»Public Library. Rethinking the Infrastructures of
Knowledge Production«
Exhibition at Württembergischer Kunstverein Stuttgart, 2014
**The present-day social model of authorship is co-substantive with the
normative regime of copyright. Copyright’s avowed role is to triangulate a
balance between the rights of authors, cultural industries, and the public.
Its legal foundation is in the natural right of the author over the products
of intellectual labor. The recurrent claims of the death of the author,
disputing the primacy of the author over the work, have failed to do much to
displace the dominant understanding of the artwork as an extension of the
personality of the author.**
The structuralist criticism positing an impersonal structuring structure
within which the work operates; the hypertexual criticism dissolving
boundaries of work in the arborescent web of referentiality; or the remix
culture’s hypostatisation of the collective and re-appropriative nature of all
creativity – while changing the meaning we ascribe to the works of culture –
have all failed to leave an impact on how the production of works is
normativized and regulated.
And yet the nexus author–work–copyright has transformed in fundamental ways,
however in ways opposite to what these openings in our social epistemology
have suggested. The figure of the creator, with the attendant apotheosis of
individual creativity and originality, is nowadays more forcefully than ever
before being mobilized and animated by the efforts to expand the exclusive
realm of exploitation of the work under copyright. The forcefulness though
speaks of a deep-seated neurosis, intimating that the purported balance might
not be what it is claimed to be by the copyright advocates. Much is revealed
as we descend into the hidden abode of production.
## _Of Copyright and Authorship_
Copyright has principally an economic function: to unambiguously establish
individualized property in the products of intellectual labor. Once the legal
title is unambiguously assigned, there is a property holder with whose consent
the contracting, commodification, and marketing of the work can proceed. In
that aspect, copyright is not very different from the requirement of formal
freedom that is granted to the laborer to contract out their own labor power
as a commodity to capital, allowing then the capital to maximize the
productivity and appropriate the products of the worker’s labor – which is in
terms of Marx »dead labor.« In fact, the analogy between the contracting of
labor force and the contracting of intellectual work does not stop there. They
also share a common history.
The liberalism of rights and the commodification of labor have emerged from
the context of waning absolutism and incipient capitalism in Europe of the
seventeenth and the eighteenth century. Before the publishers and authors
could have their monopoly over the exploitation of their publications
instituted in the form of copyright, they had to obtain a privilege to print a
book from royal censors. First printing privileges granted to publishers, for
instance in early seventeenth century Great Britain, came with the burden
placed on publishers to facilitate censorship and control over the
dissemination of the growing body of printed matter in the aftermath of the
invention of movable type printing.
The evolution of regulatory mechanisms of contemporary copyright from the
context of absolutism and early capitalism receives its full relief if one
considers how peer review emerged as a self-censoring mechanism within the
Royal Academy and the Académie des sciences. [1] The internal peer review
process helped the academies maintain the privilege to print the works of
their members, which was given to them only under the condition that the works
they publish limit themselves to matters of science and make no political
statements that could otherwise sour the benevolence of the monarch. Once they
expanded to print in their almanacs, journals, and books the works of authors
outside of the academy ranks, they both expanded their scientific authority
and their regulating function to the entire nascent field of modern science.
The transition from the privilege tied to the publisher to the privilege tied
to the natural person of the author would unfold only later. In Great Britain
this occurred as the guild of printers, Stationers’ Company, failed to secure
the extension of its printing privilege and thus, in order to continue with
the business of printing books, decided to advocate a copyright for the
authors instead, which resulted in the passing of the Copyright Act of 1709,
also known as the Statute of Anne. Thus the author became the central figure
in the regulation of literary and scientific production. Not only did the
author now receive the exclusive rights to the work, the author was also made
– as Foucault has famously analyzed – the identifiable subject of scrutiny,
censorship, and political sanction by the absolutist state or the church.
And yet, although the romantic author now took center stage, copyright
regulation, the economic compensation for the work, would long remain no more
than an honorary one. Until well into the eighteenth century literary writing
and creativity in general were regarded as resulting from the divine
inspiration and not from the individual genius of the author. Money earned in
the growing business with books mostly stayed in the hands of the publishers,
while the author received an honorarium, a flat sum that served as a »token of
esteem.« [2] It was only with the increasingly vocal demand by the authors to
secure material and political independence from the patronage and authority
that they started to make claims for rightful remuneration.
