Hamerman
Pirate Libraries and the Fight for Open Information
2015
| | SEPTEMBER 11TH, 2015 | A BI-WEEKLY WEBPAPER | ISSUE 61
|
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PIRATE LIBRARIES and the fight for open information
/ by _Sarah Hamerman_ |
In a digital era that destabilizes traditional notions of intellectual
property, cultural producers must rethink information access.
Over the last several years, a number of _pirate libraries_ have done just
that. Collaboratively run digital libraries such as
[_Aaaaaarg_](http://aaaaarg.fail/),
_[Monoskop](http://www.monoskop.org/Monoskop)_ , _[Public
Library](https://www.memoryoftheworld.org/)_ , and
_[UbuWeb_](http://www.ubuweb.tv/) have emerged, offering access to humanities
texts and audiovisual resources that are technically ‘pirated’ and often hard
to find elsewhere.
Though these sites differ somewhat in content, architecture, and ideological
bent, all of them disavow intellectual copyright law to varying degrees,
offering up pirated books and media with the aim of advancing information
access.
“Information wants to be free,” has served as a catchphrase in recent internet
activism, calling for information democracy, led by media, library and
information advocates.
As online information access is increasingly embedded within the networks of
capital, the digital text-sharing underground actualizes the Internet’s
potential to build a true information commons.
With such projects, the archive becomes a record of collective power, not
corporate or state power; the digital book becomes unlocked, linkable, and
shareable.
Still, these sites comprise but a small subset of the networks of peer-to-peer
file sharing. Many legal battles waged over the explosion of audiovisual file
sharing through p2p services such as Napster, BitTorrent and MediaFire. At its
peak, Napster boasted over 80 million users; the p2p music-sharing service was
shut down after a high-profile lawsuit by the RIAA in 2001.
The US Department of Justice brought charges against open access activist
_[Aaron Swartz](http://www.fvckthemedia.com/issue51/editorial)_ in 2011 for
his large-scale unauthorized downloading of files from the JStor Academic
database. Swartz, who sadly committed suicide before his trial, was an
organizer for Demand Progress, a campaign against the Stop Online Piracy Act,
which was defeated in 2012. Swartz’s actions and the fight around SOPA
represent a benchmark in the struggle for open-access and anti-copyright
practices surrounding the digital book.
Aaaaaarg, Monoskop, UbuWeb and Public Library are representative cases of the
pirate library because of their explicit engagement with archival form, their
embrace of ideas of the _[digital commons](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Commons)_ within current left-leaning thought, and their like-minded focus on critical theory and the arts.
All of these projects lend themselves to be considered _as libraries_ ,
retooled for open digital networks.
_Aaaaaarg.org_ , started by Los Angeles based artist Sean Dockray, hosts
full-text pdfs of over 50,000 books and articles. The library is connected to a an
alternative education project called the Public School, which serves as a
platform for self-organizing lectures, workshops and projects in cities across
the globe. _Aaaaaarg_ ’s catalog is viewable by the public, but
upload/download privileges are restricted through an invite system, thus
circumventing copyright law.
The site is divided into a “Library,” in which users can search for texts by
author; “Collections,” or user-generated grouping of texts designed for
reading groups or research interests; and “Discussions,” a message board where
participants can request texts and volunteer for working groups. Most
recently, _Aaaaaarg_ has introduced a “compiler” tool that allows readers to
select excerpts from longer texts and assemble them into new PDFs, and a
reading tool that allows readers to save reference points and insert comments
into texts. Though the library is easily searchable, it doesn’t maintain
high-quality _[metadata](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metadata)_. Dockray and
other organizers intend to preserve a certain subjective and informal quality,
focusing more on discussion and collaboration than correct preservation and
classification practice.
_Aaaaaarg_ has been threatened with takedowns a few times, but has survived by
creating mirrored sites and reconstituted itself by varying the number of A’s
in the URL. Its shifts in location, organization, and capabilities reflect
both the decentralized, ad-hoc nature of its maintenance and the organizers’
attempts to elude copyright regulations. Text-sharing sites such as _Aaaaaarg_
have also been referred to as _[shadow
libraries_](http://supercommunity.e-flux.com/texts/sharing-instinct/),
reflecting their quasi-covert status and their efforts to evade shutdown.
Monoskop.org, a project founded by media artist _[Dušan
Barok](http://monoskop.org/Du%C5%A1an_Barok)_ , is a wiki for collaborative
studies of art, media and the humanities that was born in 2004 out of Barok’s
study of media art and related cultural practices. Its significant holdings -
about 3,000 full-length texts and many more excerpts, links and citations -
include avant-garde and modernist magazines, writings on sound art, scanned
illustrations, and media theory texts.
