Over the last few monsoons I lived with the dread that the rain would
eventually find its ways through my leaky terrace roof and destroy my books.
Last August my fears came true when I woke up in the middle of the night to
see my room flooded and water leaking from the roof and through the walls.
Much of the night was spent rescuing the books and shifting them to a dry
room. While timing and speed were essential to the task at hand they were also
the key hazards navigating a slippery floor with books perched till one’s
neck. At the end of the rescue mission, I sat alone, exhausted amongst a
mountain of books assessing the damage that had been done, but also having
found books I had forgotten or had not seen in years; books which I had
thought had been permanently borrowed by others or misplaced found their way
back as I set many aside in a kind of ritual of renewed commitment.
Sorting the badly damaged from the mildly wet, I could not help but think
about the fragile histories of books from the library of Alexandria to the
great Florence flood of 1966. It may have seemed presumptuous to move from the
precarity of one’s small library and collection to these larger events, but is
there any other way in which one experiences earth-shattering events if not
via a microcosmic filtering through one’s own experiences? I sent a distressed
email to a friend Sandeep a committed bibliophile and book collector with a
fantastic personal library, who had also been responsible for many of my new
acquisitions. He wrote back on August 17, and I quote an extract of the email:
> Dear Lawrence
>
> I hope your books are fine. I feel for you very deeply, since my nightmares
about the future all contain as a key image my books rotting away under a
steady drip of grey water. Where was this leak, in the old house or in the
new? I spent some time looking at the books themselves: many of them I greeted
like old friends. I see you have Lewis Hyde’s _Trickster Makes the World_ and
Edward Rice’s _Captain Sir Richard Francis Burton_ in the pile: both top-class
books. (Burton is a bit of an obsession with me. The man did and saw
everything there was to do and see, and thought about it all, and wrote it all
down in a massive pile of notes and manuscripts. He squirrelled a fraction of
his scholarship into the tremendous footnotes to the Thousand and One Nights,
but most of it he could not publish without scandalising the Victorians, and
then he died, and his widow made a bonfire in the backyard, and burnt
everything because she disapproved of these products of a lifetime’s labors,
and of a lifetime such as few have ever had, and no one can ever have again. I
almost hope there is a special hell for Isabel Burton to burn in.)
Moving from one’s personal pile to the burning of the work of one of the
greatest autodidacts of the nineteenth century and back it was strangely
comforting to be reminded that libraries—the greatest of time machines
invented—were testimonies to both the grandeur and the fragility of
civilizations. Whenever I enter huge libraries it is with a tingling sense of
excitement normally reserved for horror movies, but at the same time this same
sense of awe is often accompanied by an almost debilitating sense of what it
means to encounter finitude as it is dwarfed by centuries of words and
scholarship. Yet strangely when I think of libraries it is rarely the New York
public library that comes to mind even as I wish that we could have similar
institutions in India. I think instead of much smaller collections—sometimes
of institutions but often just those of friends and acquaintances. I enjoy
browsing through people’s bookshelves, not just to discern their reading
preferences or to discover for myself unknown treasures, but also to take
delight in the local logic of their library, their spatial preferences and to
understand the order of things not as a global knowledge project but as a
personal, often quirky rationale.
[ ](//images.e-flux-systems.com/2012_09_library-of-congress.jpg,2000 "Machine
room for book transportation at the Library of Congress, early 20th century.")
Machine room for book transportation at the Library of Congress, early 20th
century.
Like romantic love, bibliophilia is perhaps shaped by one’s first love. The
first library that I knew intimately was a little six by eight foot shop
hidden in a by-lane off one of the busiest roads in Bangalore, Commercial
street. From its name to what it contained, Mecca stores could well have been
transported out of an Arabian nights tale. One side of the store was lined
with plastic ware and kitchen utensils of every shape and size while the other
wall was piled with books, comics, and magazines. From my eight-year-old
perspective it seemed large enough to contain all the knowledge of the world.
