indeed, for many artists such books embodied the ideal of being able to
control all aspects of their work.
Yet this movement toward liberating themselves from the gallery system by
publishing and exhibiting in artists’ books was by no means an easy transition for
many artists to make. It required them to come to terms with the idea that publishing
their own work did not amount to mere vanity self-publishing, in particular. Moore
and Hendricks describe this state of affairs in terms of the power and potential of ‘the
3
Lucy R. Lippard, ‘The Artist’s Book Goes Public’, in Joan Lyons (ed), Artists’ Books: a
Critical Anthology and Sourcebook, Rochester, New York: Visual Studies Workshop Press,
1993, p45.
4
Joan Lyons, ‘Introduction’, in Lyons (ed), Artists’ Books, p7.
6
page as an alternative space’. 5 From this perspective, producing, publishing and
distributing one’s own artist’s book was a sign of autonomy and independence; it was
nothing less than a way of being able to affect society directly. 6 The political potential
associated with the book by artists should therefore not be underestimated..
Accordingly, many artists created their own publishing imprints or worked together
with newly founded artist’s book publishers and printers (just as some academics are
today challenging the increasingly profit-driven publishing industry by establishing
not-for-profit, scholar-led, open access journals and presses). The main goal of these
independent (and often non-commercial) publisher-printer-artist collectives was to
make experimental, innovative work (rather than generate a profit), and to promote
ephemeral art works, which were often ignored by mainstream, mostly marketorientated institutions. 7 Artists’ books thus fitted in well with the mythology Johanna
Drucker describes as surrounding ‘activist artists’, and especially with the idea of the
book as a tool of independent activist thought. 8
2) The Relationship with Conceptual and Processual Art
In the context of this history of the artist’s book, one particularly significant
conceptual challenge to the gallery system came with the use of the book as a
platform for exhibiting original work (itself an extension of André Malraux’s idea of
the museum without walls). Curator Seth Siegelaub was among the first to publish his
artists – as opposed to exhibiting them – thus becoming, according to Germano
5
Hendricks and Moore, ‘The Page as Alternative Space: 1950 to 1969’, in Lyons (ed),
Artists’ Books, p87.
6
Pavel Büchler, ‘Books as Books’, in Jane Rolo and Ian Hunt (eds), Book Works: a Partial
History and Sourcebook, London: Book Works, 1996.
7
Clive Phillpot, ‘Some Contemporary Artists and Their Books’, in Cornelia Lauf and Clive
Phillpot (eds), Artist/Author: Contemporary Artists’ Books, New York, Distributed Art
Publishers, 1998, pp128-9.
8
Drucker, The Century of Artists’ Books, pp7-8.
7
Celant, ‘the first to allow complete operative and informative liberty to artists’. 9 The
Xerox Book and March 1-31, 1969, featuring work by Sol LeWitt, Robert Barry,
Douglas Huebler, Joseph Kosuth, Lawrence Weiner and other international artists, are
both examples of artists’ books where the book (or the catalogue) itself is the
exhibition. As Moore and Hendricks point out, this offered all kinds of benefits when
compared with traditional exhibitions: ‘This book is the exhibition, easily
transportable without the need for expensive physical space, insurance, endless
technical problems or other impediments. In this form it is relatively permanent and,
fifteen years later, is still being seen by the public.’ 10 Artists’ books thus served here
as an alternative space in themselves and at the same time functioned within a
network of alternative spaces, such as the above-mentioned Franklin Furnace
and Printed Matter.. Next to publishing and supporting artists’ books, such venues
offered a space for staging often highly politicised, critical, experimental and
performance art. 11 It is important to emphasise this aspect of artist book publishing, as
it shows that the book was used as a specific medium to exhibit works that could not
otherwise readily find a place within mainstream exhibition venues (a situation which,
as we will show, has been one of the main driving forces behind open access book
publishing). This focus on the book as a place for continual experimentation – be it on
the level of content or form – can thus be seen as underpinning what we are referring
to here as the ‘political nature of the book’ (playing on the title of Adrian Johns’
classic work of book history). 12
9
Germano Celant, Book as Artwork 1960-1972, New York, 6 Decades Books, 2011, p40.
Hendricks and Moore, ‘The Page as Alternative Space. 1950 to 1969’, p94.
11
Brian Wallis, ‘The Artist’s Book and Postmodernism’, in Cornelia Lauf and Clive Phillpot,
(eds), Artist/Author, 1998.
12
Adrian Johns, The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making, Chicago,
University of Chicago Press, 1998.
10
8
3) The Use of Accessible Technologies
As is the case with the current changes to the scholarly monograph, the rise of artists’
books can be perceived to have been underpinned (though by no means determined)
by developments in technology, with the revolution in mimeograph and offset
printing helping to take artists’ books out of the realm of expensive and rare
commodities by providing direct access to quick and inexpensive printing
methods. 13 Due to its unique characteristics – low production costs, portability,
accessibility and endurance – the artist’s book was regarded as having the potential to
communicate with a wider audience beyond the traditional art world. In particular, it
was seen as having the power to break down the barriers between so-called high and
low culture, using the techniques of mass media to enable artists to argue for their
own,
alternative
goals,
something
that
presented
all
kinds
of
political
possibilities.14 The artist’s book thus conveyed a high degree of artistic autonomy,
while also offering a far greater role to the reader or viewer, who was now able to
interact with the art object directly (eluding the intermediaries of the gallery and
museum system). Indeed, Lippard even went so far as to envision a future where
artists’ books would be readily available as part of mass consumer culture, at
‘supermarkets, drugstores and airports’. 15
4) The Politics of the Democratic Multiple
13
Hendricks and Moore, ‘The Page as Alternative Space’, pp94-95.
Joan Lyons, ‘Introduction’, in Lyons (ed), Artists’ Books, p7.
15
Lippard, ‘The Artist’s Book Goes Public’, p48; Lippard, ‘Conspicuous Consumption: New
Artists’ Books’, in Lyons (ed), Artists’ Books, p100. Is there a contradiction here between a
politics of artists’ books that is directed against commercial profit-driven galleries and
institutions, but which nevertheless uses the tools of mass consumer culture to reach a wider
audience (see also the critique Lippard offers in the next section)? And can a similar point be
made with respect to the politics of some open access initiatives and their use of social media
and (commercial, profit-driven) platforms such as Google Books and Amazon?
