There is now a need to readdress urban commons through the lens of the digital
commons, writes Dubravka Sekulic. The lessons to be drawn from the free
software community and its resistance to the enclosure of code will likely
prove particularly valuable where participation and regulation are concerned.
> Commons are a particular type of institutional arrangement for governing the
use and disposition of resources. Their salient characteristic, which defines
them in contradistinction to property, is that no single person has exclusive
control over the use and disposition of any particular resource. Instead,
resources governed by commons may be used or disposed of by anyone among some
(more or less defined) number of persons, under rules that may range from
"anything goes" to quite crisply articulated formal rules that are effectively
enforced.
> (Benkler 2003: 6)
The above definition of commons, from the seminal paper "The political economy
of commons" by Yochai Benkler, addresses any type of commons, whether analogue
or digital. In fact, the concept of commons entered the digital realm from
physical space in order to interpret the type of communities, relationships
and production that started to appear with the development of the free as
opposed to the proprietary. Peter Linebaugh charted in his excellent book
_Magna Carta Manifesto_ , how the creation and development of the concept of
commons were closely connected to constantly changing relationships of people
and communities to the physical space. Here, I argue that the concept was
enriched when it was implemented in the digital field. Readdressing urban
space through the lens of digital commons can enable another imagination and
knowledge to appear around urban commons.
[](http://www.derive.at/)The
notion of commons in (urban) space is often complicated by archaic models of
organization and management - "the pasture we knew how to share". There is a
tendency to give the impression that the solution is in reverting to the past
models. In the realm of digital though, there is no "pasture" from the Middle
Ages to fall back on. Digital commons had to start from scratch and define its
own protocols of production and reproduction (caring and sharing). Therefore,
the digital commons and free software community can be the one to turn to, not
only for inspiration and advice, but also as a partner when addressing
questions of urban commons. Or, as Marcell Mars would put it "if we could
start again with (regulating and defining) land, knowing what we know now
about digital networks, we could come up with something much better and
appropriate for today's world. That property wouldn't be private, maybe not
even property, but something else. Only then can we say we have learned
something from the digital" (2013).
## Enclosure as the trigger for action
The moment we turn to commons in relation to (urban) space is the moment in
which the pressure to privatize public space and to commodify every aspect of
urban life has become so strong that it can be argued that it mirrors a moment
in which Magna Carta Libertatum was introduced to protect the basic
reproduction of life for those whose sustenance was connected to the common
pastures and forests of England in the thirteenth century. At the end of the
twentieth century, urban space became the ultimate commodity, and increasing
privatization not only endangered the reproduction of everyday life in the
city; the rent extraction through privatized public space and housing
endangered bare life itself. Additionally, the cities' continuous
privatization of its amenities transformed almost every action in the city, no
matter how mundane - as for example, drinking a glass of water from a tap -,
into an action that creates profit for some private entity and extracts it
from the community. Thus every activity became labour, which a citizen-worker
is not only alienated from, but also unaware of. David Harvey's statement
about the city replacing the factory as a site of class war seems to be not
only an apt description of the condition of life in the city, but also a cry
for action.
When Richard Stallman turned to the foundational gesture of the creation of
free software, GNU/GPL (General Public Licence) was his reaction to the
artificially imposed logic of scarcity on the world of code - and the
increasing and systematic enclosure that took place in the late 1970s and
1980s as "a tidal wave of commercialization transformed software from a
technical object into a commodity, to be bought and sold on the open market
under the alleged protection of intellectual property law" (Coleman 2012:
138). Stallman, who worked as a researcher at MIT's Artificial Intelligence
Laboratory, detected how "[m]any programmers are unhappy about the
commercialization of system software. It may enable them to make more money,
but it requires them to feel in conflict with other programmers in general
rather than feel as comrades. The fundamental act of friendship among
programmers is the sharing of programs; marketing arrangements now typically
used essentially forbid programmers to treat others as friends. The purchaser
of software must choose between friendship and obeying the law. Naturally,
many decide that friendship is more important. But those who believe in law
often do not feel at ease with either choice. They become cynical and think
that programming is just a way of making money" (Stallman 2002: 32).
In the period between 1980 and 1984, "one man [Stallman] envisioned a crusade
to change the situation" (Moglen 1999). Stallman understood that in order to
subvert the system, he would have to intervene in the protocols that regulate
the conditions under which the code is produced, and not the code itself;
although he did contribute some of the best lines of code into the compiler
and text editor - the foundational infrastructure for any development. The
gesture that enabled the creation of a free software community that yielded
the complex field of digital commons was not a perfect line of code. The
creation of GNU General Public License (GPL) was a legal hack to counteract
the imposing of intellectual property law on code. At that time, the only
license available for programmers wanting to keep the code free was public
domain, which gave no protection against the code being appropriated and
closed. GPL enabled free codes to become self-perpetuating. Everything built
using a free code had to be made available under the same condition, in order
to secure the freedom for programmers to continue sharing and not breaking the
law. "By working on and using GNU rather than proprietary programs, we can be
hospitable to everyone and obey the law. In addition, GNU serves as an example
to inspire and as a banner to rally others to join in sharing. This can give
us a feeling of harmony, which is impossible if we use software, which is not
free. For about half the programmers I talk to, this is an important happiness
that money cannot replace" (Stallman 2002: 33).