As a wiki, any user can edit any article or upload content, and see their
changes reflected immediately. Monoskop is comprised of two sister sites: the
Monoskop wiki and Monoskop Log, the accompanying text repository. Monoskop Log
is structured as a Wordpress site with links hosted on third-party sites, much
like the rare-music download blogs that became popular in the mid-2000s.
Though this architecture is relatively unstable, links are fixed on-demand and
site mirroring and redundancy balance out some of the instability.
Monoskop makes clear that it is offering content under the fair-use doctrine
and that this content is for personal and scholarly use, not commercial use.
Barok notes that though there have been a small number of takedowns, people
generally appreciate unrestricted access to the types of materials in Monoskop
log, whether they are authors or publishers.
_Public Library_ , a somewhat newer pirate library founded by Croatian
Internet activist and researcher Marcell Mars and his collaborators, currently
offers a collection of about 6,300 texts. The project frames itself through a
utopian philosophy of building a truly universal library, radically extending
enlightenment-era conceptions of democracy. Through democratizing the _tools
of librarianship_ – book scanning, classification systems, cataloging,
information – it promises a broader, de-institutionalized public library.
In __[Public Library: An
Essay](https://www.memoryoftheworld.org/blog/2014/10/27/public-library-an-essay/#sdendnote19sym)__ , Public Library’s organizers frame p2p libraries as
“fragile knowledge infrastructures built and maintained by brave librarians
practicing civil disobedience which the world of researchers in the humanities
rely on.” This civil disobedience is a politically motivated refutation of
intellectual property law and the orientation of information networks toward
venture capital and advertising. While the pirate libraries fulfill this
dissident function as a kind of experimental provocation, their content is
audience-specific rather than universal.
_[UbuWeb](http://www.ubuweb.com/resources/index.html)_ , founded in 1996 by
conceptual artist/ writer Kenneth Goldsmith, is the largest online archive of
avant-garde art resources. Its holdings include sound, video and text-based
works dating from the historical avant-garde era to today. While many of the
sites in the “pirate library” continuum source their content through
community-based or peer-to-peer models, UbuWeb focuses on making available out
of print, obscure or difficult to access artistic media, stating that
uploading such historical artifacts doesn’t detract from the physical value of
the work; rather, it enhances it. The website’s philosophy blends the utopian
ideals of avant-garde concrete poetry with the ideals of the digital gift
economy, and it has specifically refused to accept corporate or foundation
funding or adopt a more market-oriented business model.
**Pirate Libraries vs. “The Sharing Economy”**
In pirate libraries, information users become archive builders by uploading
often-copyrighted content to shared networks.
Within the so-called “ _[sharing
economy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharing_economy)_ ,” users essentially
lease e-book content from information corporations such as Amazon, which
markets both the Kindle as platform. This centralization of intellectual
property has dire impacts on the openness of the digital book as a
collaborative knowledge-sharing device.
In contrast, the pirate library actualizes a gift economy based on qualitative
and communal rather than monetized exchange. As Mackenzie Wark writes in _A
Hacker Manifesto_ (2004), “The gift is marginal, but nevertheless plays a
vital role in cementing reciprocal and communal relations among people who
otherwise can only confront each other as buyers and sellers of commodities.”
From theorizing new media art to building solidarity against repressive
regimes, such communal information networks can crucially articulate shared
bodies of political and aesthetic desire and meaning. According to author
Matthew Stadler, literature is by nature communal. “Literature is not owned,”
he writes. “It is, by definition, a space of mutually negotiated meanings that
never closes or concludes, a space that thrives on — indeed requires — open
access and sharing.”
In a roundtable discussion published in _New Formations_ , _Aaaaaarg_ founder
Sean Dockray remarks that the site “actively explored and exploited the
affordances of asynchronous, networked communication,” functioning upon the
logic of the hack. Dockray continues: “But all of this is rather commonplace
for what’s called ‘piracy,’ isn’t it?” Pirate librarianship can be thought of
as a practice of civil disobedience within the stringent information
environment of today.
These projects promise both the realization and destruction of the public
library. They promote information democracy while calling the _professional_
institution of the Library into question, allowing amateurs to upload,
catalog, lend and maintain collections. In _Public Library: An Essay_ , Public
Library’s organizers _[write](https://www.memoryoftheworld.org/blog/2014/10/27
/public-library-an-essay/)_ : “With the emergence of the internet…
librarianship has been given an opportunity… to include thousands of amateur
librarians who will, together with the experts, build a distributed peer-to-peer network to care for the catalog of available knowledge.”