## _Of Compensation and Exploitation
_
The moment of full-blown affirmation of romantic author-function marks a
historic moment of redistribution and establishment of compromise between the
right of publishers to economic exploitation of the works and the right of
authors to rightful compensation for their works. Economically this was made
possible by the expanding market for printed books in the eighteenth and the
nineteenth century, while politically this was catalyzed by the growing desire
for autonomy of scientific and literary production from the system of feudal
patronage and censorship in gradually liberalizing modern capitalist
societies. The autonomy of production was substantially coupled to the
production for the market. However, the irenic balance could not last
unobstructed. Once the production of culture and science was subsumed under
the exigencies of the market, it had to follow the laws of commodification and
competition that no commodity production can escape.
With the development of big corporation and monopoly capitalism, [3] the
purported balance between the author and the publisher, the innovator or
scientist and the company, the labor and the capital, the public circulation
and the pressures of monetization has become unhinged. While the legislative
expansions of protections, court decisions, and multilateral treaties are
legitimated on basis of the rights of creators, they have become the economic
basis for the monopolies dominating the commanding heights of the global
economy to protect their dominant position in the world market. The levels of
concentration in the industries with large portfolios of various forms of
intellectual property rights is staggering. The film industry is a US$88
billion industry dominated by six major studios. The recorded music industry
is an almost US$20 billion industry dominated by three major labels. The
publishing industry is a US$120 billion industry, where the leading ten earn
in revenues more than the next 40 largest publishing groups. Among patent
holding industries, the situation is a little more diversified, but big patent
portfolios in general dictate the dynamics of market power.
Academic publishing in particular draws a stark relief of the state of play.
It is a US$10 billion industry dominated by five publishers, financed up to
75% from the subscriptions of libraries. It is notorious for achieving extreme
year on year profit margins – in the case of Reed Elsevier regularly well over
20%, with Taylor & Francis, Springer, and Wiley-Blackwell only just lagging
behind. [4] Given that the work of contributing authors is not paid, but
financed by their institutions (provided they are employed at an institution)
and that the publications nowadays come mostly in the form of electronic
articles licensed under subscription for temporary use to libraries and no
longer sold as printed copies, the public interest could be served at a much
lower cost by leaving commercial closed-access publishers out of the equation.
However, given the entrenched position of these publishers and their control
over the moral economy of reputation in academia, the public disservice that
they do cannot be addressed within the historic ambit of copyright. It
requires politicization.
## _Of Law and Politics_
When we look back on the history of copyright, before there was legality there
was legitimacy. In the context of an almost completely naturalized and
harmonized global regulation of copyright the political question of legitimacy
seems to be no longer on the table. An illegal copy is an object of exchange
that unsettles the existing economies of cultural production. And yet,
copyright nowadays marks a production model that serves the power of
appropriation from the author and market power of the publishers much more
than the labor of cultural producers. Hence the illegal copy is again an
object begging the question as to what do we do at a rare juncture when a
historic opening presents itself to reorganize how a good, such as knowledge
and culture, is produced and distributed in a society. We are at such a
juncture, a juncture where the regime regulating legality and illegality might
be opened to the questioning of its legitimacy or illegitimacy.
1. Jump Up For a more detailed account of this development, as well as for the history of printing privilege in Great Britain, see Mario Biagioli: »From Book Censorship to Academic Peer Review,« in: _Emergences:_ _Journal for the Study of Media & Composite Cultures _12, no. 1 [2002], pp. 11–45.
2. Jump Up The transition of authorship from honorific to professional is traced back in Martha Woodmansee: _The Author, Art, and the Market: Rereading the History of Aesthetics_. New York 1996.