14
9
The idea of the book as a real democratic multiple came into being only after 1945, a
state of events that has been facilitated by a number of technological innovations,
including those detailed above. Yet the concept of the democratic multiple itself
developed in what was already a climate of political activism and social
consciousness. In this respect, the democratic multiple was part of both the overall
trend toward the dematerialization of art and the newly emergent emphasis on cultural
and artistic processes rather than ready-made objects. 16
Artists’ desire for
independence from established institutions and for the wider availability of their
works thus resonated with the democratising and anti-institutional potential of the
book as a medium. What is more, the book offered artists a space in which they were
able to experiment with the materiality of the medium itself and with the practices
that comprised it, and thus ultimately with the question of what constituted art and an
art object. This reflexivity of the book with regard to its own nature is one of the key
characteristics that make a book an artist’s book, and enable it to have political
potential in that it can be ‘rethought to serve new ends’. Much the same can be said
with respect to the relation between the book and scholarly communication: witness
the way reflection on the material nature of the book in the digital age has led to
questions being raised regarding how we structure scholarly communication and
practice scholarship more generally.
5) Conceptual Experimentation: Problematising the Concept and Form of the Book
Another key to understanding artists’ books and their history lies with the way the
radical change in printing technologies after World War II led to the reassessment of
the book form itself, and in particular, of the specific nature of the book’s materiality,
16
Drucker, The Century of Artists’ Books, p72.
10
of the very idea of the book, and of the notions and practices underlying the book’s
various uses.
When it came to reevaluating the materiality of the book, many experiments with
artists’ books tried to escape the linearity brought about by the codex form’s
(sequential) constraints, something which had long conditioned both writing and
reading practices. Undoubtedly, one of the most important theorists as far as
rethinking the materiality of the book in the period after 1945 is concerned is Ulises
Carrión. He defines the book as a specific set of conditions that should be (or need to
be) responded to. 17 Instead of seeing it as just a text, Carrión positions the book as an
object, a container and a sequence of spaces. For him, the codex is a form that needs
to be responded to in what he prefers to call ‘bookworks’. These are ‘books in which
the book form, as a coherent sequence of pages, determines conditions of reading that
are intrinsic to the work.’ 18 From this perspective, artists’ books interrogate the
structure and the meaning of the book’s form. 19
Yet the book is also a metaphor, a symbol and an icon to be responded to. 20 Indeed, it
is difficult to establish a precise definition or set of characteristics for artists’ books as
their very nature keeps changing. As Sowden and Bodman put it, ‘What a book is can
be challenged’. 21 Drucker, meanwhile, is at pains to point out that the book is open
for innovation, although the latter has its limits: ‘The convention of the book is both
its constrained meanings (as literacy, the law, text and so forth) and the space of new
17
James Langdon (ed), Book, Birmingham, Eastside Projects, 2010.
Ulises Carrión, ‘Bookworks Revisited’, in James Langdon (ed), Book, Birmingham,
Eastside Projects, 2010.
19
Drucker, The Century of Artists’ Books, pp3-4.
20
Ibid., p360.
21
Tom Sowden and Sarah Bodman, A Manifesto for the Book, Impact Press, 2010, p9.
18
11
work (the blank page, the void, the empty place).’ Books here ‘mutate, expand,
transform’. Accordingly, Drucker regards the transformed book as an intervention,
something that reflects the inherent critique that book experiments embody with
respect to their own constitution.22 One way of examining reflexively the structures
that make up the book is precisely by disturbing those structures. In certain respects
the page can be thought of as being finite (e.g. physically, materially), but it can also
be understood to be infinite, not least as a result of being potentially different on each
respective viewing/reading. This allows the book to be perceived as a self-reflexive
medium that is extremely well-suited to formal experiments. At the same time, it
allows it to be positioned as a potentially political medium, in the sense that it can be
used to intervene in and disturb existing practices and institutions.
6) The Problematisation of Reading and Authorship
As part of their constitution, artists’ books can be said to have brought into question
certain notions and practices relating to the book that had previously been taken too
much for granted – and perhaps still are. For instance, Brian Wallis shows how, ‘in
place of the omnipotent author’, postmodern artists’ books ‘acknowledge a
collectivity of voices and active participation of the reader’. 23 Carrión, for one, was
very concerned with the thought that readers might consume books passively, while
being unaware of their specificity as a medium. 24 The relationship between the book
and reading, and the way in which the physical aspect of the book can change how we
read, was certainly an important topic for artists throughout this period. Many
experiments with artists’ books focused on the interaction between author, reader and
22
Drucker, The Century of Artists’ Books.
Lucy Lippard and John Chandler, ‘The Dematerialization of Art’, Art International, 12, 2
(1968).
24
Langdon, Book.
23
12
book, offering an alternative, and not necessarily linear, reading experience. 25 Such
readerly interventions often represented a critical engagement with ideas of the author
as original creative genius derived from the cultural tradition of European
Romanticism. Joan Lyons describes this potential of the artist’s book very clearly:
‘The best of the bookworks are multinotational. Within them, words, images, colors,
marks, and silences become plastic organisms that play across the pages in variable
linear sequence. Their importance lies in the formulation of a new perceptual
literature whose content alters the concept of authorship and challenges the reader to a
new discourse with the printed page.’ 26 Carrión thus writes about how in the books of
the new art, as he calls them, words no longer transmit an author’s intention. Instead,
authors can use other people’s words as an element of the book as a whole – so much
so that he positions plagiarism as lying at the very basis of creativity. As far as artists’
books are concerned, it is not the artist’s intention that is at stake, according to
Carrión, but rather the process of testing the meaning of language. It is the reader who
creates the meaning and understanding of a book for Carrión, through his or her
specific meaning-extraction. Every book requires a different reading and opens up
possibilities to the reader. 27
THE INHIBITIONS OF MEDIATIC CHANGE
We can thus see that the very ‘nature’ of the book is particularly well suited to
experimentation and to reading against the grain. As a medium, the book has the
25
This has been one of the focal points of the books published and commissioned by UK
artist book publisher Book Works, for instance. Jane Rolo and Ian Hunt, ‘Introduction’, in
Book Works: A Partial History and Sourcebook, op. cit.
26
Joan Lyons, ‘Introduction’, p7.
27
Ulises Carrión, ‘The New Art of Making Books’, in James Langdon (ed), Book,
Birmingham, Eastside Projects, 2010.