I earned a weekly stipend packing noodles for an hour every day after school
in the home shop that my parents ran, which I used to either borrow or buy
second hand books from the store. I was usually done with them by Sunday and
would have them reread by Wednesday. The real anguish came in waiting from
Wednesday to Friday for the next set. After finally acquiring a small
collection of books and comics myself I decided—spurred on by a fatal
combination of entrepreneurial enthusiasm and a pedantic desire to educate
others—to start a small library myself. Packing my books into a small aluminum
case and armed with a makeshift ledger, I went from house to house convincing
children in the neighborhood to forgo twenty-five paisa in exchange for a book
or comic with an additional caveat that they were not to share them with any
of their friends. While the enterprise got off to a reasonable start it soon
met its end when I realized that despite my instructions, my friends were
generously sharing the comics after they were done with them, which thereby
ended my biblioempire ambitions.
Over the past few years the explosion of ebook readers and consequent rise in
the availability of pirated books have opened new worlds to my booklust.
[Library.nu](library.nu), which began as gigapedia, suddenly made the idea of
the universal library seem like reality. By the time it shut down in February
2012 the library had close to a million books and over half a million active
users. Bibliophiles across the world were distraught when the site was shut
down and if it were ever possible to experience what the burning of the
library of Alexandria must have felt it was that collective ache of seeing the
closure of [library.nu.](library.nu)
What brings together something as monumental as the New York public library, a
collective enterprise like [library.nu](library.nu) and Mecca stores if not
the word library? As spaces they may have little in common but as virtual
spaces they speak as equals even if the scale of their imagination may differ.
All of them partake of their share in the world of logotopias. In an
exhibition designed to celebrate the place of the library in art, architecture
and imagination the curator Sascha Hastings coined the term logotopia to
designate “word places”—a happy coincidence of architecture and language.
There is however a risk of flattening the differences between these spaces by
classifying them all under a single utopian ideal of the library. Imagination
after all has a geography and physiology and requires our alertness to these
distinctions. Lets think instead of an entire pantheon (both of spaces as well
as practices) that we can designate as shadow libraries (or shadow logotopias
if you like) which exist in the shadows cast by the long history of monumental
libraries. While they are often dwarfed by the idea of the library, like the
shadows cast by our bodies, sometimes these shadows surge ahead of the body.
[ ](//images.e-flux-systems.com/2012_09_london-blitz-WEB.jpg,2000 "The London
Library after the Blitz, c. 1940.")
The London Library after the Blitz, c. 1940.
At the heart of all libraries lies a myth—that of the burning of the library
of Alexandria. No one knows what the library of Alexandria looked like or
possesses an accurate list of its contents. What we have long known though is
a sense of loss. But a loss of what? Of all the forms of knowledge in the
world in a particular time. Because that was precisely what the library of
Alexandria sought to collect under its roofs. It is believed that in order to
succeed in assembling a universal library, King Ptolemy I wrote “to all the
sovereigns and governors on earth” begging them to send to him every kind of
book by every kind of author, “poets and prose-writers, rhetoricians and
sophists, doctors and soothsayers, historians, and all others too.” The king’s
scholars had calculated that five hundred thousand scrolls would be required
if they were to collect in Alexandria “all the books of all the peoples of the
world.”1
What was special about the Library of Alexandria was the fact that until then
the libraries of the ancient world were either private collections of an
individual or government storehouses where legal and literary documents were
kept for official reference. By imagining a space where the public could have
access to all the knowledge of the world, the library also expressed a new
idea of the human itself. While the library of Alexandria is rightfully
celebrated, what is often forgotten in the mourning of its demise is another
library—one that existed in the shadows of the grand library but whose
whereabouts ensured that it survived Caesar’s papyrus destroying flames.
According to the Sicilian historian Diodorus Siculus, writing in the first
century BC, Alexandria boasted a second library, the so-called daughter
library, intended for the use of scholars not affiliated with the Museion. It
was situated in the south-western neighborhood of Alexandria, close to the
temple of Serapis, and was stocked with duplicate copies of the Museion
library’s holdings. This shadow library survived the fire that destroyed the
primary library of Alexandria but has since been eclipsed by the latter’s
myth.