3. Jump Up When referencing monopoly markets, we do not imply purely monopolistic markets, where one company is the only enterprise selling a product, but rather markets where a small number of companies hold most of the market. In monopolistic competition, oligopolies profit from not competing on prices. Rather »all the main players are large enough to survive a price war, and all it would do is shrink the size of the industry revenue pie that the firms are fighting over. Indeed, the price in an oligopolistic industry will tend to gravitate toward what it would be in a pure monopoly, so the contenders are fighting for slices of the largest possible revenue pie.« Robert W. McChesney: _Digital Disconnect: How Capitalism Is Turning the Internet Against Democracy_. New York 2013, pp. 37f. The immediate effect of monopolistic competition in culture is that the consumption is shaped to conform to the needs of the large enterprise, i.e. to accommodate the economies of scale, narrowing the range of styles, expressions, and artists published and promoted in the public.
4. Jump Up Vincent Larivière, Stefanie Haustein, and Philippe Mongeon: »The Oligopoly of Academic Publishers in the Digital Era,« in: _PLoS ONE_ 10, no. 6 [June 2015]: e0127502, doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0127502.
Tomislav Medak is a philosopher with interests in contemporary political
philosophy, media theory and aesthetics. He is coordinating the theory program
and publishing activities of the Multimedia Institute/MAMA (Zagreb/Croatia),
and works in parallel with the Zagreb-based theatre collective BADco.
Sollfrank & Goldsmith
The Poetry of Archiving
2013
Kenneth Goldsmith
The Poetry of Archiving
Berlin, 1 February 2013
[00:12]
Kenneth Goldsmith: The type of writing I do is exactly the same thing that I
do on UbuWeb. And that’s the idea that nothing new needs to be written or
created. In fact, it's the archiving and the gathering and the appropriation
of preexisting materials, that is the new mode of both writing and archiving.
[00:35] So you have a system where writing and archiving have become the
identical situation today.
[00:43]
UbuWeb
[00:47]
It started in 1996, and it began as a site for visual and concrete poetry,
which was a mid-century genre of typographical poetry. I got a scanner, and I
scanned a concrete poem. And I put it up on Ubu, and on those days the images
used to come in as interlaced GIFs, every other line filling in. So really it
was an incredible thing to watch this poem kind of grow organically. [1:21]
And it looked exactly like concrete poetry had always wanted to look – a
little bit of typographical movement. [1:27] And I thought, this is perfect.
And also, because concrete poetry is so flat and modernist, when it was
illuminated from the back by the computer screen it looked beautiful and
graphic and flat and clean. [1:40] And suddenly it was like: this is the
perfect medium for concrete poetry. Which, I do worry still, is very much a
part of Ubu. [1:50] And then, a few years later real audio came, and I began
to put up sound poetry, you know, little sound files of sound poetry. So you
could look at the concrete poetry and listen to the sound poetry. [2:07] And a
few years later we had a little bit more bandwidth, and we began to put on
videos. So this is the way the site grew. [2:16] But also what happened on Ubu
was an odd thing. Because it was concrete poetry, so I put up the poems of
John Cage – the concrete mesostics of John Cage. And then I got a little bit
of sound of John Cage reading some of these things, and suddenly it was Cage
reading a mesostic with an orchestra behind him. [2:40] And I said, wait a
minute, this no longer sound poetry, this is something else. And I thought,
what is this? And I said, ah, this is avant-garde.
[2:50] And so from there, because of Cage and Cage's practice, the whole thing
became a repository and archive for the avant-garde, which it is today. So
that's how it moved from being specifically concrete poetry in 1996, to today
being all avant-garde.
[3:09]
Avantgarde
[3:15]
[3:30] And then something happened in the digital, where it seemed to... All
of that fell off. Because we already knew that. [3:42] So it was an orphan
term. It became detached from its nefarious pre-digital context. And it was an
open term. [3:51] I was like, we can actually use this term again, avant-
garde, and redefine it as a way of, you know, multi-media, impurity,
difference, all sorts of ways that it was never allowed to be used before. So
I've actually inhabited this term, and repurposed it. [4:15] So I don't really
know what avant-garde is, it's always changing. And UbuWeb is an archive that
is not pure avant-garde. You look at it and say, no, things are wrong there.
There's rock musicians, and there's performance artists, and there's
novelists. [4:33] I mean, it doesn't quite look like the avant-garde looked
before the digital. But then, everything looks different after the digital.