Public Library frames amateur librarianship as a free, collaboratively
maintained and democratic activity, drawing upon the language of the French
Revolution and extending it for the 21st century. While these practices are
democratic in form, they are not necessarily democratic in the populist sense;
rather, they focus on bringing high theoretical discourses to people outside
the academy. Accordingly, they attract a modest but engaged audience of
critics, artists, designers, activists, and scholars.
The activities of Aaaaaarg and Public Library may fall closer to ‘ _[peer
preservation](http://computationalculture.net/article/book-piracy-as-peer-preservation)_ ’
than ‘peer production,’ as the desires to share information
widely and to preserve these collections against shutdown often come into
conflict. In a _[recent piece](http://supercommunity.e-flux.com/texts/sharing-instinct/)_ for e-flux coauthored with Lawrence Liang, Dockray accordingly
laments “the unfortunate fact that digital shadow libraries have to operate
somewhat below the radar: it introduces a precariousness that doesn’t allow
imagination to really expand, as it becomes stuck on techniques of evasion,
distribution, and redundancy.”
UbuWeb and Monoskop, which digitize rare, out-of-print art texts and media
rather than in-print titles, can be said to fulfill the aims of preservation
and access. UbuWeb and Monoskop are openly used and discussed as classroom
resources and in online arts journalism more frequently than the more
aggressively anti-copyright sources; more on-the-record and mainstream
visibility likely -- but doesn’t necessarily -- equate to wider usage.
**From Alternative Space to Alternative Media**
Aaaaaarg _[locates itself as a
‘scaffolding’](http://chtodelat.org/b9-texts-2/vilensky/materialities-of-independent-publishing-a-conversation-with-aaaaarg-chto-delat-i-cite-mute-and-neural/)_ between institutions, a platform that unfolds between institutional
gaps and fills them in, rather than directly opposing them. Over ten years
after it was founded, it continues to provide a community for “niche”
varieties of political critique.
Drawing upon different strains of ‘alternative networking,’ the digital
text-sharing underground gives a voice to those quieted by the mechanisms of
institutional archives, publishing, and galleries. On the one hand, pirate
libraries extend the logic of alternative art spaces/artist-run spaces that
challenge the “white cube” and the art market; instead, they showcase ways of
making that are often ephemeral, performative, and anti-commercial.
Lawrence Liang refers to projects such as Aaaaaarg as “ _[ludic
libraries](http://supercommunity.e-flux.com/texts/sharing-instinct/)_ ,” as
they encourage a sense of intellectual play that deviates from well-
established norms of utility, seriousness, purpose, and property.
Just as alternative, community-oriented art spaces promote “fringe” art forms,
the pirate libraries build upon open digital architectures to promote “fringe”
scholarship, art, technological and archival practices. Though the comparison
between physical architecture and virtual architecture is a metaphor here, the
impact upon creative communities runs parallel.
At the same time, the digital text-sharing underground builds upon Robert W.
McChesney’s calls in _Digital Disconnect_ for a democratic media system that
promotes the expansion of public, student and community journalism. A truly
heterogeneous media system, for McChesney, would promote a multiplicity of
opinions, supplementing for-profit mass media with a substantial and varied
portion of nonprofit and independent media.
In order to create a political system – and a media system – that reflects
multiple interests, rather than the supposedly neutral status quo, we must
support truly free, not-for-profit alternatives to corporate journalism and
“clickbait” media designed to lure traffic for advertisers. We must support
creative platforms that encourage blending high-academic language with pop-
culture; quantitative analysis with art-making; appropriation with
authenticity: the pirate libraries serve just these purposes.
Pirate libraries help bring about what Gary Hall calls the “unbound book” as
text-form; as he writes, we can perceive such a digital book “as liquid and
living, open to being continually updated and collaboratively written, edited,
annotated, critiqued, updated, shared, supplemented, revised, re-ordered,
reiterated and reimagined.” These projects allow us to re-imagine both
archival practices and the digital book for social networks based on the gift.
Aaaaaarg, Monoskop, UbuWeb, and Public Library build a record of critical and
artistic discourse that is held in common, user-responsive and networkable.
Amateur librarians sustain these projects through technological ‘hacks’ that
innovate upon present archival tools and push digital preservation practices
forward.
Pirate libraries critique the ivory tower’s monopoly over the digital book.
They posit a space where alternative communities can flourish.
Between the cracks of the new information capital, the digital text-sharing
underground fosters the coming-into-being of another kind of information
society, one in which the historical record is the democratically-shared basis
for new forms of knowledge.
From this we should take away the understanding that _piracy is normal_ and
the public domain it builds is abundant. While these practices will continue
just beneath the official surface of the information economy, it is high time
for us to demand that our legal structures catch up.