Architects and planners as well as environmental designers have for too long
believed the opposite, that a good enough design can subvert the logic of
enclosure that dominates the production and reproduction of space; that a good
enough design can keep space open and public by the sheer strength of spatial
intervention. Stallman rightfully understands that no design is strong enough
to keep private ownership from claiming what it believes belongs to it.
Digital and urban commons, despite operating in completely different realms
and economies, are under attack from the same threat of "market processes"
that "crucially depend upon the individual monopoly of capitalists (of all
sorts) over ownership of the means of production, including finance and land.
All rent, recall, is a return to the monopoly power of private ownership of
some crucial asset, such as land or a patent. The monopoly power of private
property is therefore both the beginning-point and the end-point of all
capitalist activity" (Harvey 2012: 100). Stallman envisioned a bleak future
(2003: 26-28) but found a way to "relate the means to the ends". He understood
that the emancipatory task of a struggle "is not only what has to be done, but
also how it will be done and who will do it" (Stavrides & De Angelis: 7).
Thus, to produce the necessary requirements - both for a community to emerge,
but also for the basis of future protocols - tools and methodologies are
needed for the community to create both free software and itself.
## Renegotiating (undoing) property, hacking the law, creating community
Property, as an instrument of allocation of resources, is a right that is
negotiated within society and by society and not written in stone or given as
such. The digital, more than any other field, discloses property as being
inappropriate for contemporary relationships between production and
reproduction and, additionally, proves how it is possible to fundamentally
rethink it. The digital offers this possibility as it is non-material, non-
rival and non-exclusive (Meretz 2013), unlike anything in the physical world.
And Elinor Ostrom's lifelong empirical researches give ground to the belief
that eschewing property, being the sole instrument of allocation, can work as
a tool of management even for rival, excludable goods.
The value of information in digital form is not flat, but property is not the
way to protect that value, as the music industry realized during the course of
the last ten years. Once the copy is _out there_ , the cost of protecting its
exclusivity on the grounds of property becomes too high in relation to the
potential value to be extracted. For example, the value is extracted from
information through controlling the moment of its release and not through
subsequent exploitation. Stallman decided to tackle the imposition of the
concept of property on computer code (and by extension to the digital realm as
a whole) by articulating it in another field: just as property is the product
of constant negotiations within a society, so are legal regulations. After
some time, he was joined by "[m]any free software developers [who] do not
consider intellectual property instruments as the pivotal stimulus for a
marketplace of ideas and knowledge. Instead, they see them as a form of
restriction so fundamental (or poorly executed) that they need to be
counteracted through alternative legal agreements that treat knowledge,
inventions, and other creative expressions not as property but rather as
speech to be freely shared, circulated, and modified" (Coleman 2012: 26).
The digital sphere can give a valid example of how renegotiating regulation
can transform a resource from scarce to abundant. When the change from
analogue signal to packet switching begun to take effect, the distribution of
finite territory and the way the radio frequency spectrum was managed got
renegotiated and the amount of slots of space to be allocated grew by an order
of magnitude while the absolute size of the spectrum stayed the same. This
shift enabled Brecht's dream of a two-sided radio to become reality, thus
enabling what he had suggested: "change this apparatus over from distribution
to communication".1
According to Lawrence Lessig, what regulates behavior in cyberspace is an
interdependence of four constraints: market, law, architecture and norms
(Lessig 2012: 121-25). Analogously, space can be put in place of cyberspace,
as the regulation of space is the sum of these four constraints. These four
constraints are in a dynamic relationship in which the balance can be tilted
towards one, depending on how much each of these categories puts pressure on
the other three. Changes in any one reflect the regulation of the whole.
"Architecture" in Lessig's theory should be understood broadly as the "built
environment" that regulates behaviour in (cyber)space. In the last few decades
we have experienced the domination of the market reconfiguring the basis of
norms, law and architecture. In order to counteract this, the other three
constraints need to be re-negotiated. In digital space, this reconfiguration
happened by declaring the code - that is, the set of instructions written as
highly formalized text in a specific programming language to be executed
(usually) by the computer - to be considered as speech in front of the law,
and by hacking the law in order to disrupt the way that property relationships
are formed.
