This chapter is written from the perspective of an artist who develops models
of practice founded on the fundamental assumption that knowledge is socially
constructed. Knowledge, according to this understanding, builds on imitation
and dialogue and is therefore based on a collective endeavour. Although
collective forms of knowledge production are common in the sciences, such
modes of working constitute a distinct shift for artistic practice, which has
been conceived as individual and isolated or subjective. Moreover, the shift
from the individual to the social in artistic production — what has been
called art’s ‘social turn’[1](ch11.xhtml#footnote-525) — also shifts the
emphasis from the artwork to the social processes of production and therefore
proposes to relinquish ‘the notion of the “work” as a noun (a static object)’
and re-conceptualises ‘the “work” as a verb (a communicative
activity)’.[2](ch11.xhtml#footnote-524) This shift from ‘noun’ to ‘verb’
promotes collective practices over authored objects and includes work such as
developing infrastructures, organising events, facilitating, hosting,
curating, editing and publishing. Such generative practices also question the
nature of authorship in art.
Authorship is no doubt a method to develop one’s voice, to communicate and to
interact with others, but it is also a legal, economic and institutional
construct, and it is this function of authorship as a framing and measuring
device that I will discuss in this chapter. Oscillating between the arts and
academia, I shall examine the concept of authorship from a legal, economic and
institutional perspective by studying a set of artistic practices that have
made copyright, intellectual property and authorship into their artistic
material.
Copyright’s legal definition combines authorship, originality and property.
‘Copyright is not a transcendent moral idea’, as Mark Rose has shown, ‘but a
specifically modern formation [of property rights] produced by printing
technology, marketplace economics and the classical liberal culture of
possessive individualism’.[3](ch11.xhtml#footnote-523) Therefore the author in
copyright law is unequivocally postulated in terms of liberal and neoliberal
values. Feminist legal scholar Carys Craig argues that copyright law and the
concept of authorship it supports fail to adequately recognise the essential
social nature of human creativity. It chooses relationships qua private
property instead of recognising the author as necessarily social situated and
therefore creating (works) within a network of social
relations.[4](ch11.xhtml#footnote-522) This chapter tries to reimagine
authorial activity in contemporary art that is not caught in ‘simplifying
dichotomies that pervade copyright theory (author/user, creator/copier,
labourer/free-rider)’,[5](ch11.xhtml#footnote-521) and to examine both the
blockages that restrict our acknowledgement of the social production of art
and the social forces that exist within emancipatory collective
practices.[6](ch11.xhtml#footnote-520)
Copyright is granted for an ‘original work [that] is fixed in any tangible
medium of expression’. It is based on the relationship between an
‘originator’, being imagined as the origin of the
work,[7](ch11.xhtml#footnote-519) and distinct products, which are fixed in a
medium, ‘from which they can be perceived, reproduced, or otherwise
communicated, either directly or with the aid of a machine or
device.’[8](ch11.xhtml#footnote-518)
Practices, on the contrary, are not protected under
copyright.[9](ch11.xhtml#footnote-517) Because practice can’t be fixed into a
tangible form of expression, intellectual property rights are not created and
cannot be exploited economically. This inability to profit from practice by
making use of intellectual property results in a clear privileging of the
‘outputs’ of authored works over practice. This value system therefore
produces ‘divisive hierarchical splits between those who ‘do’ [practices], and
those who write about, make work about
[outputs]’.[10](ch11.xhtml#footnote-516)
Media scholar Kathleen Fitzpatrick observes in her forthcoming book Generous
Thinking:
[H]owever much we might reject individualism as part and parcel of the
humanist, positivist ways of the past, our working lives — on campus and off —
are overdetermined by it. […] c. And the drive to compete […] bleeds out into
all areas of the ways we work, even when we’re working together.’ The
competitive individualism that the academy cultivates makes all of us
painfully aware that even our most collaborative efforts will be assessed
individually, with the result that even those fields whose advancement depends
most on team-based efforts are required to develop careful guidelines for
establishing credit and priority.[11](ch11.xhtml#footnote-515)
Artist and activist Susan Kelly expands on this experience with her
observation that this regime of individual merit even inhibits us from
partaking in collective practices. She describes the dilemma for the academic
activist, when the demand for ‘outputs’ (designs, objects, texts,
exhibitions), which can be measured, quantified and exploited by institutions
(galleries, museums, publishers, research universities), becomes the
prerequisite of professional survival.