Alberto Manguel says that if the library of Alexandria stood tall as an
expression of universal ambitions, there is another structure that haunts our
imagination: the tower of Babel. If the library attempted to conquer time, the
tower sought to vanquish space. He says “The Tower of Babel in space and the
Library of Alexandria in time are the twin symbols of these ambitions. In
their shadow, my small library is a reminder of both impossible yearnings—the
desire to contain all the tongues of Babel and the longing to possess all the
volumes of Alexandria.”2 Writing about the two failed projects Manguel adds
that when seen within the limiting frame of the real, the one exists only as
nebulous reality and the other as an unsuccessful if ambitious real estate
enterprise. But seen as myths, and in the imagination at night, the solidity
of both buildings for him is unimpeachable.3
The utopian ideal of the universal library was more than a question of built
up form or space or even the possibility of storing all of the knowledge of
the world; its real aspiration was in the illusion of order that it could
impose on a chaotic world where the lines drawn by a fine hairbrush
distinguished the world of animals from men, fairies from ghosts, science from
magic, and Europe from Japan. In some cases even after the physical structure
that housed the books had crumbled and the books had been reduced to dust the
ideal remained in the form of the order imagined for the library. One such
residual evidence comes to us by way of the _Pandectae_ —a comprehensive
bibliography created by Conrad Gesner in 1545 when he feared that the Ottoman
conquerors would destroy all the books in Europe. He created a bibliography
from which the library could be built again—an all embracing index which
contained a systematic organization of twenty principal groups with a matrix
like structure that contained 30,000 concepts.4
It is not surprising that Alberto Manguel would attempt write a literary,
historical and personal history of the library. As a seventeen-year-old man in
Buenos Aries, Manguel read for the blind seer Jorge Luis Borges who once
imagined in his appropriately named story—The Tower of Babel—paradise as a
kind of library. Modifying his mentor’s statement in what can be understood as
a gesture to the inevitable demands of the real and yet acknowledging the
possible pleasures of living in shadows, Manguel asserts that sometimes
paradise must adapt itself to suit circumstantial requirements. Similarly
Jacques Rancière writing about the libraries of the working class in the
eighteenth century tells us about Gauny a joiner and a boy in love with
vagrancy and botany who decides to build a library for himself. For the sons
of the poor proletarians living in Saint Marcel district, libraries were built
only a page at a time. He learnt to read by tracing the pages on which his
mother bought her lentils and would be disappointed whenever he came to the
end of a page and the next page was not available, even though he urged his
mother to buy her lentils from the same grocer. 5
[ ](//images.e-flux-systems.com/2012_09_DGF-D-Tropics-detail-hi-res-
WEB.jpg,2000 "Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Chronotopes & Dioramas , 2009.
Diorama installation at The Hispanic Society of America, New York.")
Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, _Chronotopes & Dioramas_, 2009. Diorama
installation at The Hispanic Society of America, New York.
Is the utopian ideal of the universal library as exemplified by the library of
Alexandria or modernist pedagogic institutions of the twentieth century
adequate to the task of describing the space of the shadow library, or do we
need a different account of these other spaces? In an era of the ebook reader
where the line between a book and a library is blurred, the very idea of a
library is up for grabs. It has taken me well over two decades to build a
collection of a few thousand books while around two hundred thousand books
exist as bits and bytes on my computer. Admittedly hard drives crash and data
is lost, but is that the same threat as those of rain or fire? Which then is
my library and which its shadow? Or in the spirit of logotopias would it be
more appropriate to ask the spatial question: where is the library?
If the possibility of having 200,000 books on one’s computer feels staggering
here is an even more startling statistic. The Library of Congress which is the
largest library in the world with holdings of approximately thirty million
books, which would—if they were piled on the floor—cover 364 kilometers could
potentially fit into an SD card. It is estimated that by 2030 an ordinary SD
card will have the capacity of storing up to 64 TB and assuming each book were
digitized at an average size of 1MB it would technically be possible to fit
two Libraries of Congress in one’s pocket.