To put it simply, in order to create a change in dynamics between the
architecture, norms and the market, the law had to be addressed first. This is
not a novel procedure, "legal hacking is going on all the time, it is just
that politics is doing it under the veil of legality because they are the
parliament, they are Microsoft, which can hire a whole law firm to defend them
and find all the legal loopholes. Legal hacking is the norm actually" (Bailey
2013). When it comes to physical space, one of the most obvious examples of
the reconfiguration of regulations under the influence of the market is to
create legal provisions, norms and architecture to sustain the concept of
developing (and privatizing) public space through public-private partnerships.
The decision of the Italian parliament that the privatization of services
(specifically of water management) is legal and does not obstruct one's access
to water as a human right, is another example of a crude manipulation of the
law by the state in favour of the market. Unlike legal hacks by corporations
that aim to create a favourable legal climate for another round of
accumulation through dispossession, Stallman's hack tries to limit the impact
of the market and to create a space of freedom for the creation of a code and
of sharable knowledge, by questioning one of the central pillars of liberal
jurisprudence: (intellectual) property law.
Similarly, translated into physical space, one of the initiatives in Europe
that comes closest to creating a real existing urban commons, Teatro Valle
Occupato in Rome, is doing the same, "pushing the borders of legality of
private property" by legally hacking the institution of a foundation to "serve
a public, or common, purpose" and having "notarized [a] document registered
with the Italian state, that creates a precedent for other people to follow in
its way" (Bailey 2013). Sounds familiar to Stallman's hack as the fundamental
gesture by which community and the whole eco-system can be formed.
It is obvious that, in order to create and sustain that type of legal hack, it
is a necessity to have a certain level of awareness and knowledge of how
systems, both political and legal, work, i.e. to be politically literate.
"While in general", says Italian commons-activist and legal scholar Saki
Bailey, "we've become extremely lazy [when it comes to politics]. We've
started to become a kind of society of people who give up their responsibility
to participate by handing it over to some charismatic leaders, experts of [a]
different type" (2013). Free software hackers, in order to understand and take
part in a constant negotiation that takes place on a legal level between the
market that seeks to cloister the code and hackers who want to keep it free,
had to become literate in an arcane legal language. Gabriella Coleman notes in
_Coding Freedom_ that hacker forums sometimes tend to produce legal analysis
that is just as serious as one would expect to find in a law office. Like the
occupants of Teatro Valle, free software hackers understand the importance of
devoting time and energy to understand constraints and to find ways to
structurally divert them.
This type of knowledge is not shared and created in isolation, but in
socialization, in discussions in physical or cyber spaces (such as #irc chat
rooms, forums, mailing lists…), the same way free software hackers share their
knowledge about code. Through this process of socializing knowledge, "the
community is formed, developed, and reproduced through practices focused on
common space. To generalize this principle: the community is developed through
commoning, through acts and forms of organization oriented towards the
production of the common" (Stavrides 2012: 588). Thus forming a community is
another crucial element of the creation of digital commons, but even more
important are its development and resilience. The emerging community was not
given something to manage, it created something together, and together devised
rules of self-regulation and decision-making.
The prime example of this principle in the free software community is the
Debian Project, formed around the development of the Debian Linux
distribution. It is a volunteer organization consisting of around 3,000
developers that since its inception in 1993 has defined a set of basic
principles by which the project and its members conduct their affairs. This
includes the introduction of new people into the community, a process called
Debian Social Contract (DSC). A special part of the DSC defines the criteria
for "free software", thus regulating technical aspects of the project and also
technical relations with the rest of a free software community. The Debian
Constitution, another document created by the community so it can govern
itself, describes the organizational structure for formal decision-making
within the project.
Another example is Wikipedia, where the community that makes the online
encyclopedia also takes part in creating regulations, with some aspects
debated almost endlessly on forums. It is even possible to detect a loose
community of "Internet users" who took to the streets all over the world when
SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) and PIPA (Preventing Real Online Threats to
Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property Act) threatened to
enclose the Internet, as we know it; the proposed legislation was successfully
contested.
Free software projects that represent the core of the digital commons are most
of the time born of the initiative of individuals, but their growth and life
cycle depend on the fact that they get picked up by a community or generate
community around them that is allowed to take part in their regulation and in
decisions about which shape and forms the project will take in the future.
This is an important lesson to be transferred to the physical space in which
many projects fail because they do not get picked up by the intended
community, as the community is not offered a chance to partake in its creation
and, more importantly, its regulation.
## Building common infrastructure and institutions
"The expansion of intellectual property law" as the main vehicle of the trend
to enclose the code that leads to the act of the creation of free software
and, thus, digital commons, "is part and parcel of a broader neoliberal trend
to privatize what was once under public or under the state's aegis, such as
health provision, water delivery, and military services" (Coleman 2012: 16).