13
potential to raise questions for some of the established practices and institutions
surrounding the production, distribution and consumption of printed matter. This
potential notwithstanding, it gradually became apparent (for some this realisation
occurred during the 1960s and 1970s, for others it only came about later) that the
ability of artists’ books to bring about institutional change in the art world, and to
question both the concept of the book and that of art as the singular aesthetic artefact
bolstered by institutional structures, was not particularly long-lasting. With respect to
the democratization of the artist’s book, for example, Lippard notes that, by losing its
distance, there was also a chance of the book losing its critical function. Here, says
Lippard, the ‘danger is that, with an expanding audience and an increased popularity
with collectors, the artist’s book will fall back into its edition de luxe or coffee table
origin … transformed into glossy, pricey products.’ For Lippard there is a discrepancy
between the characteristics of the medium which had the potential to break down
walls, and the actual content and form of most artists’ books which was highly
experimental and avant-garde, and thus inaccessible to readers/consumers outside of
the art world. 28
PROCESSES OF INCORPORATION AND COMMERCIALISATION
Interestingly, Carrión was one of the sharpest critics of the idea that artists’ books
should be somehow able to subvert the gallery system. In his ‘Bookworks Revisited’,
he showed how the hope surrounding this supposedly revolutionary potential of the
book as a medium was based on a gross misunderstanding of the mechanisms
underlying the art world. In particular, Carrión attacked the idea that the artist’s book
28
Lippard, ‘The Artist’s Book Goes Public’ pp47-48.
14
could do without any intermediaries. Instead of circumventing the gallery system, he
saw book artists as merely adopting an alternative set of intermediaries, namely book
publishers and critics. 29
Ten years later Stewart Cauley updated Carrión’s criticisms, arguing that as an art
form and medium, the artist’s book had not been able to avoid market mechanisms
and the celebrity cult of the art system. In fact, by the end of the 1980s the field of
artists’ publications had lost most of its experimental impetus and had become
something of an institution itself, imitating the gallery and museum system it was
initially designed to subvert. 30 Those interested in artists’ books initially found it
difficult to set up an alternative system, as they had to manage without organized
distribution, review mechanisms or funding schemes. When they were eventually able
to do so in the 1970s, the resulting structures in many ways mirrored the very
institutions they were supposed to be criticizing and providing an alternative to.31
Cauley points the finger of blame at the book community itself, especially at the fact
that artists at the time focused more on the concept and structure of the book than on
using the book form to make any kind of critical political statement. The idea that
artists’ books were disconnected from mainstream institutional systems has also been
debunked as a myth. As Drucker makes clear, many artists’ books were developed in
cooperation with museums or galleries, where they were perceived not as subversive
artefacts but rather as low-cost tools for gathering additional publicity for those
institutions and their activities. 32
29
Carrión, ‘Bookworks Revisited’; Johanna Drucker, ‘Artists’ Books and the Cultural Status
of the Book’, Journal of Communication, 44 (1994).
30
Stewart Cauley, ‘Bookworks for the ’90s’, Afterimage, 25, 6, May/June (1998).
31
Stefan Klima, Artists Books: A Critical Survey of the Literature, Granary Books, New
York, 1998, pp54-60.
32
Drucker, The Century of Artists’ Books, p78.
15
Following Abigail Solomon-Godeau, this process of commercialisation and
incorporation – or, as she calls it, ‘the near-total assimilation’ of art practice
(Solomon-Godeau focuses specifically on postmodern photography) and critique into
the discourses it professed to challenge – can be positioned as part of a general
tendency in conceptual and postmodern ‘critical art practices’. It is a development that
can be connected to the changing art markets of the time and viewed in terms of a
broader social and cultural shift to Reaganomics. For Solomon-Godeau, however, the
problem lay not only in changes to the art market, but in critical art practices and art
critique too, which in many ways were not robust enough to keep on reinventing
themselves. Nonetheless, even if they have become incorporated into the art market
and the commodity system, Solomon-Godeau argues that it is still possible for art
practices and institutional critiques to develop some (new) forms of sustainable
challenge from within these systems. As far as she is concerned, ‘a position of
resistance can never be established once and for all, but must be perpetually
refashioned and renewed to address adequately those shifting conditions and
circumstances that are its ground.’ 33
THE PROMISE OF OPEN ACCESS
At first sight many of the changes that have occurred recently in the world of
academic book publishing seem to resemble those charted above with respect to the
artist’s book. As was the case with the publishing of artists’ books, digital publishing
has provided interested parties with an opportunity to counter the existing
33
Abigail Solomon-Godeau, ‘Living with Contradictions: Critical Practices in the Age of
Supply-Side Aesthetics’, Social Text, 21 (1989).
16
(publishing) system and its institutions, to experiment with using contemporary and
emergent media to publish (in this case academic) books in new ways and forms, and
in the process to challenge established ideas of the printed codex book, together with
the material practices of production, distribution and consumption that surround it.
This has resulted in a new wave of scholar-led publishing initiatives in academia, both
formal (with scholars either becoming publishers themselves, or setting up crossinstitutional publishing infrastructures with libraries, IT departments and research
groups) and informal (using self-publishing and social media platforms such as blogs
and wikis). 34 The phenomenon of open access book publishing can be located within
this broader context – a context which, it is worth noting, also includes the closing of
many book shops due to fierce rivalry from the large supermarkets at one end of the
market, and online e-book traders such as Amazon at the other; the fact that the major
high-street book chains are increasingly loath to take academic titles - not just
journals but books too; and the handing over (either in part or in whole) to for-profit
corporations of many publishing organisations designed to serve charitable aims and
the public good: scholarly associations, learned societies, university presses, nonprofit and not-for-profit publishers.
From the early 1990s onwards, open access was pioneered and developed most
extensively in the science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) fields,
where much of the attention was focused on the online self-archiving by scholars of
pre-publication (i.e. pre-print) versions of their research papers in central, subject or
institutionally-based repositories. This is known as the Green Road to open access, as
34
See, for example, Janneke Adema and Birgit Schmidt, ‘From Service Providers to Content
Producers: New Opportunities For Libraries in Collaborative Open Access Book Publishing’,
New Review of Academic Librarianship, 16 (2010).