Stankievech
Letter to the Superior Court of Quebec Regarding Arg.org
2016
Letter to the Superior Court of Quebec Regarding Arg.org
Charles Stankievech
19 January 2016
To the Superior Court of Quebec:
I am writing in support of the online community and library platform called “Arg.org” (also known under additional aliases and
urls including “aaaaarg.org,” “grr.aaaaarg.org,” and most recently
“grr.aaaaarg.fail”). It is my understanding that a copyright infringement lawsuit has been leveled against two individuals who
support this community logistically. This letter will address what
I believe to be the value of Arg.org to a variety of communities
and individuals; it is written to encompass my perspective on the
issue from three distinct positions: (1) As Director of the Visual
Studies Program, Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design,
University of Toronto, where I am a professor and oversee three
degree streams for both graduate and undergraduate students;
(2) As the co-director of an independent publishing house based
in Berlin, Germany, and Toronto, Canada, which works with international institutions around the world; (3) As a scholar and writer
who has published in a variety of well-regarded international
journals and presses. While I outline my perspective in relation to
these professional positions below, please note that I would also
be willing to testify via video-conference to further articulate
my assessment of Arg.org’s contribution to a diverse international
community of artists, scholars, and independent researchers.
98
Essay continuing from page 49
“Warburgian tradition.”47 If we consider the Warburg Library
in its simultaneous role as a contained space and the reflection
of an idiosyncratic mental energy, General Stumm’s aforementioned feeling of “entering an enormous brain” seems an
especially concise description. Indeed, for Saxl the librarian,
“the books remain a body of living thought as Warburg had
planned,”48 showing “the limits and contents of his scholarly
worlds.”49 Developed as a research tool to solve a particular
intellectual problem—and comparable on a number of levels
to exhibition-led inquiry—Aby Warburg’s organically structured, themed library is a three-dimensional instance of a library that performatively articulates and potentiates itself,
which is not yet to say exhibits, as both spatial occupation and
conceptual arrangement, where the order of things emerges
experimentally, and in changing versions, from the collection
and its unusual cataloging.50
47
48
49
50
Saxl speaks of “many tentative and personal excrescences” (“The History of
Warburg’s Library,” 331). When Warburg fell ill in 1920 with a subsequent fouryear absence, the library was continued by Saxl and Gertrud Bing, the new and
later closest assistant. Despite the many helpers, according to Saxl, Warburg always
remained the boss: “everything had the character of a private book collection, where
the master of the house had to see it in person that the bills were paid in time,
that the bookbinder chose the right material, or that neither he nor the carpenter
delivering a new shelf over-charged” (Ibid., 329).
Ibid., 331.
Ibid., 329.
A noteworthy aside: Gertrud Bing was in charge of keeping a meticulous index of
names and keywords; evoking the library catalog of Borges’s fiction, Warburg even
kept an “index of un-indexed books.” See Diers, “Porträt aus Büchern,” 21.
99
1. Arg.org supports a collective & semiprivate community of
academics & intellectuals.
As the director of a graduate-level research program at the University of Toronto, I have witnessed first-hand the evolution
of academic research. Arg.org has fostered a vibrant community
of thinkers, students, and writers, who can share their research
and create new opportunities for collaboration and learning
because of the knowledge infrastructure provided by the platform.
The accusation of copyright infringement leveled against the
community misses the point of the research platform altogether.
While there are texts made available for download at no expense
through the Arg.org website, it is essential to note that these texts
are not advertised, nor are they accessible to the general public.
Arg.org is a private community whose sharing platform can only
be accessed by invitation. Such modes of sharing have always
existed in academic communities; for example, when a group of
professors would share Xerox copies of articles they want to read
together as part of a collaborative research project. Likewise,
it would be hard to imagine a community of readers at any time
in history without the frequent lending and sharing of books.
From this perspective, Arg.org should be understood within a
twenty-first century digital ethos, where the sharing of intellectual
property and the generation of derivative IP occurs through collaborative platforms. On this point, I want to draw further attention
to two fundamental aspects of Arg.org.
a. One essential feature of the Arg.org platform is that it gives
invited users the ability to create reading lists from available texts—
what are called on the website “collections.” These collections
are made up of curated folders containing text files (usually in
Portable Document Format); such collections allow for new and
novel associations of texts, and the development of working
bibliographies that assist in research. Users can discover previously unfamiliar materials—including entire books and excerpted
chapters, essays, and articles—through these shared collections.