It sounds like science fiction, but isn’t it the case that much of the science
fiction of a decade ago finds itself comfortably within the weaves of everyday
life. How do we make sense of the future of the library? While it may be
tempting to throw our hands up in boggled perplexity about what it means to be
able to have thirty million books lets face it: the point of libraries have
never been that you will finish what’s there. Anyone with even a modest book
collection will testify to the impossibility of ever finishing their library
and if anything at all the library stands precisely at the cusp of our
finitude and our infinity. Perhaps that is what Borges—the consummate mixer of
time and space—meant when he described paradise as a library, not as a spatial
idea but a temporal one: that it was only within the confines of infinity that
one imagine finishing reading one’s library. It would therefore be more
interesting to think of the shadow library as a way of thinking about what it
means to dwell in knowledge. While all our aspirations for a habitat should
have a utopian element to them, lets face it, utopias have always been
difficult spaces to live in.
In contrast to the idea of utopia is heterotopia—a term with its origins in
medicine (referring to an organ of the body that had been dislodged from its
usual space) and popularized by Michel Foucault both in terms of language as
well as a spatial metaphor. If utopia exists as a nowhere or imaginary space
with no connection to any existing social spaces, then heterotopias in
contrast are realities that exist and are even foundational, but in which all
other spaces are potentially inverted and contested. A mirror for instance is
simultaneously a utopia (placeless place) even as it exists in reality. But
from the standpoint of the mirror you discover your absence as well. Foucault
remarks, “The mirror functions as a heterotopia in this respect: it makes this
place that I occupy at the moment when I look at myself in the glass at once
absolutely real, connected with all the space that surrounds it, and
absolutely unreal, since in order to be perceived it has to pass through this
virtual point which is over there.”6
In _The Order of Things_ Foucault sought to investigate the conceptual space
which makes the order of knowledge possible; in his famed reading of Borges’s
Chinese encyclopedia he argues that the impossibility involved in the
encyclopedia consists less in the fantastical status of the animals and their
coexistence with real animals such as (d) sucking pigs and (e) sirens, but in
where they coexist and what “transgresses the boundaries of all imagination,
of all possible thought, is simply that alphabetical series (a, b, c, d) which
links each of those categories to all the others.” 7 Heterotopias destabilize
the ground from which we build order and in doing so reframe the very
epistemic basis of how we know.
Foucault later developed a greater spatial understanding of heterotopias in
which he uses specific examples such as the cemetery (at once the space of the
familiar since everyone has someone in the cemetery and at the heart of the
city but also over a period of time the other city, where each family
possesses its dark resting place).8 Indeed, the paradox of heterotopias is
that they are both separate from yet connected to all other spaces. This
connectedness is precisely what builds contestation into heterotopias.
Imaginary spaces such as utopias exist completely outside of order.
Heteretopias by virtue of their connectedness become sites in which epistemes
collide and overlap. They bring together heterogeneous collections of unusual
things without allowing them a unity or order established through resemblance.
Instead, their ordering is derived from a process of similitude that produces,
in an almost magical, uncertain space, monstrous combinations that unsettle
the flow of discourse.
If the utopian ideal of the library was to bring together everything that we
know of the world then the length of its bookshelves was coterminous with the
breadth of the world. But like its predecessors in Alexandria and Babel the
project is destined to be incomplete haunted by what it necessarily leaves out
and misses. The library as heterotopia reveals itself only through the
interstices and lays bare the fiction of any possibility of a coherent ground
on which a knowledge project can be built. Finally there is the question of
where we stand once the grounds that we stand on itself has been dislodged.
The answer from my first foray into the tiny six by eight foot Mecca store to
the innumerable hours spent on [ library.nu]( library.nu) remains the same:
the heterotopic pleasure of our finite selves in infinity.
×
This essay is a part of a work I am doing for an exhibition curated by Raqs
Media Collective, Sarai Reader 09. The show began on August 19, 2012, with a
deceptively empty space containing only the proposal, with ideas for the
artworks to come over a period of nine months. See .
**Lawrence Liang** is a researcher and writer based at the Alternative Law
Forum, Bangalore. His work lies at the intersection of law and cultural
politics, and has in recent years been looking at question of media piracy. He
is currently finish a book on law and justice in Hindi cinema.