17
distinct from the Gold Road, which refers to the publishing of articles in online, open
access journals. Of particular interest in this respect is the philosophy that lies behind
the rise of the open access movement, as it can be seen to share a number of
characteristics with the thinking behind artists’ books discussed earlier. The former
was primarily an initiative established by academic researchers, librarians, managers
and administrators, who had concluded that the traditional publishing system – thanks
in no small part to the rapid (and, as we shall see, ongoing) process of aggressive forprofit commercialisation it was experiencing – was no longer willing or able to meet
all of their communication needs. Accordingly, those behind this initiative wanted to
take advantage of the opportunities they saw as being presented by the new digital
publishing and distribution mechanisms to make research more widely and easily
available in a far faster, cheaper and more efficient manner than was offered by
conventional print-on-paper academic publishing. They had various motivations for
doing so. These include wanting to extend the circulation of research to all those who
were interested in it, rather than restricting access to merely those who could afford to
pay for it in the form of journal subscriptions, etc; 35 and a desire to promote the
emergence of a global information commons, and, through this, help to produce a
renewed democratic public sphere of the kind Jürgen Habermas propounds. From the
latter point of view (as distinct from the more radical democratic philosophy we
proceed to develop in what follows), open access was seen as working toward the
creation of a healthy liberal democracy, through its alleged breaking down of the
barriers between the academic community and the rest of society, and its perceived
consequent ability to supply the public with the information they need to make
knowledgeable decisions and actively contribute to political debate. Without doubt,
35
John Willinsky, The Access Principle: The Case for Open Access to Research and
Scholarship, Cambridge, Mass., The MIT Press, 2009, p5.
18
though, another motivating factor behind the development of open access was a desire
on the part of some of those involved to enhance the transparency, accountability,
discoverability, usability, efficiency and (cost) effectivity not just of scholarship and
research but of higher education itself. From the latter perspective (and as can again
be distinguished from the radical open access philosophy advocated below), making
research available on an open access basis was regarded by many as a means of
promoting and stimulating the neoliberal knowledge economy both nationally and
internationally. Open access is supposed to achieve these goals by making it easier for
business and industry to capitalise on academic knowledge - companies can build new
businesses based on its use and exploitation, for example - thus increasing the impact
of higher education on society and helping the UK, Europe and the West (and North)
to be more competitive globally. 36
To date, the open access movement has progressed much further toward its goal of
making all journal articles available open access than it has toward making all
academic books available in this fashion. There are a number of reasons why this is
the case. First, since the open access movement was developed and promoted most
extensively in the STEMs, it has tended to concentrate on the most valued mode of
publication in those fields: the peer-reviewed journal article. Interestingly, the recent
36
Gary Hall, Digitize This Book! The Politics of New Media, or Why We Need Open Access
Now, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2008; Janneke Adema, Open Access
Business Models for Books in the Humanities and Social Sciences: An Overview of Initiatives
and Experiments, OAPEN Project Report, Amsterdam, 2010. David Willetts, the UK Science
Minister, is currently promoting ‘author-pays’ open access for just these reasons. See David
Willetts, ‘Public Access to Publicly-Funded Research’, BIS: Department for Business,
Innovation and Skills, May 2, 2012: https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/public-accessto-publicly-funded-research--2
19
arguments around the ‘Academic Spring’ and ‘feral’ publishers such as Informa plc
are no exception to this general rule. 37
Second, restrictions to making research available open access associated with
publishers’ copyright and licensing agreements can in most cases be legally
circumvented when it comes to journal articles. If all other options fail, authors can
self-archive a pre-refereed pre-print of their article in a central, subject or
institutionally-based repository such as PubMed Central. However, it is not so easy to
elude such restrictions when it comes to the publication of academic books. In the
latter case, since the author is often paid royalties in exchange for their text, copyright
tends to be transferred by the author to the publisher. The text remains the intellectual
property of the author, but the exclusive right to put copies of that text up for sale, or
give them away for free, then rests with the publisher. 38
Another reason the open access movement has focused on journal articles is because
of the expense involved in publishing books in this fashion, since one of the main
models of funding open access in the STEMs, author-side fees, 39 is not easily
transferable either to book publishing or to the Humanities and Social Sciences
(HSS). In contrast to the STMs, the HSS feature a large number of disciplines in
which it is books (monographs in particular) published with esteemed international
37
David Harvie, Geoff Lightfoot, Simon Lilley and Kenneth Weir, ‘What Are We To Do
With Feral Publishers?’, submitted for publication in Organization, and accessible through
the Leicester Research Archive: http://hdl.handle.net/2381/9689.
38
See the Budapest Open Access Initiative, ‘Self-Archiving FAQ, written for the Budapest
Open Access Initiative (BOAI)’, 2002-4: http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/.
39
Although ‘author-pays’ is often positioned as the main model of funding open access
publication in the STEMs, a lot of research has disputed this fact. See, for example, Stuart
Shieber, ‘What Percentage of Open-Access Journals Charge Publication Fees’, The
Occasional Pamphlet on Scholarly Publishing, May 9, 2009:
http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/pamphlet/2009/05/29/what-percentage-of-open-access-journalscharge-publication-fees/.
20
presses, rather than articles in high-ranking journals, that are considered as the most
significant and valued means of scholarly communication. Authors in many fields in
the HSS are simply not accustomed to paying to have their work published. What is
more, many authors associate doing so with vanity publishing. 40 They are also less
likely to acquire the grants from either funding bodies or their institutions that are
needed to cover the cost of publishing ‘author-pays’. That the HSS in many Western
countries receive only a fraction of the amount of government funding the STEMs do
only compounds the problem, 41 as does the fact that higher rejection rates in the HSS,
as compared to the STEMs, mean that any grants would have to be significantly
larger, as the time spent on reviewing articles, and hence the amount of human labour
used, makes it a much more intensive process. 42 And that is just to publish journal
articles. Publishing books on an author-pays basis would be more expensive still.
Yet even though the open access movement initially focused more on journal articles
than on monographs, things have begun to change in this respect in recent years.
Undoubtedly, one of the major factors behind this change has been the fact that the
40
Maria Bonn, ‘Free Exchange of Ideas: Experimenting with the Open Access Monograph’,
College and Research Libraries News, 71, 8, September (2010) pp436-439:
http://crln.acrl.org/content/71/8/436.full.