Based on the popularity of previous collections I have personally
assembled on the Arg.org platform, I have been invited to give
100
In the Memory Hall of Reproductions
Several photographs document how the Warburg Library was
also a backdrop for Warburg’s picture panels, the wood boards
lined with black fabric, which, not unlike contemporary mood
boards, held the visual compositions he would assemble and
re-assemble from around 2,000 photographs, postcards, and
printed reproductions cut out of books and newspapers.
Sometimes accompanied by written labels or short descriptions, the panels served as both public displays and researchin-process, and were themselves photographed with the aim
to eventually be disseminated as book pages in publications.
In the end, not every publishing venture was realized, and
most panels themselves were even lost along the way; in fact,
today, the panel photographs are the only visual remainder of
this type of research from the Warburg Institute. Probably the
most acclaimed of the panels are those which Warburg developed in close collaboration with his staff during the last years
of his life and from which he intended to create a sequential
picture atlas of human memory referred to as the Mnemosyne
Atlas. Again defying the classical boundaries of the disciplines, Warburg had appropriated visual material from the
archives of art history, natural philosophy, and science to
vividly evoke and articulate his thesis through the creation of
unprecedented associations. Drawing an interesting analogy,
the following statement from Warburg scholar Kurt Forster
underlines the importance of the panels for the creation of
meaning:
Warburg’s panels belong into the realm of the montage à la Schwitters or Lissitzky. Evidently, such a
101
guest lectures at various international venues; such invitations
demonstrate that this cognitive work is considered original
research and a valuable intellectual exercise worthy of further
discussion.
b. The texts uploaded to the Arg.org platform are typically documents scanned from the personal libraries of users who have
already purchased the material. As a result, many of the documents are combinations of the original published text and annotations or notes from the reader. Commentary is a practice that
has been occurring for centuries; in Medieval times, the technique
of adding commentary directly onto a published page for future
readers to read alongside the original writing was called “Glossing.”
Much of the philosophy, theology, and even scientific theories
were originally produced in the margins of other texts. For example, in her translation and publication of Charles Babbage’s lecture
on the theory of the first computer, Ada Lovelace had more notes
than the original lecture. Even though the text was subsequently
published as Babbage’s work, today modern scholarship acknowledges Lovelace as important voice in the theorization of the
modern computer due to these vital marginal notes.
2. Arg.org supports small presses.
Since 2011, I have been the co-founder and co-director of
K. Verlag, an independent press based in Berlin, Germany, and
Toronto, Canada. The press publishes academic books on art
and culture, as well as specialty books on art exhibitions. While
I am aware of the difficulties faced by small presses in terms of
profitability, especially given fears that the sharing of books online
could further hurt book sales; however, my experience has been
in the opposite direction. At K. Verlag, we actually upload our new
publications directly to Arg.org because we know the platform
reaches an important community of readers and thinkers. Fully
conscious of the uniqueness of printed books and their importance, digital circulation of ebooks and scanned physical books
present a range of different possibilities in reaching our audiences
in a variety of ways. Some members of Arg.org may be too
102
comparison does not need to claim artistic qualities
for Warburg’s panels, nor does it deny them regarding
Schwitters’s or Lissitzky’s collages. It simply lifts the
role of graphic montage from the realm of the formal
into the realm of the construction of meaning.51
Interestingly, even if Forster makes a point not to categorize
Warburg’s practice as art, in twentieth-century art theory and
visual culture scholarship, his idiosyncratic technique has
evidently been mostly associated with art practice. In fact,
insofar as Warburg is acknowledged (together with Marcel
Duchamp and, perhaps, the less well-known André Malraux),
it is as one of the most important predecessors for artists
working with the archive.52 Forster articulates the traditional
assumption that only artists were “allowed” to establish idiosyncratic approaches and think with objects outside of the
box. However, within the relatively new discourse of the
“curatorial,” contra the role of the “curator,” the curatorial
delineates its territory as that which is no longer defined exclusively by what the curator does (i.e. responsibilities of classification and care) but rather as a particular agency in terms of
epistemologically and spatially working with existing materials and collections. Consequently, figures such as Warburg
51
52
Kurt Forster, quoted in Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, “Gerhard Richter’s Atlas: Das anomische Archiv,” in Paradigma Fotografie: Fotokritik am Ende des fotografischen Zeitalters,
ed. Herta Wolf (Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2002), 407, with further references.
One such example is the Atlas begun by Gerhard Richter in 1962; another is
Thomas Hirschhorn’s large-format, mixed-media collage series MAPS. Entitled
Foucault-Map (2008), The Map of Friendship Between Art and Philosophy (2007),
and Hannah-Arendt-Map (2003), these works are partly made in collaboration
with the philosopher Marcus Steinweg. They bring a diverse array of archival and
personal documents or small objects into associative proximities and reflect the
complex impact philosophy has had on Hirschhorn’s art and thinking.