Take the young academic, for example, who spends evenings and weekends in the
library fast tracking a book on social movements about which she cares deeply
and wants to broaden her understanding. She is also desperate for it to be
published quickly to earn her the university research points that will see her
teaching contract renewed for the following year. It is likely that the same
academic is losing touch with the very movements she writes about, and is no
longer participating in their work because she is exhausted and the book takes
time to write no matter how fast she works. On publication of the book, her
work is validated professionally; she gets the university contract and is
invited to sit on panels in public institutions about contemporary social
movements. In this hypothetical case, it is clear that the academic’s work has
become detached from the movements she now writes and talks about, and she no
doubt sees this. But there is good compensation for this uneasiness in the
form of professional validation, invitations that flatter, and most
importantly, an ease of the cycle of hourly paid or precarious nine-month
contracts.[12](ch11.xhtml#footnote-514)
Kelly’s and Fitzpatrick’s examples describe the paradoxes that the demand for
authorship creates for collective practices. But how can we actually escape
regimes of authorship that are conceptualised and economised as ‘cultural
capital’?
Academic authorship, after all, is the basis for employment, promotion, and
tenure. Also, arguably, artists who stop being ‘authors’ of their own work
would no longer be considered ‘artists’, because authorship is one of art’s
main framing devices. In the following I will discuss three artistic practices
that address this question — with, as we will see, very different
outcomes.[13](ch11.xhtml#footnote-513)
The artist’s main objective appeared to be not to pirate and circulate an
unauthorised reprint of Salinger’s novel, because he did not present the book
under Salinger’s name but his own. Prince also chose a very limited
circulation figure.[16](ch11.xhtml#footnote-510) It is also far from
conventional plagiarism, because hardly any twentieth century literature is
more read and widely known than Salinger’s Catcher. So the question is, why
would Prince want to recirculate one of the most-read American novels of all
time, a book available in bookshops around the world, with a total circulation
of 65 million copies, translated into 30
languages?[17](ch11.xhtml#footnote-509)
Prince stated that he loved Salinger’s novel so much that ‘I just wanted to
make sure, if you were going to buy my Catcher in the Rye, you were going to
have to pay twice as much as the one Barnes and Noble was selling from J. D.
Salinger. I know that sounds really kind of shallow and maybe that’s not the
best way to contribute to something, but in the book-collecting world you pay
a premium for really collectible books,’ he explained in an interview with
singer Kim Gordon.[18](ch11.xhtml#footnote-508)
As intended, the work quickly turned into a
collectible[19](ch11.xhtml#footnote-507) and attracted lots of applause from
members of the contemporary art world including, among others, conceptual
writer Kenneth Goldsmith, who described the work as a ‘terribly ballsy move’.
Prince was openly ‘pirating what is arguably the most valuable property in
American literature, practically begging the estate of Salinger to sue
him.’[20](ch11.xhtml#footnote-506)
## Who has the Power to Appropriate?
We need to examine Goldsmith’s appraisal more closely. What is this ‘ballsy
move’? And how does it relate to the asserted criticality of appropriation
artists in the late 1970s, a group of which Prince was part?
Prince rose to prominence in New York in the late 1970s, associated with the
Pictures generation of artists[21](ch11.xhtml#footnote-505) whose
appropriation of images from mass culture and advertising — Prince’s
photographs of Marlboro Man adverts, for example — examined the politics of
representation.[22](ch11.xhtml#footnote-504) Theorists and critics, often
associated with the academic October journal,[23](ch11.xhtml#footnote-503)
interpreted the Pictures artists’ ‘unabashed usurpations of images as radical
interrogations of the categories of originality and authenticity within the
social construction of authorship. […] The author had become irrelevant
because the original gesture had become unimportant; the copy adequately stood
in its place and performed its legitimising
function.’[24](ch11.xhtml#footnote-502)
Artist Sherrie Levine, one of the leading figures in American appropriation
art, expresses the core theoretical commitment of this group of artists in her
1982 manifesto: ‘The world is filled to suffocating. Man has placed his token
on every stone. Every word, every image, is leased and mortgaged. […] A
picture is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of
culture. We can only imitate a gesture that is always anterior, never
original.’[25](ch11.xhtml#footnote-501) This ostensive refusal of originality
poses, no doubt, a critique of the author who creates ‘ex nihilo’. But does it
really present a critique of authorship per se? I shall propose three
arguments from different viewpoints — aesthetic, economic and legal — to
explore the assumptions of this assertion.