41
Patrick Alexander, director of the Pennsylvania State University Press, provides the
following example: ‘Open Access STEM publishing is often funded with tax-payer dollars,
with publication costs built into researchers’ grant request… the proposed NIH budget for
2013 is $31 billion. NSF’s request for 2013 is around $7.3 billion. Compare those amounts to
the NEH ($154 million) and NEA ($154 million) and you can get a feel for why researchers
in the the arts and humanities face challenges in funding their publication costs.’ (Adeline
Koh, ‘Is Open Access a Moral or a Business Issue? A Conversation with The Pennsylvania
State University Press, The Chronicle of Higher Education, July 10, 2012:
http://chronicle.com/blogs/profhacker/is-open-access-a-moral-or-a-business-issue-aconversation-with-the-pennsylvania-state-university-press/41267)
42
See Mary Waltham’s 2009 report for the National Humanities Alliance, ‘The Future of
Scholarly Journals Publishing among Social Sciences and Humanities Associations’:
http://www.nhalliance.org/research/scholarly_communication/index.shtml; and Peter Suber,
‘Promoting Open Access in the Humanities’, 2004:
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/writing/apa.htm. ‘On average, humanities journals have
higher rejection rates (70-90%) than STEM journals (20-40%)’, Suber writes.
21
publication of books on an open access basis has been perceived as one possible
answer to the ‘monograph crisis’. This phrase refers to the way in which the already
feeble sustainability of the print monograph is being endangered even further by the
ever-declining sales of academic books. 43 It is a situation that has in turn been brought
about by ‘the so-called “serials crisis”, a term used to designate the vertiginous rise of
the subscription to STEM journals since the mid-80s which… strangled libraries and
led to fewer and fewer purchases of books/monographs.’ 44 This drop in library
demand for monographs has led many presses to produce smaller print runs; focus on
more commercial, marketable titles; or even move away from monographs to
concentrate on text books, readers, and reference works instead. In short, conventional
academic publishers are now having to make decisions about what to publish more on
the basis of the market and a given text’s potential value as a commodity, and less on
the basis of its quality as a piece of scholarship. This last factor is making it difficult
for early career academics to publish the kind of research-led monographs that are
often needed to acquire that all important first full-time position. This in turn means
the HSS is, in effect, allowing publishers to make decisions on its future and on who
gets to have a long-term career on an economic basis, according to the needs of the
market – or what they believe those needs to be. But it is also making it hard for
43
Greco and Wharton estimate that the average number of library purchases of monographs
has dropped from 1500 in the 1970s to 200-300 at present. Thompson estimates that print
runs and sales have declined from 2000-3000 (print runs and sales) in the 1970s to print runs
of between 600-1000 and sales of between 400-500 nowadays. Albert N. Greco and Robert
Michael Wharton, ‘Should University Presses Adopt an Open Access [electronic publishing]
Business Model for all of their Scholarly Books?’, ELPUB. Open Scholarship: Authority,
Community, and Sustainability in the Age of Web 2.0 – Proceedings of the 12th
International Conference on Electronic Publishing held in Toronto, Canada 25-27 June
2008; John B. Thompson, Books in the Digital Age: The Transformation of Academic and
Higher Education Publishing in Britain and the United States, Cambridge, Polity Press, 2005.
44
Jean Kempf, ‘Social Sciences and Humanities Publishing and the Digital “Revolution”’
unpublished manuscript, 2010: http://perso.univlyon2.fr/~jkempf/Digital_SHS_Publishing.pdf; Thompson, Books in the Digital Age, pp. 9394.
22
authors in the HSS generally to publish monographs that are perceived as being
difficult, advanced, specialized, obscure, radical, experimental or avant-garde - a
situation reminiscent of the earlier state of events which led to the rise of artists’
books, with the latter emerging in the context of a perceived lack of exhibition space
for experimental and critical (conceptual) work within mainstream commercial
galleries.
Partly in response to this ‘monograph crisis’, a steadily increasing number of
initiatives have now been set up to enable authors in the HSS in particular to bring out
books open access – not just introductions, reference works and text books, but
research monographs and edited collections too. These initiatives include scholar-led
presses such as Open Humanities Press, re.press, and Open Book Publishers;
commercial presses such as Bloomsbury Academic; university presses, including
ANU E Press and Firenze University Press; and presses established by or working
with libraries, such as Athabasca University’s AU Press. 45
Yet important though the widespread aspiration amongst academics, librarians and
presses to find a solution to the monograph crisis has been, the reasons behind the
development of open access book publishing in the HSS are actually a lot more
diverse than is often suggested. For instance, to the previously detailed motivating
factors that inspired the rise of the open access movement can be added the desire,
shared by many scholars, to increase accessibility to (specialized) HSS research, with
a view to heightening its reputation, influence, impact and esteem. This is seen as
45
A list of publishers experimenting with business models for OA books is available at:
http://oad.simmons.edu/oadwiki/Publishers_of_OA_books. See also Adema, Open Access
Business Models.
23
being especially significant at a time when the UK government, to take just one
example, is emphasizing the importance of the STEMs while withdrawing support
and funding for the HSS. Many scholars in the HSS are thus now willing to stand up
against, and even offer a counter-institutional alternative to, the large, established,
profit-led, commercial firms that have come to dominate academic publishing – and,
in so doing, liberate the long-form argument from market constraints through the
ability to publish books that often lack a clear commercial market.
TWO STRATEGIES: ACCESSIBILITY AND EXPERIMENTATION
That said, all of these reasons and motivating factors behind the recent changes in
publishing models are still very much focused on making more scholarly research
more accessible. Yet for at least some of those involved in the creation and
dissemination of open access books, doing so also constitutes an important stage in
the development of what might be considered more ‘experimental’ forms of research
and publication; forms for which commercial and heavily print-based systems of
production and distribution have barely provided space. Such academic experiments
are thus perhaps capable of adopting a role akin to, if not the exact equivalent of, that
we identified artists’ books as having played in the countercultural context of the
1960s and 1970s: in terms of questioning the concept and material form of the book;
promoting alternative ways of reading and communicating via books; and
interrogating modern, romantic notions of authorship. We are thinking in particular of
projects that employ open peer-review procedures (such as Kathleen Fitzpatrick’s
Planned Obsolescence, which uses the CommentPress Wordpress plugin to enable
comments to appear alongside the main body of the text), wikis (e.g. Open
24
Humanities Press’ two series of Liquid and Living Books) and blogs (such as those
created using the Anthologize app developed at George Mason University). 46 These
enable varying degrees of what Peter Suber calls ‘author-side openness’ when it
comes to reviewing, editing, changing, updating and re-using content, including
creating derivative works. Such practices pose a conceptual challenge to some of the
more limited interpretations of open access (what has at times been dubbed ‘weak
open access’), 47 and can on occasion even constitute a radical test of the integrity and
identity of a given work, not least by enabling different versions to exist
simultaneously. In an academic context this raises questions of both a practical and
theoretical nature that have the potential to open up a space for reimagining what
counts as scholarship and research, and of how it can be responded to and accessed:
not just which version of a work is to be cited and preserved, and who is to have
ultimate responsibility for the text and its content; but also what an author, a text, and
a work actually is, and where any authority and stability that might be associated with
such concepts can now be said to reside.