103
poor to afford to buy our books (eg. students with increasing debt,
precarious artists, or scholars in countries lacking accessible
infrastructures for high-level academic research). We also realize
that Arg.org is a library-community built over years; the site
connects us to communities and individuals making original work
and we are excited if our books are shared by the writers, readers,
and artists who actively support the platform. Meanwhile, we
have also seen that readers frequently discover books from our
press through a collection of books on Arg.org, download the
book for free to browse it, and nevertheless go on to order a print
copy from our shop. Even when this is not the case, we believe
in the environmental benefit of Arg.org; printing a book uses
valuable resources and then requires additional shipping around
the world—these practices contradict our desire for the broadest
dissemination of knowledge through the most environmentallyconscious of means.
3. Arg.org supports both official institutional academics
& independent researchers.
As a professor at the University of Toronto, I have access to one
of the best library infrastructures in the world. In addition to
core services, this includes a large number of specialty libraries,
archives, and massive online resources for research. Such
an investment by the administration of the university is essential
to support the advanced research conducted in the numerous
graduate programs and by research chairs. However, there are
at least four ways in which the official, sanctioned access to these
library resources can at times fall short.
a. Physical limitations. While the library might have several copies
of a single book to accommodate demand, it is often the case
that these copies are simultaneously checked out and therefore
not available when needed for teaching or writing. Furthermore,
the contemporary academic is required to constantly travel for
conferences, lectures, and other research obligations, but travelling with a library is not possible. Frequently while I am working
abroad, I access Arg.org to find a book which I have previously
104
and Malraux, who thought apropos objects in space (even
when those objects are dematerialized as reproductions),
become productive forerunners across a range of fields: from
art, through cultural studies and art history, to the curatorial.
Essential to Warburg’s library and Mnemosyne Atlas, but
not yet articulated explicitly, is that the practice of constructing two-dimensional, heterogeneous image clusters shifts the
value between an original work of art and its mechanical
reproduction, anticipating Walter Benjamin’s essay written a
decade later.53 While a museum would normally exhibit an
original of Albrecht Dürer’s Melencolia I (1514) so it could be
contemplated aesthetically (admitting that even as an etching
it is ultimately a form of reproduction), when inserted as a
quotidian reprint into a Warburgian constellation and exhibited within a library, its “auratic singularity”54 is purposefully
challenged. Favored instead is the iconography of the image,
which is highlighted by way of its embeddedness within a
larger (visual-emotional-intellectual) economy of human consciousness.55 As it receives its impetus from the interstices
53
54
55
One of the points Benjamin makes in “The Artwork in the Age of Mechanical
Reproduction” is that reproducibility increases the “exhibition value” of a work of art,
meaning its relationship to being viewed is suddenly valued higher than its
relationship to tradition and ritual (“cult value”); a process which, as Benjamin writes,
nevertheless engenders a new “cult” of remembrance and melancholy (224–26).
Benjamin defines “aura” as the “here and now” of an object, that is, as its spatial,
temporal, and physical presence, and above all, its uniqueness—which in his
opinion is lost through reproduction. Ibid., 222.
It is worth noting that Warburg wrote his professorial dissertation on Albrecht
Dürer. Another central field of his study was astrology, which Warburg examined
from historical and philosophical perspectives. It is thus not surprising to find
out that Dürer’s Melencolia I (1514), addressing the relationship between the
human and the cosmos, was of the highest significance to Warburg as a recurring
theme. The etching is shown, for instance, as image 8 of Plate 58, “Kosmologie bei
Dürer” (Cosmology in Dürer); reproduced in Warnke, ed., Aby Moritz Warburg:
Der Bilderatlas Mnemosyne, Gesammelte Schriften, Vol. 1, 106–7. The connections
105
purchased, and which is on my bookshelf at home, but which
is not in my suitcase. Thus, the Arg.org platform acts as a patch
for times when access to physical books is limited—although
these books have been purchased (either by the library or the
reader herself) and the publisher is not being cheated of profit.
b. Lack of institutional affiliation. The course of one’s academic
career is rarely smooth and is increasingly precarious in today’s
shift to a greater base of contract sessional instructors. When
I have been in-between institutions, I lost access to the library
resources upon which my research and scholarship depended.
So, although academic publishing functions in accord with library
acquisitions, there are countless intellectuals—some of whom
are temporary hires or in-between job appointments, others whom
are looking for work, and thus do not have access to libraries.