The structural fight headed by the GNU/GPL against the enclosure of code
"defines the contractual relationship that serves to secure the freedom of
means of production and to constitute a community of those participating in
the production and reproduction of free resources. And it is this constitutive
character, as an answer to an every time singular situation of appropriation
by the capital, that is a genuine political emancipation striving for an equal
and free collective production" (Mars & Medak 2004). Thus digital commons "is
based on the _communication_ among _singularities_ and emerges through
collaborative social processes of production " (Negri & Hardt 2005: 204).
The most important lesson urban commons can take from its digital counterpart
is at the same time the most difficult one: how to make a structural hack in
the moment of the creation of an urban commons that will enable it to become
structurally self-perpetuating, thus creating fertile ground not only for a
singular spatialization of urban commons to appear, but to multiply and create
a whole new eco-system. Digital commons was the first field in which what
Negri and Hardt (2009: 3-21) called the "republic of property" was challenged.
Urban commons, in order to really emerge as a spatialization of a new type of
relationship, need to start undoing property as well in order to socially re-
appropriate the city. Or in the words of Stavros Stavrides "the most urgent
and promising task, which can oppose the dominant governance model, is the
reinvention of common space. The realm of the common emerges in a constant
confrontation with state-controlled 'authorized' public space. This is an
emergence full of contradictions, perhaps, quite difficult to predict, but
nevertheless necessary. Behind a multifarious demand for justice and dignity,
new roads to collective emancipation are tested and invented. And, as the
Zapatistas say, we can create these roads only while walking. But we have to
listen, to observe, and to feel the walking movement. Together" (Stavrides
2012: 594).
The big task for both digital and urban commons is "[b]uilding a core common
infrastructure [which] is a necessary precondition to allow us to transition
away from a society of passive consumers buying what a small number of
commercial producers are selling. It will allow us to develop into a society
in which all can speak to all, and in which anyone can become an active
participant in political, social and cultural discourse" (Benkler 2003: 9).
This core common infrastructure has to be porous enough to include people that
are not similar, to provide "a ground to build a public realm and give
opportunities for discussing and negotiating what is good for all, rather than
the idea of strengthening communities in their struggle to define their own
commons. Relating commons to groups of "similar" people bears the danger of
eventually creating closed communities. People may thus define themselves as
commoners by excluding others from their milieu, from their own privileged
commons." (Stavrides 2010). If learning carefully from digital commons, urban
commons need to be conceptualized on the basis of the public, with a self-
regulating community that is open for others to join. That socializes
knowledge and thus produces and reproduces the commons, creating a space for
political emancipation that is capable of judicial arguments for the
protection and extension of regulations that are counter-market oriented.
## References
Bailey, Saki (2013): Interview by Dubravka Sekulic and Alexander de Cuveland.
Benkler, Yochai (2003): "The political economy of commons". _Upgrade_ IV, no.
3, 6-9, [www.benkler.org/Upgrade-
Novatica%20Commons.pdf](http://www.benkler.org/Upgrade-
Novatica%20Commons.pdf).
Benkler, Yochai (2006): _The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production
Transforms Markets and Freedom_. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Brecht, Bertolt (2000): "The radio as a communications apparatus". In: _Brecht
on Film and Radio_ , edited by Marc Silberman. Methuen, 41-6.
Coleman, E. Gabriella (2012): _Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of
Hacking_. Princeton University Press / Kindle edition.
Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri (2005): _Multitude: War and Democracy in the
Age of Empire_. Penguin Books.
Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri (2011): _Commonwealth_. Belknap Press of
Harvard University Press.
Harvey, David (2012): The Art of Rent. In: _Rebel Cities: From the Right to
the City to the Urban Revolution_ , 1st ed. Verso, 94-118.
Hill, Benjamin Mako (2012): Freedom for Users, Not for Software. In: Bollier,
David & Helfrich, Silke (Ed.): _The Wealth of the Commons: a World Beyond
Market and State_. Levellers Press / E-book.
Lessig, Lawrence (2012): _Code: Version 2.0_. Basic Books.
Linebaugh, Peter (2008): _The Magna Carta Manifesto: Liberties and Commons for
All_. University of California Press.
Mars, Marcell (2013): Interview by Dubravka Sekulic.
Mars, Marcell and Tomislav Medak (2004): "Both devil and gnu",
[www.desk.org:8080/ASU2/newsletter.Zarez.N5M.MedakRomicTXT.EnGlish](http://www.desk.org:8080/ASU2/newsletter.Zarez.N5M.MedakRomicTXT.EnGlish).
Martin, Reinhold (2013): "Public and common(s): Places: Design observer",
[placesjournal.org/article/public-and-
commons](https://placesjournal.org/article/public-and-commons).
Meretz, Stefan (2010): "Commons in a taxonomy of goods", [keimform.de/2010
/commons-in-a-taxonomy-of-goods](http://keimform.de/2010/commons-in-a
-taxonomy-of-goods/).