It is interesting then that, although they can be positioned as constituting two of the
major driving forces behind the recent upsurge in the current interest in open access
book publishing, as ‘projects’, the at times more obviously or overtly ‘political’ (be it
liberal-democratic, neoliberal or otherwise) project of using digital media and the
Internet to create wider access to book-based research on the one hand, and
experimenting—as part of the more conceptual, experimental aspects of open access
book publishing—with the form of the book (a combination of which we identified as
46
See http://mediacommons.futureofthebook.org/mcpress/plannedobsolescence;
http://liquidbooks.pbwiki.com/; http://www.livingbooksaboutlife.org/; http://anthologize.org/.
47
See Peter Suber, SPARC OA newsletter, issue 155, March 2, 2011:
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/newsletter/03-02-11.htm
25
being essential components of the experimental and political potential of artists’
books) and the way our dominant system of scholarly communication currently
operates on the other, often seem to be rather disconnected. Again, a useful
comparison can be made to the situation described by Lippard, where more
(conceptually or materially) experimental artists’ books were seen as being less
accessible to a broader public and, in some cases, as going against the strategy of
democratic multiples, promoting exclusivity instead.
It is certainly the case that, in order to further the promotion of open access and
achieve higher rates of adoption and compliance among the academic community, a
number of strategic alliances have been forged between the various proponents of the
open access movement. Some of these alliances (those associated with Green open
access, for instance) have taken making the majority if not indeed all of the research
accessible online without a paywall (Gratis open access) 48 as their priority, perhaps
with the intention of moving on to the exploration of other possibilities, including
those concerned with experimenting with the form of the book, once critical mass has
been attained – but perhaps not. Hence Stevan Harnad’s insistence that ‘it’s time to
stop letting the best get in the way of the better: Let’s forget about Libre and Gold OA
until we have managed to mandate Green Gratis OA universally.’ 49 Although they
cannot be simply contrasted and opposed to the former (often featuring many of the
same participants), other strategic alliances have focused more on gaining the trust of
the academic community. Accordingly, they have prioritized allaying many of the
48
For an overview of the development of these terms, see:
http://www.arl.org/sparc/publications/articles/gratisandlibre.shtml
49
Stevan Harnad, Open Access: Gratis and Libre, Open Access Archivangelism,
Thursday, May 3, 2012.
26
anxieties with regard to open access publications – including concerns regarding their
quality, stability, authority, sustainability and status with regard to publishers’
copyright licenses and agreements – that have been generated as a result of the
transition toward the digital mode of reproduction and distribution. More often than
not, such alliances have endeavoured to do so by replicating in an online context
many of the scholarly practices associated with the world of print-on-paper
publishing. Witness the way in which the majority of open access book publishers
continue to employ more or less the same quality control procedures, preservation
structures and textual forms as their print counterparts: pre-publication peer review
conducted by scholars who have already established their reputations in the paper
world; preservation carried out by academic libraries; monographs consisting of
numbered pages and chapters arranged in a linear, sequential order and narrative, and
so on. As Sigi Jöttkandt puts it with regard to the strategy of Open Humanities Press
in this respect:
We’re intending OHP as a tangible demonstration to our still generally
sceptical colleagues in the humanities that there is no reason why OA
publishing cannot have the same professional standards as print. We aim to
show that OA is not only academically credible but is in fact being actively
advanced by leading figures in our fields, as evidenced by our editorial
advisory board. Our hope is that OHP will contribute to OA rapidly becoming
standard practice for scholarly publishing in the humanities. 50
50
Sigi Jöttkandt, 'No-fee OA Journals in the Humanities, Three Case Studies: A Presentation
by Open Humanities Press', presented at the Berlin 5 Open Access Conference: From Practice
to Impact: Consequences of Knowledge Dissemination, Padua, September 19, 2007:
http://openhumanitiespress.org/Jottkandt-Berlin5.pdf
27
Relatively few open access publishers, however, have displayed much interest in
combining such an emphasis on achieving universal, free, online access to research
and/or the gaining of trust, with a rigorous critical exploration of the form of the book
itself. 51 And this despite the fact that the ability to re-use material is actually an
essential feature of what has become known as the Budapest-Bethesda-Berlin (BBB)
definition of open access, which is one of the major agreements underlying the
movement. 52 It therefore seems significant that, of the books presently available open
access, only a minority have a license where price and permission barriers to research
are removed, with the result that the research is available under both Gratis and Libre
(re-use) conditions. 53
REIMAGINING THE BOOK, OR RADICAL OPEN ACCESS
Admittedly, there are many in the open access community who regard the more
radical experiments conducted with and on books as highly detrimental to the
strategies of large-scale accessibility and trust respectively. From this perspective,
efforts designed to make open access material available for others to (re)use, copy,
51
Open Humanities Press (http://openhumanitiespress.org/) and Media Commons Press
(http://mediacommons.futureofthebook.org/mcpress/) remain the most notable exceptions on
the formal side of the publishing scale, the majority of experiments with the form of the book
taking place in the informal sphere (e.g. blogbooks self-published by Anthologize, and
crowd-sourced, ‘sprint’ generated books such as Dan Cohen and Tom Scheinfeldt’s Hacking
the Academy: http://hackingtheacademy.org/).
52
See Peter Suber on the BBB definition here:
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/newsletter/09-02-04.htm, where he also states that two
of the three BBB component definitions (the Bethesda and Berlin statements) require
removing barriers to derivative works.