From the aesthetic perspective, Prince and Levine are making formal choices in
the process of appropriating already existing work. They re-photograph,
produce photographic prints, make colour choices; they enlarge or scale down,
trim the edges and take decisions about framing. Nate Harrison makes this
point when he argues that ‘Levine and Prince take individual control of the
mass-authored image, and in so doing, reaffirm the ground upon which the
romantic author stands.’[26](ch11.xhtml#footnote-500) It is exactly this
control of, and authority over, the signed and exhibited image that leads
Prince and Levine to be validated as ‘author[s] par
excellence’.[27](ch11.xhtml#footnote-499) Prince, for example, has been lauded
as an artist who ‘makes it new, by making it
again’.[28](ch11.xhtml#footnote-498) This ‘making it again’, a process that
Hal Foster names ‘recoding’,[29](ch11.xhtml#footnote-497) creates new meaning
and must therefore be interpreted as an ‘original’ authorial act.
Subsequently, this work has been validated by museums, galleries, collectors
and critics. From an economic perspective one can therefore argue that
Prince’s numerous solo exhibitions in prestigious museums, his sales figures,
and affiliation to commercial galleries are evidence that he has been ascribed
artistic authorship as well as authorial agency by the institutions of the art
world.[30](ch11.xhtml#footnote-496)
The legal framework remains conceptual, theoretical and untested in this case.
But on another occasion, Prince’s authorship was tested in court — and
eventually legally confirmed to belong to him. This is crucial to my inquiry.
What are we to make of the fact that Prince, who challenges the copyright
doctrine in his gestures of appropriation, has been ascribed legitimate
authorship by courts who rule on copyright law? It seems paradoxical, because
as Elizabeth Wang rightly claims, ‘if appropriation is legitimized, the
political dimension of this act is excised’.[32](ch11.xhtml#footnote-494) And
Cornelia Sollfrank argues ‘the value of appropriation art lies in its
illicitness. […] Any form of [judicial] legitimisation would not support the
[appropriation] artists’ claims, but rather undermine
them.’[33](ch11.xhtml#footnote-493)
## Authorship Defined by Market Value and Celebrity Status?
To illustrate this point I will briefly digress to discuss a controversial
court case about Prince’s authorial legitimacy. In 2009, New-York-based
photographer, Patrick Cariou began litigation against Prince, his gallerist
Larry Gagosian and his catalogue publisher Rizzoli. Prince had appropriated
Cariou’s photographs in his series Canal Zone which went on show at Gagosian
Gallery.[34](ch11.xhtml#footnote-492) A first ruling by a district judge
stated that Prince’s appropriation was copyright infringement and requested
him to destroy the unsold paintings on show. The ruling also forbade those
that had been sold from being displayed publicly in the
future.[35](ch11.xhtml#footnote-491)
However Prince’s eventual appeal turned the verdict around. A second circuit
court decided that twenty-five of his thirty paintings fell under the fair use
rule. The legal concept of fair use allows for copyright exceptions in order
to balance the interests of exclusive right holders with the interests of
users and the public ‘for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting,
teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or
research’.[36](ch11.xhtml#footnote-490) One requirement to justify fair use is
that the new work should be transformative, understood as presenting a new
expression, meaning or message. The appeal’s court considered Prince’s
appropriation as sufficiently transformative because a ‘reasonable
observer’[37](ch11.xhtml#footnote-489)would perceive aesthetic differences
with the original.[38](ch11.xhtml#footnote-488)
Many artists applauded the appeal court’s verdict, as it seemed to set a
precedent for a more liberal approach towards appropriation art. Yet attorney
Sergio Muñoz Sarmiento and art historian Lauren van Haaften-Schick voiced
concerns about the verdict’s interpretation of ‘transformative’ and the
ruling’s underlying assumptions.