In this position, I would resort to asking colleagues and friends
to share their access or help me by downloading articles through
their respective institutional portals. Arg.org helps to relieve
this precarity through a shared library which allows scholarship
to continue; Arg.org is thus best described as a community of
readers who share their research and legally-acquired resources
so that when someone is researching a specific topic, the adequate book/essay can be found to fulfill the academic argument.
c. Special circumstances of non-traditional education. Several
years ago, I co-founded the Yukon School of Visual Arts in
Dawson City as a joint venture between an Indigenous government and the State college. Because we were a tiny school,
we did not fit into the typical academic brackets regarding student
population, nor could we access the sliding scale economics
of academic publishers. As a result, even the tiniest package for
a “small” academic institution would be thousands of times larger
than our population and budget. As a result, neither myself
nor my students could access the essential academic resources
required for a post-secondary education. I attempted to solve this
problem by forging partnerships, pulling in favors, and accessing
resources through platforms like Arg.org. It is important to realize
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among text and image, visual display and publishing, the
expansive space of the library and the dense volume of the
book, Aby Warburg’s wide-ranging work appears to be best
summarized by the title of one of the Mnemosyne plates:
“Book Browsing as a Reading of the Universe.”56
To the Paper Museum
Warburg had already died before Benjamin theorized the
impact of mechanical reproduction on art in 1935. But it is
Malraux who claims to have embarked on a lengthy, multipart project about similitudes in the artistic heritage of the
world in exactly the same year, and for whom, in opposition
to the architectonic space of the museum, photographic
reproduction, montage, and the book are the decisive filters
through which one sees the world. At the outset of his book
Le Musée imaginaire (first published in 1947),57 Malraux argues
that the secular modern museum has been crucial in reframing and transforming objects into art, both by displacing
them from their original sacred or ritual context and purpose,
and by bringing them into proximity and adjacency
with one another, thereby opening new possible readings
56
57
and analogies between Warburg’s image-based research and his theoretical ideas,
and von Trier’s Melancholia, are striking; see Anna-Sophie Springer’s visual essay
“Reading Rooms Reading Machines” on p. 91 of this book.
“Buchblättern als Lesen des Universums,” Plate 23a, reproduced in Warnke, Aby
Moritz Warburg: Der Bilderatlas Mnemosyne, Gesammelte Schriften, Vol. 1, 38–9.
The title of the English translation, The Museum Without Walls, by Stuart Gilbert
and Francis Price (London: Secker & Warburg, 1967), must be read in reference
to Erasmus’s envisioning of a “library without walls,” made possible through the
invention of the printing press, as Anthony Grafton mentions in his lecture, “The
Crisis of Reading,” The CUNY Graduate Center, New York, 10 November 2014.
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that Arg.org was founded to meet these grassroots needs; the
platform supports a vast number of educational efforts, including
co-research projects, self-organized reading groups, and numerous other non-traditional workshops and initiatives.
d. My own writing on Arg.org. While using the platform, I have frequently come across my own essays and publications on the
site; although I often upload copies of my work to Arg.org myself,
these copies had been uploaded by other users. I was delighted
to see that other users found my publications to be of value and
were sharing my work through their curated “collections.” In some
cases, I held outright exclusive copyright on the text and I was
pleased it was being distributed. In other rare cases, I shared the
copyright or was forced to surrender my IP prior to publication;
I was still happy to see this type of document uploaded. I realize
it is not within my authority to grant copyright that is shared,
however, the power structure of contemporary publishing is often
abusive towards the writer. Massive, for-profit corporations have
dominated the publishing of academic texts and, as a result of
their power, have bullied young academics into signing away their
IP in exchange for publication. Even the librarians at Harvard
University—who spend over $3.75 million USD annually on journal subscriptions alone—believe that the economy of academic
publishing and bullying by a few giants has crossed a line, to the
point where they are boycotting certain publishers and encouraging faculty to publish instead in open access journals.
I want to conclude my letter of support by affirming that
Arg.org is at the cutting edge of academic research and knowledge
production. Sean Dockray, one of the developers of Arg.org,
is internationally recognized as a leading thinker regarding the
changing nature of research through digital platforms; he is regularly invited to academic conferences to discuss how the community on the Arg.org platform is experimenting with digital research.
Reading, publishing, researching, and writing are all changing
rapidly as networked digital culture influences professional and
academic life more and more frequently. Yet, our legal frameworks and business models are always slower than the practices
(“metamorphoses”) of individual objects—and, even more
critically, producing the general category of art itself. As
exceptions to this process, Malraux names those creations that
are so embedded in their original architecture that they defy
relocation in the museum (such as church windows, frescoes,
or monuments); this restriction of scale and transportation, in
fact, resulted in a consistent privileging of painting and sculpture within the museological apparatus.58
Long before networked societies, with instant Google
Image searches and prolific photo blogs, Malraux dedicated
himself to the difficulty of accessing works and oeuvres
distributed throughout an international topography of institutions. He located a revolutionary solution in the dematerialization and multiplication of visual art through photography
and print, and, above all, proclaimed that an imaginary museum
based on reproductions would enable the completion of a
meaningful collection of artworks initiated by the traditional
museum.59 Echoing Benjamin’s theory regarding the power of
the reproduction to change how art is perceived, Malraux
writes, “Reproduction is not the origin but a decisive means
for the process of intellectualization to which we subject art.