It is hard to avoid the feeling these days that the future is behind us. It’s
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purpose that once drove historical progress has become impossible to sustain.
On the one hand, the faith in modernist, nationalist, or universalist utopias
continues to retreat, while on the other, a more immediate crisis of faith has
accompanied the widespread sense of diminishing economic prospects felt in so
many places. Not to mention...
Over the last few monsoons I lived with the dread that the rain would
eventually find its ways through my leaky terrace roof and destroy my books.
Last August my fears came true when I woke up in the middle of the night to
see my room flooded and water leaking from the roof and through the walls.
Much of the night was spent rescuing the books and shifting them to a dry
room. While timing and speed were essential to the task at hand they were also
the key hazards navigating a slippery floor...
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## [There’s Nothing to See Here: Erasing the
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good at her job. In 1951 she started erasing her typing mistakes with a white
tempera paint solution she mixed in her kitchen blender. She called her
invention Mistake Out and began distributing small green bottles of it to her
coworkers. In 1956 she founded the delectably named Mistake Out Company.
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## [The Last Pictures: Interview with Trevor Paglen](/journal/37/61238/the-
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## [Breaking the Contract](/journal/37/61241/breaking-the-contract/)
1\. The Contract The Duchampian revolution leads not to the liberation of the
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Shadow Libraries
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Notes - Shadow Libraries
1
Esther Shipman and Sascha Hastings eds., _Logotopia: The Library in
Architecture Art and the Imagination,_ (Cambridge Galleries: Abc Art Books
Canada, 2008).
Go to Text
2
Alberto Manguel, “My Library” in Hastings and Shipman eds. _Logotopia, The
Library in Art and Architecture and the Imagination, (Cambridge Galleries: ABC
Art Books Canada, 2008)._
Go to Text
3
Alberto Manguel, _The Library at Night_ , (Yale University Press 2009).
Go to Text
4
Ray Hastings and Esther Shipman, eds. _Logotopia: The Library in Architecture
Art and the Imagination_. Cambridge Galleries / ABC Art Books Canada, 2008.
Go to Text
5
Jacques Rancière, _The Nights of Labour: The Workers’ Dream in Nineteenth
Century France,_ (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991).
Go to Text
6
Michel Foucault, “Different Spaces,” in _Aesthetics, Method, Epistemology_ ,
ed. James D. Faubion (New York: The New Press, 1998), 179; For Foucault on
language and heterotopias see _The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the
Human Sciences,_ (New York: Pantheon, 1970).
Go to Text
7
Ibid, xv.
Go to Text
8
In Foucault, “Different Spaces,” which was presented as a lecture to the
_Architecture Studies Circle_ in 1967, a few years after the writing of _The
Order of Things_.
Go to Text
Esther Shipman and Sascha Hastings eds., _Logotopia: The Library in
Architecture Art and the Imagination,_ (Cambridge Galleries: Abc Art Books
Canada, 2008).
Alberto Manguel, “My Library” in Hastings and Shipman eds. _Logotopia, The
Library in Art and Architecture and the Imagination, (Cambridge Galleries: ABC
Art Books Canada, 2008)._
Alberto Manguel, _The Library at Night_ , (Yale University Press 2009).
Ray Hastings and Esther Shipman, eds. _Logotopia: The Library in Architecture
Art and the Imagination_. Cambridge Galleries / ABC Art Books Canada, 2008.
Jacques Rancière, _The Nights of Labour: The Workers’ Dream in Nineteenth
Century France,_ (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991).
Michel Foucault, “Different Spaces,” in _Aesthetics, Method, Epistemology_ ,
ed. James D. Faubion (New York: The New Press, 1998), 179; For Foucault on
language and heterotopias see _The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the
Human Sciences,_ (New York: Pantheon, 1970).
Ibid, xv.
In Foucault, “Different Spaces,” which was presented as a lecture to the
_Architecture Studies Circle_ in 1967, a few years after the writing of _The
Order of Things_.
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
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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
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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
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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.
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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
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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.”