The questions of ‘aesthetic differences’ perceived by a ‘reasonable observer’,
Sarmiento rightly says, are significant. After all, Prince did not provide a
statement of intent in his deposition[39](ch11.xhtml#footnote-487) therefore
the judges had to adopt the role of a (quasi) art critic ‘employing [their]
own artistic judgment[s]’ in a field in which they had not been
trained.[40](ch11.xhtml#footnote-486)
Secondly, trying to evaluate the markets Cariou and Prince cater for, the
court introduced a controversial distinction between celebrity and non-
celebrity artists. The court opinion reasons: ‘Certain of the Canal Zone
artworks have sold for two million or more dollars. The invitation list for a
dinner that Gagosian hosted in conjunction with the opening of the Canal Zone
show included a number of the wealthy and famous such as the musicians Jay-Z
and Beyoncé Knowles, artists Damien Hirst and Jeff Koons, [….] and actors
Robert De Niro, Angelina Jolie, and Brad Pitt’.[41](ch11.xhtml#footnote-485)
Cariou, on the contrary, so the verdict argues, ‘has not aggressively marketed
his work’, and has earned just over $8,000 in royalties from Yes Rasta since
its publication.[42](ch11.xhtml#footnote-484) Furthermore, he made only ‘a
handful of private sales [of his photographic prints] to personal
acquaintances’.[43](ch11.xhtml#footnote-483) Prince, by contrast, sold eight
of his Canal Zone paintings for a total of $10,480,000 and exchanged seven
others for works by canonical artists such as painter Larry Rivers and
sculptor Richard Serra.[44](ch11.xhtml#footnote-482)
The court documents here tend to portray Cariou as a sort of hobby artist or
‘lower class amateur’ in Sarmiento’s words,[45](ch11.xhtml#footnote-481)
whereas Prince is described as a ‘well-known appropriation
artist’[46](ch11.xhtml#footnote-480) with considerable success in the art
market.[47](ch11.xhtml#footnote-479) Such arguing is dangerous, because it
brings social class, celebrity status and art market success into play as
legal categories to be considered in future copyright cases and dismisses
‘Cariou’s claim as a legitimate author and
artist’.[48](ch11.xhtml#footnote-478) The parties eventually reached an out-
of-court settlement regarding the remaining five paintings, and their
infringement claim was returned to the district court meaning that no ruling
had been issued. This pragmatic settlement can be interpreted as a missed
opportunity for further clarification in the interpretation of fair use. No
details about the settlement have been disclosed.[49](ch11.xhtml#footnote-477)
Richard Prince presented himself in his court deposition as an artist, who
‘do[es]n’t really have a message,’ and was not ‘trying to create anything with
a new meaning or a new message.’[50](ch11.xhtml#footnote-476) Nevertheless the
appeal court’s ruling transforms the ‘elusive artist not only into a subject,
but also into an [artist] author’[51](ch11.xhtml#footnote-475) — a status he
set out to challenge in the first place. Therefore Richard Prince’s ongoing
games[52](ch11.xhtml#footnote-474) might be entertaining or make us laugh, but
they stop short of effectively challenging the conceptualisation of
authorship, originality and property because they are assigned the very
properties that are denied to the authors whose works are copied. That is to
say, Prince’s performative toying with the law does not endanger his art’s
operability in the art world. On the contrary, it constructs and affirms his
reputation as a radical and saleable artist-author.
## De-Authoring
A very different approach to copyright law is demonstrated by American artist
Cady Noland, who employs the law to effectively endanger her art’s operability
in the art market. Noland is famously concerned with the circulation and
display of her work with respect to context, installation and photographic
representation. Relatedly, she has also become very critical of short-term
speculation on the art market. Noland has apparently not produced any new work
for over a decade, due to the time she now spends pursuing litigation around
her existing oeuvre.[53](ch11.xhtml#footnote-473) In 2011, she strikingly
demonstrated that an artist need not give up control when her work enters the
commercial art market and turns into a commodity for short-term profit. She
made probably one of the most important stands in modern art history when she
‘de-authored’ her work Cowboys Milking (1990), after it was put up for auction
at Sotheby’s with the consequence that the work could not be sold as a Cady
Noland work anymore.