Moglen, Eben (1999): "Anarchism triumphant: Free software and the death of
copyright", First Monday,
[firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/684/594](http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/684/594).
Stallman, Richard and Joshua Gay (2002): _Free Software, Free Society:
Selected Essays of Richard M. Stallman_. GNU Press.
Stallman, Richard and Joshua Gay (2003): "The Right to Read". _Upgrade_ IV,
no. 3, 26-8.
Stavrides, Stavros (2013): "Contested urban rhythms: From the industrial city
to the post-industrial urban archipelago". _The Sociological Review_ 61,
34-50.
Stavrides, Stavros, and Massimo De Angelis (2010): "On the commons: A public
interview with Massimo De Angelis and Stavros Stavrides". _e-flux_ 17, 1-17,
[www.e-flux.com/journal/on-the-commons-a-public-interview-with-massimo-de-
angelis-and-stavros-stavrides/](http://www.e-flux.com/journal/on-the-commons-a
-public-interview-with-massimo-de-angelis-and-stavros-stavrides/).
1
"[...] radio is one-sided when it should be two-. It is purely an apparatus
for distribution, for mere sharing out. So here is a positive suggestion:
change this apparatus over from distribution to communication". See "The radio
as a communications apparatus", Brecht 2000.
Published 4 November 2015
Original in English
First published by derive 61 (2015)
the image, corrects the contrast, crops out the use
less bits, sharpens the text, and occasionally even
attempts to read it. All of this computation wants
to repress any traces of reading and scanning, with
the obvious goal of returning to the pure book, or
an even more Platonic form.
That purified, originary version of the text
might be the e-book. Publishers are occasionally
skipping the act of printing altogether and selling
the files themselves, such that the words reserved
for “
well-scanned”books ultimately describe ebooks: clean, searchable, small (i.e., file size). Al
though it is perfectly understandable for a reader
to prefer aligned text without smudges or other
markings where “
paper”is nothing but a pure,
bright white, this movement towards the clean has
its consequences. Distinguished as a form by the
fact that it is produced, distributed, and consumed
digitally, the e-book never leaves the factory.
A minimal gap is, however, created between
the file that the producer uses and the one that
the consumer uses— imagine the cultural chaos
if the typical way of distributing books were as
Word documents!— through the process of export
ing. Whereas scanning is a complex process and
material transformation (which includes exporting
at the very end), exporting is merely converting
formats. But however minor an act, this conver
sion is what puts a halt to the writing and turns
the file into a product for reading. It is also at this
stage that forms of “
digital rights management”ate
applied in order to restrict copying and printing of
the file.
Sharing and copying texts is as old as books
themselves— actually, one could argue that this is
almost a definition of the book— but computers
and the Internet have only accelerated this
activity. From transcription to tracing to photocopying
to scanning, the labour and material costs involved
in producing a copy has fallen to nothing in our
present digital file situation. Once the scan has
generated a digitized version of some kind, say a
PDF, it easily replicates and circulates. This is not
aberrant behaviour, either, but normative comput
er use: copy and paste are two of the first choices
in any contextual menu. Personal file storage has
slowly been migrating onto computer networks,
particularly with the growth of mobile devices, so
Sean Dockray
The Scan and the Export
The scan is an ambivalent image. It oscillates
back and forth: between a physical page and a
digital file, between one reader and another, be
tween an economy of objects and an economy of
data. Scans are failures in terms of quality, neither
as “
readable”as the original book nor the inevi
table ebook, always containing too much visual
information or too little.
Technically speaking, it is by scanning that
one can make a digital representation of a physical
object, such as a book. When a representation of
that representation (the image) appears on a digital
display device, it hovers like a ghost, one world
haunting another. But it is not simply the object
asserting itself in the milieu of light, informa
tion, and electricity. Much more is encoded in
the image: indexes of past readings and the act of
scanning itself.
An incomplete inventory of modifications to
the book through reading and other typical events
in the life of the thing: folded pages, underlines,
marginal notes, erasures, personal symbolic sys
tems, coffee spills, signatures, stamps, tears, etc.
Intimacy between reader and text marking the
pages, suggesting some distant future palimpsest in
which the original text has finally given way to a
mass of negligible marks.
Whereas the effects of reading are cumulative,
the scan is a singular event. Pages are spread and
pressed flat against a sheet of glass. The binding
stretches, occasionally to the point of breaking.
A camera driven by a geared down motor slides
slowly down the surface of the page. Slight move
ment by the person scanning (who is also a scan
ner; this is a man-machine performance) before
the scan is complete produces a slight motion blur,
the type goes askew, maybe a finger enters the
frame of the image. The glass is rarely covered in
its entirety by the book and these windows into
the actual room where the scanning is done are
ultimately rendered as solid, censored black. After
the physical scanning process comes post-produc
tion. Software— automated or not— straightens
99
one's files are not always located on one's
equipment. The act of storing and retrieving shuffles
data across machines and state lines.