58
59
I thank the visual culture scholar Antonia von Schöning for pointing me to
Malraux after reading my previous considerations of the book-as-exhibition. Von
Schöning herself is author of the essay “Die universelle Verwandtschaft zwischen
den Bildern: André Malraux’Musée Imaginaire als Familienalbum der Kunst,”
kunsttexte.de, April 2012, edoc.hu-berlin.de/kunsttexte/2012-1/von-schoening
-antonia-5/PDF/von-schoening.pdf.
André Malraux, Psychologie der Kunst: Das imaginäre Museum (Baden-Baden:
Woldemar Klein Verlag, 1949), 9; see also Rosalind Krauss, “The Ministry of
Fate,” in A New History of French Literature, ed. Denis Hollier (Cambridge, MA
and London: Harvard University Press, 1989), 1000–6: “The photographic archive
itself, insofar as it is the locale of a potentially complete assemblage of world
artifacts, is a repository of knowledge in a way that no individual museum could
ever be” (1001).
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of artists and technologists. Arg.org is a non-profit intellectual
venture and should therefore be considered as an artistic experiment, a pedagogical project, and an online community of coresearchers; it should not be subject to the same legal judgments
designed to thwart greedy profiteers and abusive practices.
There are certainly some documents to be found on Arg.org that
have been obtained by questionable or illegal means—every
Web 2.0 platform is bound to find such examples, from Youtube
to Facebook; however, such examples occur as a result of a small
number of participant users, not because of two dedicated individuals who logistically support the platform. A strength of Arg.org
and a source of its experimental vibrancy is its lack of policing,
which fosters a sense of freedom and anonymity which are both
vital elements for research within a democratic society and
the foundations of any library system. As a result of this freedom,
there are sometimes violations of copyright. However, since
Arg.org is a committed, non-profit community-library, such transgressions occur within a spirit of sharing and fair use that characterize this intellectual community. This sharing is quite different
from the popular platform Academia.edu, which is searchable
by non-users and acquires value by monetizing its articles through
the sale of digital advertising space and a nontransparent investment exit strategy. Arg.org is the antithesis of such a model
and instead fosters a community of learning through its platform.
Please do not hesitate to contact me for further information,
or to testify as a witness.
Regards,
Charles Stankievech,
Director of Visual Studies Program, University of Toronto
Co-Director of K. Verlag, Berlin & Toronto
… Medieval works, as diverse as the tapestry, the glass window,
the miniature, the fresco, and the sculpture become united as
one family if reproduced together on one page.”60 In his search
for a common visual rhetoric, Malraux went further than
merely arranging creations from one epoch and cultural sphere
by attempting to collect and directly juxtapose artworks and
artifacts from very diverse and distant cultural, historical, and
geographic contexts.
His richly illustrated series of books thus functions as a
utopian archive of new temporalities of art liberated from
history and scale by de-contextualizing and re-situating the
works, or rather their reproduced images, in unorthodox combinations. Le Musée imaginaire was thus an experimental virtual
museum intended to both form a repository of knowledge and
provide a space of association and connection that could not
be sustained by any other existing place or institution. From an
art historical point of view—Malraux was not a trained scholar
and was readily criticized by academics—his theoretical
assumptions of “universal kinship” (von Schöning) and the
“anti-destiny” of art have been rejected. His material selection
process and visual appropriation and manipulation through
framing, lighting, and scale, have also been criticized for their
problematic and often controversial—one could say, colonizing—implications.61 Among the most recent critics is the art
historian Walter Grasskamp, who argues that Malraux moreover might well have plagiarized the image-based work of the
60
61
André Malraux, Das imaginäre Museum, 16.
See the two volumes of Georges Duthuit, Le Musée Inimaginable (Paris: J. Corti,
1956); Ernst Gombrich, “André Malraux and the Crisis of Expressionism,” The
Burlington Magazine 96 (1954): 374–78; Michel Merlot, “L’art selon André Malraux,
du Musée imaginaire à l’Inventaire general,” In Situ 1 (2001), www.insitu.revues
.org/1053; and von Schöning, “Die universelle Verwandtschaft zwischen den Bildern.”