Swiss-born dealer Marc Jancou, based in New York and Geneva, had consigned the
work to Sotheby’s a few months after having purchased it for $106,500 from a
private collector.[54](ch11.xhtml#footnote-472) Jancou was obviously attracted
by the fact that one of Noland’s works had achieved the highest price for a
piece by a living female artist: $6.6m.
At Noland’s request, on the eve of the auction, Sotheby’s abruptly withdrew
the piece, a silkscreen print on an aluminium panel. The artist argued that it
was damaged: ‘The current condition […] materially differs from that at the
time of its creation. […] [H]er honor and reputation [would] be prejudiced as
a result of offering [it] for sale with her name associated with
it.’[55](ch11.xhtml#footnote-471) From a legal point of view, this amounts to
a withdrawal of Noland’s authorship. The US Visual Artists Rights Act of 1990,
VARA, grants artists ‘authorship’ rights over works even after they have been
sold, including the right to prevent intentional modification and to forbid
the use of their name in association with distorted or mutilated
work.[56](ch11.xhtml#footnote-470) Such rights are based on the premise that
the integrity of a work needs to be guaranteed and a work of art has cultural
significance that extends beyond mere property
value.[57](ch11.xhtml#footnote-469)
Noland’s withdrawal of authorship left Jancou with ‘a Cady Noland’ in his
living room, but not on the market. In an email to Sotheby’s, he complained:
‘This is not serious! Why does an auction house ask the advise [sic] of an
artist that has no gallery representation and has a biased and radical
approach to the art market?’[58](ch11.xhtml#footnote-468) Given that Noland is
a long-standing and outspoken sceptic with respect to speculative dealing in
art, he somewhat naively wonders why she would be able to exercise this degree
of power over an artwork that had been entered into a system of commercial
exchange. His complaint had no effect. The piece remained withdrawn from the
auction and Jancou filed a lawsuit in February 2012 seeking $26 million in
damages from Sotheby’s.[59](ch11.xhtml#footnote-467)
From an economic perspective, both artists, Noland and Prince, illustrated
powerfully how authorship is instituted in the form of the artist’s signature,
to construct (Prince’s Catcher in the Rye) or destroy (Noland’s Cowboy
Milking) monetary value. Richard Prince’s stated intention is to double the
book’s price, and by attaching his name to Salinger’s book in a Duchampian
gesture, he turns it into a work of art authored and copyrighted by Prince.
Noland, on the contrary lowers the value of her artwork by removing her
signature and by asserting the artist-author’s (Noland) rights over the
dealer-owner’s (Jancou).[60](ch11.xhtml#footnote-466)
However, from a legal perspective I would argue that both Noland and Prince —
in their opposite approaches of removing and adding their signatures — affirm
authorship as it is conceptualised by the law.[61](ch11.xhtml#footnote-465)
After all ‘copyright law is a system to which the notion of the author appears
to be central — in defining the right owner, in defining the work, in defining
infringement.’[62](ch11.xhtml#footnote-464)
## Intellectual Property Obsession Running Amok?
Intellectual property — granted via copyright — has become one of the driving
forces of the creative economy, being exploited by corporations and
institutions of the so-called ‘creative industries’. In the governmental
imagination, creative workers are described as ‘model entrepreneurs for the
new economy’.[63](ch11.xhtml#footnote-463) Shortly after the election of New
Labour in the UK in 1997, the newly formed Department of Culture, Media and
Sport established the Creative Industries Mapping Document (CIMD 1998) and
defined the ‘Creative Industries’ primarily in relation to creativity and
intellectual property.[64](ch11.xhtml#footnote-462) According to the
Department for Culture Media and Sport the creative industries have ‘their
origin in individual creativity, skill and talent, which have a potential for
wealth and job creation through the generation and exploitation of
intellectual property.’[65](ch11.xhtml#footnote-461) This exploitation of
intellectual property as intangible capital has been taken on board by
institutions and public management policymakers, which not only turn creative
practices into private property, but trigger working policies that produce
precarious self-entrepreneurship and sacrifice in pursuit of
gratification.[66](ch11.xhtml#footnote-460)
We find this kind of thinking reflected for instance on the website built by
the University of the Arts London to give advice on intellectual property —
which was until recently headlined ‘Own It’.[67](ch11.xhtml#footnote-459)
Here, institutional policies privilege the privatisation and propertisation of
creative student work over the concept of sharing and fair use.