53
An examination of the licenses used on two of the largest open access book publishing
platforms or directories to date, the OAPEN (Open Access Publishing in Academic
Networks) platform and the DOAB (Directory of Open Access Books), reveals that on the
OAPEN platform (accessed May 6th 2012) 2 of the 966 books are licensed with a CC-BY
license, and 153 with a CC-BY-NC license (which still restricts commercial re-use). On the
DOAB (accessed May 6th 2012) 5 of the 778 books are licensed with a CC-BY license, 215
with CC-BY-NC.
28
reproduce and distribute in any medium, as well as make and distribute derivative
works, coupled with experiments with the form of the book, are seen as being very
much secondary objectives (and even by some as unnecessarily complicating and
diluting open access’s primary goal of making all of the research accessible online
without a paywall). 54 And, indeed, although in many of the more formal open access
definitions (including the important Bethesda and Berlin definitions of open access,
which require removing barriers to derivative works), the right to re-use and reappropriate a scholarly work is acknowledged and recommended, in both theory and
practice a difference between ‘author-side openness’ and ‘reader-side openness’ tends
to be upheld—leaving not much space for the ‘readerly interventions’ that were so
important in opening up the kind of possibilities for ‘reading against the grain’ that
the artist’s book promoted, something we feel (open access) scholarly works should
also strive to encourage and support. 55 This is especially the case with regard to the
publication of books, where a more conservative vision frequently holds sway. For
instance, it is intriguing that in an era in which online texts are generally connected to
a network of other information, data and mobile media environments, the open access
book should for the most part still find itself presented as having definite limits and a
clear, distinct materiality.
But if the ability to re-use material is an essential feature of open access – as, let us
repeat, it is according to the Budapest-Bethesda-Berlin and many of other influential
definitions of the term – then is working toward making all of the research accessible
54
See, for example, Stevan Harnad, Open Access: Gratis and Libre, Open Access
Archivangelism, Thursday, May 3, 2012.
55
For more on author-side and reader-side openness respectively, see Peter Suber, SPARC
OA newsletter: http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/newsletter/03-02-11.htm
29
online on a Gratis basis and/or gaining the trust of the academic community the best
way for the open access movement (including open access book publishing) to
proceed, always and everywhere? If we do indeed wait until we have gained a critical
mass of open access content before taking advantage of the chance the shift from
analogue to digital creates, might it not by then be too late? Does this shift not offer
us the opportunity, through its loosening of much of the stability, authority, and
‘fixity’ of texts, to rethink scholarly publishing, and in the process raise the kind of
fundamental questions for our ideas of authorship, authority, legitimacy, originality,
permanence, copyright, and with them the text and the book, that we really should
have been raising all along? If we miss this opportunity, might we not find ourselves
in a similar situation to that many book artists and publishers have been in since the
1970s, namely, that of merely reiterating and reinforcing established structures and
practices?
Granted, following a Libre open access strategy may on occasion risk coming into
conflict with those more commonly accepted and approved open access strategies (i.e.
those concerned with achieving accessibility and the gaining of trust on a large-scale).
Nevertheless, should open access advocates on occasion not be more open to adopting
and promoting forms of open access that are designed to make material available for
others to (re)use, copy, reproduce, distribute, transmit, translate, modify, remix and
build upon? In particular, should they not be more open to doing so right here, right
now, before things begin to settle down and solidify again and we arrive at a situation
where we have succeeded merely in pushing the movement even further toward rather
weak, watered-down and commercial versions of open access?
30
CONCLUSION
We began by looking at how, in an art world context, the idea and form of the book
have been used to engage critically many of the established cultural institutions, along
with some of the underlying philosophies that inform them. Of particular interest in
this respect is the way in which, with the rise of offset printing and cheaper
production methods and printing techniques in the 1960s, there was a corresponding
increase in access to the means of production and distribution of books. This in turn
led to the emergence of new possibilities and roles that the book could be put to in an
art context, which included democratizing art and critiquing the status quo of the
gallery system. But these changes to the materiality and distribution of the codex
book in particular – as an artistic product as well as a medium – were integrally linked
with questions concerning the nature of both art and the book as such. Book artists
and theorists thus became more and more engaged in the conceptual and practical
exploration of the materiality of the book. In the end, however, the promise of
technological innovation which underpinned the changes with respect to the
production and distribution of artists’ books in the 1960s and 1970s was not enough
to generate any kind of sustainable (albeit repeatedly reviewed, refashioned and
renewed) challenge within the art world over the longer term.
The artist’s book of the 1960s and 1970s therefore clearly had the potential to bring
about a degree of transformation, yet it was unable to elude the cultural practices,
institutions and the market mechanisms that enveloped it for long (including those
developments in financialisation and the art market Solomon-Godeau connects to the
shift to Reaganomics). Consequently, instead of criticising or subverting the
31
established systems of publication and distribution, the artist’s book ended up being
largely integrated into them. 56 Throughout the course of this article we have argued
that its conceptual and material promise notwithstanding, there is a danger of
something similar happening to open access publishing today. Take the way open
access has increasingly come to be adopted by commercial publishers. If one of the
motivating factors behind at least some aspects of the open access movement – not
just the aforementioned open access book publishers in the HSS, but the likes of
PLoS, too – has been to stand up against, and even offer an alternative to, the large,
profit-led firms that have come to dominate the field of academic publishing, recent
years have seen many such commercial publishers experimenting with open access
themselves, even if such experiments have so far been confined largely to journals.57
Most commonly, this situation has resulted in the trialling of ‘author-side’ fees for the
open access publishing of journals, a strategy seen as protecting the interests of the
established publishers, and one which has recently found support in the Finch Report
from a group of representatives of the research, library and publishing communities
convened by David Willetts, the UK Science Minister. 58 But the idea that open access
56
That said, there is currently something of a revival of print, craft and artist's book
publishing taking place in which the paperbound book is being re-imagined in offline
environments. In this post-digital print culture, paper publishing is being used as a new form
of avant-garde social networking that, thanks to its analog nature, is not so easily controlled
by the digital data-gathering commercial hegemonies of Google, Amazon, Facebook et al. For
more, see Alessandro Ludovico, Post-Digital Print - the Mutation of Publishing Since 1984,
Onomatopee, 2012; and Florian Cramer, `Post-Digital Writing', Electronic Book Review,
December, 2012: http://electronicbookreview.com/thread/electropoetics/postal.