[4:41]
Selection / curation
[4:46]
I don't know anything. I am a poet. I'm not a historian, I'm not an academic.
I don't know anything, I've just got a sense: that might be interesting, that
sort of feels avant-garde. I mean, it is ridiculous, it's terrible: I am the
wrong person to do this. But, you know, nobody stopped me, and so I've been
doing it. You know, anybody can do it. [5:11] It's very hard to have something
on Ubu, and that's why it's so good. That's why it's not archive-type of work,
where everything can go, and there're good things there, but there is no one
working as a gatekeeper to say, actually this is better than that. [5:26] And
I think one of the problems with net culture, or the web culture, is that
we've decided to suspend judgment. We can't say that one thing is better than
another thing, because everything is equal. There's a part of me that really
likes that idea, and it creates fabulous chaos. But I think it is a sort of a
curatorial job to go in and make sense of some of that chaos. In a very small
way, that's what I try to do on UbuWeb. [5:52] You know, it's the avant-garde,
it's not a big project. It's a rather small slice of culture that one can have
a point of view. I'm not saying that's right. It's probably very wrong. But
nobody else it's doing it, so I figured, you know… [6:12] But by virtue of the
fact that there's only one UbuWeb, it's become institutional. And the reason
that there is only one UbuWeb is that UbuWeb ignores copyright. And everybody
else, of course, is afraid of copyright. There should be hundreds of UbuWebs.
It is ridiculous that there's only one. But everybody else is afraid of
copyright, so that nobody would put anything on. [6:41] We just act like
copyright doesn't exist. Copyright, what's that? Never heard of it.
[6:48]
Contents
[5:52]
I think that these artifacts that are on UbuWeb are very valuable historically
and culturally, they are very significant. But economically, I don't think
they had that type of value. And I love small labels that try to put these
things out. But they inevitably loose money by trying to put these things out.
So when somebody does put something out, sometimes things on Ubu get released
from a small label, and I take them off the site, because I want to support
those things. [7:28] But it's hard, and people are not doing it for the money.
Nobody ever got into sound poetry or orchestral avant-garde music for the
money. [7:37] So it's kind of a weird lovely grey area that we've been able to
explore, a utopia, really, that we've been able to enact. Simply because the
economics are so sketchy.
[7:55]
Copyright
[7:59]
I am not free of fear, but I've learned over 17 years, to actually have a very
good understanding of copyright. And I have a very good understating of the
way that copyright works. So I can anticipate things. I can usually negotiate
something with somebody who, you know… [8:26] There's so many stories when
copyright is being used as a battering tool. It's not real. I had one instance
when a very powerful literary agency in New York… I received a cease and
desist DMCA Takedown, which I require a proper takedown. It was for William S.
Burroughs, and the list went on for pages and pages and pages. And then, at
the end, it says, "Under the threat of perjury, I state these facts to be
true," signed such and such person. [9:05] Now, what they did, they went into
UbuWeb and they put the words "William S. Burroughs," and they came up with
every instance of William S. Burroughs. If William S. Burroughs is mentioned
in an academic paper: that's our copyright. Nick Currie Momus wrote a song "I
Love You William S. Burroughs.” Now, Nick gave UbuWeb all of his songs. I know
that Nick owns the copyright to that. [9:30] I said, you know, it's
ridiculous! And even the things that they were claiming… It was the most
ridiculous thing. [9:37] So I wrote them back. I said: Look, I get what you're
trying to do here, but you're really going about it the wrong way. It's very
irresponsible just putting his name in the search engine, cutting and pasting,
and damn you own the copyright. You don't own the copyright to almost any of
that! And as a matter of fact, under law you perjured yourself. And I can came
right back and sue you, because this is a complete lie. But I said, look, lets
work together. If there's something that you feel that you really do own and
you really don't want there, let's talk about it, but could you please be a
little bit more reasonable. [10:13] And then of course I got a letter back,
and it's an intern, the college student saying, the state of William S.