A public space is produced when something
is shared— which is to say, made public — but this
space is not the same everywhere or in all
circumstances. When music is played for a room full of
people, or rather when all those people are simply
sharing the room, something is being made public.
Capitalism itself is a massive mechanism for
making things public, for appropriating materials,
people, and knowledge and subjecting them to its
logic. On the other hand, a circulating library, or a
library with a reading room, creates a public space
around the availability of books and other forms of
material knowledge. And even books being sold
through shops create a particular kind of public,
which is quite different from the public that is
formed by bootlegging those same books.
ft would appear that publicness is not simply a
question of state control or the absence of money.
Those categorical definitions offer very little to
help think about digital files and their native
tendency to replicate and travel across networks.
What kinds of public spaces are these, coming into
the foreground by an incessant circulation of data?
Tw o paradigmatic forms of publicness can be
described through the lens of the scan and the
export, two methods for producing a digital text.
Although neither method necessarily results in a
file that must be distributed, such files typically
are. In the case of the export, the system of
distribution tends to be through official, secure
digital repositories; limited previews provide a
small window into the content, which is ultimately
accessible only through the interface of the
shopping cart. On the other hand, the scan is
created by and moves between individuals, often
via improvised and itinerant distribution systems.
The scan travels from person to person, like a
virus. As long as it passes between people, that
common space between them stays alive. That
space might be contagious; it might break out into
something quite persuasive, an intimate publicness
becoming more common.
The scan is an image of a thing and is therefore
different from the thing (it is digital, not physical,
and it includes indexes of reading and scanning),
whereas a copy of the export is essentially identical
to the export. Here is one reason there will exist
many variations of a scan for a particular text,
while there will be one approved version (always a
clean one) of the export. A person may hold in his
or her possession a scan of a book but, no matter
what publishers may claim, the scan will never be
the book. Even if one was to inspect two files and
find them to be identical in every observable and
measurable quality, it may be revealed that these
are in fact different after all: one is a legitimate
copy and the other is not. Legitimacy in this case
has nothing whatsoever to do with internal traits,
such as fidelity to the original, but with external
ones, namely, records of economic transactions in
customer databases.
In practical terms, this means that a digital
book must be purchased by every single reader.
Unlike the book, which is commonly purchased,
read, then handed it off to a friend (who then
shares it with another friend and so on until it
comes to rest on someone’
s bookshelf) the digital
book is not transferable, by design and by law.
If ownership is fundamentally the capacity to give
something away, these books are never truly ours.
The intimate, transient publics that emerge out
of passing a book around are here eclipsed by a
singular, more inclusive public in which everyone
relates to his or her individual (identical) file.
Recently, with the popularization of digital
book readers (a device for another man-machine
pairing), the picture of this kind of publicness has
come into greater definition. Although a group of
people might all possess the same file, they will be
viewing that file through their particular readers,
which means surprisingly that they might all be
seeing something different. With variations built
into the device (in resolution, size, colour, display
technology) or afforded to the user (perhaps to
change font size or other flexible design ele
ments), familiar forms of orientation within the
writing disappear as it loses the historical struc
ture of the book and becomes pure, continuous
text. For example, page numbers give way to the
more abstract concept of a "location" when the
file is derived from the export as opposed to the
scan, from the text data as opposed to the
physical object. The act of reading in a group is also
100
different ways. An analogy: they are not prints
from the same negative, but entirely different
photographs of the same subject. Our scans are
variations, perhaps competing (if we scanned the
same pages from the same edition), but, more
likely, functioning in parallel.
Gompletists prefer the export, which has a
number of advantages from their perspective:
the whole book is usually kept intact as one unit,
the file; file sizes are smaller because the files are
based more on the text than an image; the file is
found by searching (the Internet) as opposed to
searching through stacks, bookstores, and attics; it
is at least theoretically possible to have every file.
Each file is complete and the same everywhere,
such that there should be no need for variations.
At present, there are important examples of where
variations do occur, notably efforts to improve
metadata, transcode out of proprietary formats,
and to strip DRM restrictions. One imagines an
imminent future where variations proliferate based
on an additive reading— a reader makes highlights,
notations, and marginal arguments and then
redistributes the file such that someone's
"reading" of a particular text would generate its own public,
the logic of the scan infiltrating the export.
different — "Turn to page 24" is followed by the
sound of a race of collective page flipping, while
"Go to location 2136" leads to finger taps and
caresses on plastic. Factions based on who has the
same edition of a book are now replaced by those
with people who have the same reading device.