There is evidence that this line of thought creates a self-inflicted
impediment for cultural workers inside and outside art colleges. The College
Art Association, a US-based organization of about fourteen thousand artists,
arts professionals, students and scholars released a report in 2015 on the
state of fair use in the visual arts.[68](ch11.xhtml#footnote-458) The survey
reveals that ‘visual arts communities of practice share a great deal of
confusion about and misunderstanding of the nature of copyright law and the
availability of fair use. […] Formal education on copyright, not least at art
colleges, appears to increase tendencies to overestimate risk and underuse
fair use.’ As a result, the report states, the work of art students ‘is
constrained and censored, most powerfully by themselves, because of that
confusion and the resulting fear and anxiety.’[69](ch11.xhtml#footnote-457)
This climate even results in outright self-censorship. The interviewees of
this study ‘repeatedly expressed a pre-emptive decision not to pursue an
idea’[70](ch11.xhtml#footnote-456) because gaining permission from right
holders is often difficult, time consuming or expensive. The authors of this
report called this mindset a ‘permissions culture’, giving some examples. ‘I
think of copyright as a cudgel, and I have been repeatedly forestalled and
censored because I have not been able to obtain copyright permission’, stated
one academic, whose research did not get approval from an artist’s estate. He
added: ‘For those of us who work against the grain of [the] market-driven arts
economy, their one recourse for controlling us is copyright.’ Another said:
‘In many cases I have encountered artists’ estates and sometimes artists who
refuse rights to publish (even when clearly fair use) unless they like the
interpretation in the text. This is censorship and very deleterious to
scholarship and a free public discourse on
images.’[71](ch11.xhtml#footnote-455) One scholar declared that copyright
questions overshadowed his entire work process: ‘In my own writing, I’m
worrying all the time.’[72](ch11.xhtml#footnote-454) In such a climate of
anxiety ‘editors choose not to publish books that they believe might have
prohibitive permission costs; museums delay or abandon digital-access
projects’, as Ben Mauk comments in the New Yorker
Magazine.[73](ch11.xhtml#footnote-453)
The language of law does harm because it has the rhetorical power to foreclose
debate. Legal and political science scholar Jennifer Nedelsky traces the
problem to the fact ‘that many right claims, such as “it’s my property”, have
a conclusory quality. They are meant to end, not to open up debate’, therefore
‘treating as settled, what should be debated’.[74](ch11.xhtml#footnote-452)
In a similar vein, political scientist Deborah Halbert describes how her
critique of intellectual property took her on a journey to study the details
of the law. The more she got into it, so she says, the more her own thinking
had been ‘co-opted’ by the law. ‘The more I read the case law and law
journals, the more I came to speak from a position inside the status quo. My
ability to critique the law became increasingly bounded by the law itself and
the language used by those within the legal profession to discuss issues of
intellectual property. I began to speak in terms of incentives and public
goods. I began to start any discussion of intellectual property by what was
and was not allowed under the law. It became clear that the very act of
studying the subject had transformed my standpoint from an outsider to an
insider.’[75](ch11.xhtml#footnote-451)