Burroughs just asked me… [10:23] I said, look, I get it but, you know… let’s
try to do it the right way and let's see what happens. And then they came back
with another DMCA Takedown, with a much shorter list. But even in that list,
most of the copyrights didn't belong to William S. Burroughs. They belonged to
journal poetry systems, many of them were orphan. [10:45] Because in media,
often if you publish in a publication, often the publisher owns the copyright,
not the artist, you know. You have to look and see where the copyright
resides. [10:59] Finally, I said, look this is getting ridiculous. I said,
please send a note on to the executor of Burroughs' estate, who is James
Grauerholz, and he's a good guy. He's a good guy. And I said, I quoted, and I
said, look Mr. Grauerholz, William S. Burroughs' poetry wants to be free. You
know, and I quoted from Burroughs. And also it's a great thing that Burroughs
said. I said, you know, we're not making any money here. I'm not going to
pirate Naked Lunch. I know where are you making your money, and I swear I
wouldn't want to touch that. That does well on its own. [11:30] But his cut-
ups, his sound collage cut-ups? I mean, came on, no. This is for education.
This is for, you know, art schools, kindergartens and post-graduates use it.
[11:40] So this was a way in which copyright is often used as a threat, that's
not true. And then, a little bit of talking, and you can actually get back to
some logic. And then after that it was fine, and there's all the William S.
Burroughs that's there that it was always there. And everybody seems to be
okay.
[11:57]
Opt-out System
[0:12]
Things get taken down all the time. People send an email saying, you know, I
don't want that there. And I try to convince them that we don't touch any
money. Ubu runs on zero money, we don't touch any. I try to tell them that is
good, it's all feeling good, positive. [12:19] But sometimes people really
don't want their work up. And if they don't want their work up, I take it
down. An opt-out system. Why should I keep their work up if they really don't
want it there? [12:30] So it's an unstable archive. What's there today may not
be there tomorrow. And I kind of like that too.
[12:38]
Permission culture
[12:42]
I understand people get nervous. They would prefer me to ask. But if I ask, I
couldn't have built this archive. Because if you ask, you start negotiations,
you make a contract, you need lawyers, you need permissions. And if something
has... a film has music in the background by the Rolling Stones, you have to
clear the right for the Rolling Stones and pay that a little bit of money. And
you know, licenses... I couldn't do that. I do this with no money. That would
take millions… [13:14] To do UbuWeb permission, the right way, correctly,
would take millions of millions of euros. And I built this whole thing from
nothing. Zero money. [13:26] So, you know... I think I'd love to be able to
ask for permission, do things the right way. It is the right way to do things.
But it wouldn't be possible to make an archive like this, that way.
[13:40]
Cornelia Sollfrank: How much does it happen that you are approached by artists
who say, please put my work down?
[13:47]
Almost never, almost never. It's usually the estates, art dealers, the
business people, you know, who are circling around an artist. But it's almost
never artists themselves. Artists, you know... I don't know, I just think
that… [14:07] For example, we have the music concrete of Jean Dubuffet on
UbuWeb. Fantastic experimental music. And it's so great that many people now
know of a composer named Jean Dubuffet, and later they hear: he's also a
painter. Which is really very beautiful. [14:33] Now, the paintings of Jean
Dubuffet, of course, sell for millions. And the copyright, you know... You can
make a T-shirt with a Jean Dubuffet painting, they're going to want a license
for that. [14:44] But the music of Jean Dubuffet, the estate doesn't quite
understand the value of it, or what to do with it. And this is also what
happened with my Warhol book. [14:56] Before I did my Warhol book, I went to
the Warhol Foundation, because it's big money, and you don't want to get in
trouble with those guys. And I said to them, I want to do a book of Andy's
interviews. I know that they don't own the copyright, I just wanted their
blessing, from them. And they were really sweet. They laughed at me. They
said, you want Warhol's words? Take them! We are so busy dealing with
forgeries, well, you know, exactly what your piece was about. And they laughed
at me. They were like, have fun, it's all yours, glad, go away. [15:32] So I
kind of feel, if you ask Jean Dubuffet, I would assume that Dubuffet
understood that his music production was as serious as his paintings. And this
is the sort of beautiful revisionism of the avant-garde. This is a perfect
example of the revisionism of the avant-garde that I'm talking about. You say,
oh, you know, he was actually as good of a composer as he was a painter.