If historical structures within the book are
made abstract then so are those organizing
structures outside of the book. In other words, it's not
simply that the book has become the digital book
reader, but that the reader now contains the
library itself! Public libraries are on the brink of be
ing outmoded; books are either not being acquired
or they are moving into deep storage; and physical
spaces are being reclaimed as cafes, restaurants,
auditoriums, and gift shops. Even the concept
of donation is thrown into question: when most
public libraries were being initiated a century ago,
it was often women's clubs that donated their
collections to establish the institution; it is difficult to
imagine a corresponding form of cultural sharing
of texts within the legal framework of the export.
Instead, publishers might enter into a contract
directly with the government to allow access to
files from computers within the premises of the
library building. This fate seems counter-intuitive,
considering the potential for distribution latent
in the underlying technology, but even more so
when compared to the "traveling libraries" at the
turn of the twentieth century, which were literally
small boxes that brought books to places without
libraries (most often, rural communities).
Many scans, in fact, are made from library
books, which are identified through a stamp or a
sticker somewhere. (It is not difficult to see how
the scan is closely related to the photocopy, such
that they are now mutually evolving technolo
gies.) Although it circulates digitally, like the
export, the scan is rooted in the object and is
never complete. In a basic sense, scanning is slow
and time-consuming (photocopies were slow and
expensive), and it requires that choices are made
about what to focus on. A scan of an entire book
is rare— really a labour of love and endurance;
instead, scanners excerpt from books, pulling out
the most interesting, compelling, difficult-to-find,
or useful bits. They skip pages. The scan is partial,
subjective. You and I will scan the same book in
About the Author
Sean Dockray is a Los Angeles-based artist. He is a
co-director of Telic Arts Exchange and has initiated several
collaborative projects including AAAARG.ORG and The
Public School. He recently co-organized There is
nothing less passive than the act of fleeing, a 13-day seminar at
various sites in Berlin organized through The Public School
that discussed the promises, pitfalls, and possibilities for
extra-institutionality.
101
t often the starting-point is an idea composed of
a group of centrally aroused sensations due to simultaneous
excitation of a group
This would probably
in every case he in large part the result of association by
contiguity in terms of the older classification, although
there might be some part played by the immediate
excitation of the separatefP pby an external stimulus. Starting
from this given mass of central elements, all change comes
from the fact that some of the elements disappear and are
replaced by others through a second series of associations
by contiguity. The parts of the original idea which remain
serve as the excitants for the new elements which arise.
The nature of the process is exactly like that by which
the elements of the first idea were excited, and no new
process comes in. These successive associations are thus
really in their mechanism but a series of simultaneous
associations in which the elements that make up the different
ideas are constantly changing, but with some elements
that persist from idea to idea. There is thus a constant
flux of the ideas, but there is always a part of each idea
that persists over into the next and serves to start the
mechanism of revival There is never an entire stoppage
in the course of the ideas, never an absolute break in the
series, but the second idea is joined to the one that precedes
by an identical element in each.
124
A short time later, this control of urban noise had been implemented almost
everywhere, or at least in the politically best-controlled cities, where repetition
is most advanced.
We see noise reappear, however, in exemplary fashion at certain ritualized
moments: in these instances, the horn emerges as a derivative form of violence
masked by festival. All we have to do is observe how noise proliferates in echo
at such times to get a hint of what the epidemic proliferation of the essential
violence can be like. The noise of car horns on New Year's Eve is, to my mind,
for the drivers an unconscious substitute for Carnival, itself a substitute for the
Dionysian festival preceding the sacrifice. A rare moment, when the hierarchies
are masked behind the windshields and a harmless civil war temporarily breaks
out throughout the city.
Temporarily. For silence and the centralized monopoly on the emission,
audition and surveillance of noise are afterward reimposed. This is an essential
control, because if effective it represses the emergence of a new order and a
challenge to repetition.
103
Thus, with the ball, we are all possible victims; we all expose our
selves to this danger and we escape back and forth of "I."
The "I" in the game is a token exchanged. And
this passing, this network of passes, these vicariances of subjects weave
the collection. I am I now, a subject, that is to say, exposed to being
thrown down, exposed to falling, to being placed beneath the compact
mass of the others; then you take the relay, you are substituted for "I"
and become it; later on, it is he who gives it to you, his work done, his
danger finished, his part of the collective constructed. The "we" is made
by the bursts and occultations of the "I." The "we" is made by passing
the "I." By exchanging the "I." And by substitution and vicariance of
the "I."
That immediately appears easy to think about. Everyone carries
his stone, and the wall is built. Everyone carries his "I," and the "we" is
built. This addition is idiotic and resembles a political speech. No.
104
But then let them say it clearly:
The practice of happiness is subversive when it becom es collective.
Our will tor happiness and liberation is their terror, and they react by terrorizing
us with prison, when the repression of work, of the patriarchal family, and of sex
ism is not enough.
But then let them say it clearly:
To conspire means to breathe together.
And that is what we are accused of, they want to prevent us from breathing
because we have refused to breathe In Isolation, in their asphyxiating places of
work, in their individuating familial relationships, in their atomizing houses.