## The Piracy Project — Multiple Authorship or ‘Unsolicited Collaborations’?
A similar question of language applies to the term
‘pirate’.[76](ch11.xhtml#footnote-450) Media and communication scholar Ramon
Lobato asks whether the language of piracy used by the critical intellectual
property discourse ‘should be embraced, rejected, recuperated or
rearticulated’? He contends that reducing ‘piracy’ to a mere legal category —
of conforming, or not, with the law — tends to neglect the generative forces
of piracy, which ‘create its own economies, exemplify wider changes in social
structure, and bring into being tense and unusual relationships between
consumers, cultural producers and governments.’[77](ch11.xhtml#footnote-449)
When the word pirate first appeared in ancient Greek texts, it was closely
related to the noun ‘peira’ which means trial or attempt. ‘The ‘pirate’ would
then be the one who ‘tests’, ‘puts to proof’, ‘contends with’, and ‘makes an
attempt’.[78](ch11.xhtml#footnote-448) Further etymological research shows
that from the same root stems pira: experience, practice [πείρα], pirama:
experiment [πείραμα], piragma: teasing [πείραγμα] and pirazo: tease, give
trouble [πειράζω].[79](ch11.xhtml#footnote-447)
This ‘contending with’, ’making an attempt’ and ‘teasing’ is at the core of
the Piracy Project’s practice, whose aim is twofold: firstly, to gather and
study a vast array of piratical practices (to test and negotiate the
complexities and paradoxes created by intellectual property for artistic
practice); and secondly to build a practice that is itself collaborative and
generative on many different levels.[80](ch11.xhtml#footnote-446)
The Piracy Project explores the philosophical, legal and social implications
of cultural piracy and creative modes of dissemination. Through an open call,
workshops, reading rooms and performative debates as well as through our
research into international pirate book markets[81](ch11.xhtml#footnote-445)
we gathered a collection of roughly 150 copied, emulated, appropriated and
modified books from across the world. Their approaches to copying vary widely,
from playful strategies of reproduction, modification and reinterpretation of
existing works; to acts of civil disobedience circumventing enclosures such as
censorship or market monopolies; to acts of piracy generated by commercial
interests. This vast and contradictory spectrum of cases, from politically
motivated bravery as well as artistic statements to cases of hard-edged
commercial exploitation, serves as the starting point to explore the
complexities and contradictions of authorship in debates, workshops, lectures
and texts, like this one.
In an attempt to rearticulate the language of piracy we call the books in the
collection ‘unsolicited collaborations’.[82](ch11.xhtml#footnote-444)
Unsolicited indicates that the makers of the books in the Piracy Project did
not ask for permission — Richard Prince’s ‘Catcher in the Rye’ is one
example.[83](ch11.xhtml#footnote-443) Collaboration refers to a relational
activity and re-imagines authorship not as proprietary and stable, but as a
dialogical and generative process. Here, as feminist legal scholar Carys Craig
claims, ‘authorship is not originative but participative; it is not internal
but interactive; it is not independent but interdependent. In short, a
dialogic account of authorship is equipped to appreciate the derivative,
collaborative, and communicative nature of authorial activity in a way that
the Romantic [individual genius] account never
can.’[84](ch11.xhtml#footnote-442)
Such a participatory and interdependent conceptualisation of authorship is
illustrated and tested in the Piracy Project’s research into reprinting,
modifying, emulating and commenting on published books. As such it revisits —
through material practice — Michel Foucault’s critical concept of the ‘author
function’ as the triggering of a discourse, rather than a proprietary
right.[85](ch11.xhtml#footnote-441)
This becomes clearer when we consider that digital print technologies, for
example through print on demand and desktop publishing, allow for a constant
re-printing and re-editing of existing files. The advent and widespread
accessibility of the photocopy machine in the late 1960s allowed the reader to
photocopy books and collate selected chapters, pages or images in new and
customised compilations. These new reproduction technologies undermine to an
extent the concept of the printed book as a stable and authoritative
work,[86](ch11.xhtml#footnote-440) which had prevailed since the mass
production of books on industrial printing presses came into being. Eva
Hemmungs Wirtén describes how the widespread availability of the
photocopier[87](ch11.xhtml#footnote-439) has been perceived as a threat to the
authority of the text and cites Marshall McLuhan’s address at the Vision 65
congress in 1965:
Xerography is bringing a reign of terror into the world of publishing because
it means that every reader can become both author and publisher. […]
Authorship and readership alike can become production-oriented under
xerography. Anyone can take a book apart, insert parts of other books and
other materials of his own interest, and make his own book in a relatively
fast time. Any teacher can take any ten textbooks on any subject and custom-
make a different one by simply xeroxing a chapter from this one and from that
one.[88](ch11.xhtml#footnote-438)
One example of a reprinted and modified book in the Piracy Project is No se
diga a nadie (‘Don’t tell anyone’).[89](ch11.xhtml#footnote-437) It is an
autobiographical novel by Peruvian journalist and TV presenter Jaime Bayli.