[15:58] So, you know, this is the kind of weird thing that's happened on
UbuWeb, I think. [16:04] But what's even better, is that UbuWeb, you know... I
care about Jean Dubuffet, or I care about Art Brut, and the history of all
that. [16:14] But usually what happens is, kids come into UbuWeb and they know
nothing about the history. And they’re usually kids that are making dance
music. But they go, oh, all these weird sounds at this place, lets take them.
And so they plunder the archive. So you have Bruce Nauman, you know, "Get out
of my life!" on dance floors in São Paulo, mixed in with the beat. And that to
me is the misuse of the archive that I think is really fantastic.
[16:48]
Technical infrastructure
[16:53]
It's web 1.0. I write everything in HTML, by hand. Hand-coded like I did in
1996, the same BBEdit, the same program.
[17:04]>
C.S.: But it's searchable.
[17:06]
Yea, it's got like a dumb, you know, a little free search engine on it, but I
don't do anything. You see, this is the thing. [17:15] For many, many years
people would always come up to me and say, we'd like to put UbuWeb in a
database. And I said no. It’s working really well as it is. And, you know,
imagine if Ubu had been locked up in some sort of horrible SQL database. And
the administrator of the database walks away, the guy that knows all that
stuff walks away with the keys – which always happens. No… [17:39] This way it
is free, is open, is simple, is backwardly compatible – it always works.
[17:45] I like the simplicity of it. It's not different than it was 17 years
ago. It's really dumb, but it does what it does very well.
[17:54]
Search engines
[17:58]
I removed it from Google. Because, you know, people would have set a Google
alert. And it was mostly the agents, or the estates that would set a kind of
an alert for their artists. And they didn't understand, they think we're
selling it. And it creates a lot of correspondence. [18:20] This is a lot of
work for me. I never get paid any money. There's no money. So, there's
nothing, you know... It's my free time that I'm spending corresponding with
people. And once I took it off from Google it got much better.
[18:33]
Copyright practice
[18:37]
Nobody seemed to care until I started to put film on, and then the filmmakers
went crazy. And so, that was something. [18:47] There was a big blow-up on the
FrameWorks film list. Do you know FrameWorks? It's the biggest avant-garde
film list – Listserv. And a couple of years ago Ubu got hacked, and went down
for a little while. And there was a big celebration on the FrameWorks list.
They said, the enemy is finally gone! We can return to life as normal. So I
responded to them. [19:14] I wrote an open letter to FrameWorks (which you can
actually find on UbuWeb) challenging them, saying, actually Ubu is a friend of
yours. I'm actually promoting your work for no money. I love what you do. I'm
a fan. There's no way I'm an enemy. [19:31] And I said, by the way, if you are
celebrating Ubu being down, I think it's a perfect time for you to now built
Ubu the way it should have been. You guys have all the materials. You are the
artists, you have all the knowledge. Go ahead and do it right, that would be
great. You have my blessing, please do it... Shut them down. Nobody ever
responded. Suddenly the thread died. [20:00] Nobody wants to do anything. It's
kind of, they considered it right to complain, but when asked to... They have
the tools to do it right. I'm a poet, what do I know about avant-garde film?
They know everything. But when I told them, please, you know, nobody's going
to lift a finger. [20:18] It's easier for people to complain and hate it. But
in fact, to make something better is something that people are not going to
do. So life went on. It went up and we moved on.
[20:32]
Un/stable archives
[20:36]
If you work on something for an hour a day for 17 years – 2 hours, 3 hours –
you come up with something really substantial. [20:45] The web is very
ephemeral, and UbuWeb is just as ephemeral. It’s amazing that it's been there
for as long as it has, but tomorrow it could vanish. I could get sued. I could
get bored. Maybe I just walk away and blow it up, I don't know! Why do I need
to keep doing all this work for? [21:03] So if you find something on the
Internet that you loved, don't assume it's going to be there forever. Download
it. Always make your own archive. Don't ever assume that it's waiting there
for you, because it won't be there when you look for it.