57
For more details, see Wilhelm Peekhaus, ‘The Enclosure and Alienation of Academic
Publishing: Lessons for the Professoriate’, tripleC, 10(2), 2012: http://www.triplec.at/index.php/tripleC/article/view/395
58
‘Accessibility, Sustainability, Excellence: How to Expand Access to Research Publications,
Report of the Working Group on Expanding Access to Published Research Findings’, June
18, 2012: http://www.researchinfonet.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/Finch-Group-reportFINAL-VERSION.pdf. For one overview of some of the problems that can be identified from
an HSS perspective in the policy direction adopted by Finch and Willetts, see Lucinda
Matthews-Jones, ‘Open Access and the Future of Academic Journals’, Journal of Victorian
Culture Online, November 21, 2012: http://myblogs.informa.com/jvc/2012/11/21/openaccess-and-the-future-of-academic-journals/
32
may represent a commercially viable publishing model has attracted a large amount of
so-called predatory publishers, too, 59 who (like Finch and Willetts) have propagated a
number of misleading and often quite mistaken accounts of open access. 60 The
question is thus raised as to whether the desire to offer a counter-institutional
alternative to the large, established, commercial firms is likely to become somewhat
marginalised and neutralised as a result of open access publishing being seen more
and more by such commercial publishers as just another means of generating a profit.
Will the economic as well as material practices transferred from the printing press
continue to inform and shape our communication systems? As Nick Knouf argues, to
raise this question, ‘is not to damn open access publishing by any means; rather, it is
to say that open access publishing, without a concurrent interrogation of the economic
underpinnings of the scholarly communication system, will only reform the situation
rather than provide a radical alternative.’ 61
With this idea of providing a radical challenge to the current scholarly communication
system in mind, and drawing once again on the brief history of artists’ books as
presented above, might it not be helpful to think of open access less as a project and
model to be implemented, and more as a process of continuous struggle and critical
resistance? Here an analogy can be drawn with the idea of democracy as a process. In
‘Historical Dilemmas of Democracy and Their Contemporary Relevance for
Citizenship’, the political philosopher Etiènne Balibar develops an interesting analysis
of democracy based on a concept of the ‘democratisation of democracy’ he derives
59
For a list of predatory OA publishers see: http://scholarlyoa.com/publishers/
This list has increased from 23 predatory publishers in 2011, to 225 in 2012.
60
See the reference to the research of Peter Murray Rust in Sigi Jöttkandt, ‘No-fee OA
Journals in the Humanities’.
61
Nicholas Knouf, ‘The JJPS Extension: Presenting Academic Performance Information’,
Journal of Journal Performance Studies, 1 (2010).
33
from a reading of Hannah Arendt and Jacques Rancière. For Balibar, the problem
with much of the discourse surrounding democracy is that it perceives the latter as a
model that can be implemented in different contexts (in China or the Middle East, for
instance). He sees discourses of this kind as running two risks in particular. First of
all, in conceptualizing democracy as a model there is a danger of it becoming a
homogenizing force, masking differences and inequalities. Second, when positioned
as a model or a project, democracy also runs the risk of becoming a dominating force
– yet another political regime that takes control and power. According to Balibar, a
more interesting and radical notion of democracy involves focusing on the process of
the democratisation of democracy itself, thus turning democracy into a form of
continuous struggle (or struggles) – or, perhaps better, continuous critical selfreflection. Democracy here is not an established reality, then, nor is it a mere ideal; it
is rather a permanent struggle for democratisation. 62
Can open access be understood in similar terms: less as a homogeneous project
striving to become a dominating model or force, and more as an ongoing critical
struggle, or series of struggles? And can we perhaps locate what some perceive as the
failure of artists’ books to contribute significantly to such a critical struggle after the
1970s to the fact that ultimately they became (incorporated in) dominant institutional
settings themselves – a state of affairs brought about in part by their inability to
address issues of access, experimentation and self-reflexivity in an ongoing critical
manner?
62
Etienne Balibar, ‘Historical Dilemmas of Democracy and Their Contemporary Relevance
for Citizenship’, Rethinking Marxism, 20 (2008).
34
Certainly, one of the advantages of conceptualizing open access as a process of
struggle rather than as a model to be implemented would be that doing so would
create more space for radically different, conflicting, even incommensurable positions
within the larger movement, including those that are concerned with experimenting
critically with the form of the book and the way our system of scholarly
communication currently operates. As we have shown, such radical differences are
often played down in the interests of strategy. To be sure, open access can experience
what Richard Poynder refers to as a ‘bad tempered wrangles’ over relatively ‘minor
issues’ such as ‘metadata, copyright, and distributed versus central archives’. 63 Still,
much of the emphasis has been on the importance of trying to maintain a more or less
unified front (within certain limits, of course) in the face of criticisms from
publishers, governments, lobbyists and so forth, lest its opponents be provided with
further ammunition with which to attack the open access movement, and dilute or
misinterpret its message, or otherwise distract advocates from what they are all
supposed to agree are the main tasks at hand (e.g. achieving universal, free, online
access to research and/or the gaining of trust). Yet it is important not to see the
presence of such differences and conflicts within the open access movement in purely
negative terms – the way they are often perceived by those working in the liberal
tradition, with its ‘rationalist belief in the availability of a universal consensus based
on reason’. 64 (This emphasis on the ‘universal’ is also apparent in fantasies of having
not just universal open access, but one single, fully integrated and indexed global
archive.) In fact if, as we have seen, one of the impulses behind open access is to
make knowledge and research – and with it society – more open and democratic, it
63
Richard Poynder, ‘Time to Walk the Walk’, Open and Shut?, 17 March, 2005:
http://poynder.blogspot.com/2005/03/time-to-walk-talk.html.
64
Chantal Mouffe, On the Political, London, Routledge, 2005, p11.
35
can be argued that the existence of such dissensus will help achieve this ambition.
After all, and as we know from another political philosopher, Chantal Mouffe, far
from placing democracy at risk, a certain degree of conflict and antagonism actually
constitutes the very possibility of democracy. 65 It seems to us that such a critical, selfreflexive, processual, non-goal oriented way of thinking about academic publishing
shares much with the mode of working of the artist - which is why we have argued
that open access today can draw productively on the kind of conceptual openness and
political energy that characterised experimentation with the medium of the book in
the art world of the 1960s and 1970s.