There is a crime I confess I have committed:
It is the attack against the separation of life and desire, against sexism in Interindividual relationships, against the reduction of life to the payment of a salary.
105
Counterpublics
The stronger modification of ... analysis — one in which
he has shown little interest, though it is clearly of major
significance in the critical analysis of gender and sexuality — is that some
publics are defined by their tension with a larger public. Their
participants are marked off from persons or citizens in general.
Discussion within such a public is understood to contravene the rules
obtaining in the world at large, being structured by alternative dis
positions or protocols, making different assumptions about what
can be said or what goes without saying. This kind of public is, in
effect, a counterpublic: it maintains at some level, conscious or
not, an awareness of its subordinate status. The sexual cultures of
gay men or of lesbians would be one kind of example, but so would
camp discourse or the media of women's culture. A counterpublic
in this sense is usually related to a subculture, but there are
important differences between these concepts. A counterpublic, against
the background of the public sphere, enables a horizon of opinion
and exchange] its exchanges remain distinct from authority and
can have a critical relation to power; its extent is in principle
indefinite, because it is not based on a precise demography but
mediated by print, theater, diffuse networks of talk, commerce, and ...
106
The term slang, which is less broad than language variety is described
by ... as a label that is frequently used to denote
certain informal or faddish usages of nearly anyone in the speech community.
However, slang, while subject to rapid change, is widespread and
familiar to a large number of speakers, unlike Polari. The terms jargon
and argot perhaps signify more what Polari stands for. as they are asso
ciated with group membership and are used to serve as affirmation or
solidarity with other members. Both terms refer to "obscure or secret
language’or language of a particular occupational group ...
While jargon tends to refer to an occupational sociolect,
or a vocabulary particular to a field, argot is more concerned with language
varieties where speakers wish to conceal either themselves or aspects of
their communication from non-members. Although argot is perhaps the
most useful term considered so far in relation to Polari. there exists a
more developed theory that concentrates on stigmatised groups, and could
have been created with Polari specifically in mind: anti-language.
For ..., anti-language was to anti-society what language
was to society. An anti-society is a counter-culture, a society within a
society, a conscious alternative to society, existing by resisting either
pas-sively or by more hostile, destructive means. Anti-languages are
generated by anti-societies and in their simplest forms arc partially relexicalised
languages, consisting of the same grammar but a different vocabulary
... in areas central to the activities ot subcultures.
Therefore a subculture based around illegal drug use would have words tor
drugs, the psychological effects of drugs, the police, money and so on. In
anti-languages the social values of words and phrases tend to be more
emphasised than in mainstream languages.
... found that 41 per cent of the criminals he
interviewed cave "the need for secrecy" as an important reason lor using
an anti-language, while 38 per cent listed 'verbal art'. However ...
in his account of the anti-language or grypserka of Polish
prisoners. describes how, for the prisoners, their identity was threatened and
the creation of an anti-society provided a means by wtnclt an alternative
social structure (or reality) could be constructed, becoming the source of
a second identity tor the prisoners.
107
Streetwalker theorists cultivate the ability to sustain and create hangouts by hanging
out. Hangouts are highly fluid, worldly, nonsanctioned,
communicative, occupations of space, contestatory retreats for the
passing on of knowledge, for the tactical-strategic fashioning
of multivocal sense, of enigm atic vocabularies and gestures,
for the development of keen commentaries on structural
pressures and gaps, spaces of complex and open-ended recognition.
Hangouts are spaces that cannot be kept captive by the
private / public split. They are worldly, contestatory concrete
spaces within geographies sieged by and in defiance of logics
and structures of domination.20 The streetwalker theorist
walks in illegitim ate refusal to legitimate oppressive
arrangements and logics.
Common
108
As we apprehend it, the process of instituting com
munism can only take the form of a collection of
acts of communisation, of making common such-and-such
space, such-and-such machine, such-and-such knowledge.
That is to say, the elaboration
of the mode of sharing that attaches to them.
Insurrection itself is just an accelerator, a decisive
moment in the process.
... is a collection of places, infrastructures,
communised means; and the dreams, bodies,
murmurs, thoughts, desires that circulate among those
places, the use of those means, the sharing of those
infrastructures.
The notion of ... responds to the necessity of
a minimal formalisation, which makes us accessible
as well as allows us to remain invisible. It belongs
to the communist way that we explain to ourselves
and formulate the basis of our sharing. So that the
most recent arrival is, at the very least, the equal of
the elder.
Whatever singularity, which wants to appropriate be longing itself,
its own being-in-language, and thus rejects all identity and every
condition of belonging, is the principal enemy of the State. Wherever these
singularities peacefully demonstrate their being in common there will be a
Tiananmen, and, sooner or later, the tanks will appear.