The pirate copy, found by Andrea Francke on Lima’s pirate book markets, is
almost identical in size, weight, and format and the cover image is only
slightly cropped. However, this pirate copy has two extra chapters. Somebody
has infiltrated the named author’s work and sneaked in two fictionalised
chapters about the author’s life. These extra chapters are well written, good
enough to blend in and not noticeable at first glance by the
reader.[90](ch11.xhtml#footnote-436)
The pirates cannot gain any cultural capital here, as the pirating author
remains an anonymous ghost. Equally there is no financial profit to be made,
as long as the pirate version is not pointed out to readers as an extended
version. Such act is also not framed as a conceptual gesture, as it is the
case with Prince’s Catcher in the Rye. It rather operates under the radar of
everyone, and moreover and importantly, any revelation of this intervention or
any claim of authorship would be counterproductive.
This example helps us to think through concepts of the authoritative text and
the stability of the book. Other cases in the Piracy Project find similar ways
to queer the category of authorship and the dominant modes of production and
dissemination.[91](ch11.xhtml#footnote-435) Our practice consists of
collecting; setting up temporary reading rooms to house the collection; and
organising workshops and debates in order to find out about the reasons and
intentions for these acts of piracy, to learn from their strategies and to
track their implications for dominant modes of production and
dissemination.[92](ch11.xhtml#footnote-434)
This discursive practice distinguishes the Piracy Project from radical online
libraries, such as aaaaarg.fail or
[memoryoftheworld.org](http://memoryoftheworld.org).[93](ch11.xhtml#footnote-433)
While we share similar concerns, such as distribution monopolies, enclosure
and the streamlining of knowledge, these peer-to-peer (p2p) platforms mainly
operate as distribution platforms, developing strategies to share intact
copies of authoritative texts. Marcell Mars, for example, argues against
institutional and corporate distribution monopolies when he states ‘when
everyone is a librarian, [the] library is everywhere’. Mars invites users of
the online archive [memoryoftheworld.org](http://memoryoftheworld.org) to
upload their scanned books to share with others. Similarly, Sean Dockray, who
initiated aaaaarg.fail, a user generated online archive of books and texts,
said in an interview: ‘the project wasn’t about criticising institutions,
copyright, authority, and so on. It was simply about sharing knowledge. This
wasn’t as general as it sounds; I mean literally the sharing of knowledge
between various individuals and groups that I was in correspondence with at
the time but who weren’t necessarily in correspondence with each
other.’[94](ch11.xhtml#footnote-432)
In contrast to online p2p sharing platforms, the Piracy Project took off in a
physical space, in the library of Byam Shaw School of Art in London. Its
creation was a response to restrictive university policies when, in 2010, the
management announced the closure of the art college library due to a merger
with the University of the Arts London. A joint effort by students and staff,
supported by the acting principal, turned Byam Shaw’s art college library into
a self-organised library that remained public, as well as intellectually and
socially generative.[95](ch11.xhtml#footnote-431)
As a result of the college taking collective ownership over the library and
its books, the space opened up. It had been a resource that was controlled and
validated by institutional policies that shaped crucial decisions about what
went on the shelves, but it became an assemblage of knowledge in which
potentially obscure, self-published materials that were not institutionally
validated were able to enter.
For example, artist and writer Neil Chapman’s handmade facsimile of Gilles
Deleuze’s Proust and Signs[96](ch11.xhtml#footnote-430) explored the
materiality of print and related questions about the institutional policies of
authorisation. Chapman produced a handmade facsimile of his personal paperback
copy of Deleuze’s work, including binding mistakes in which a few pages were
bound upside down, by scanning and printing the book on his home inkjet
printer. The book is close to the original format, cover and weight. However,
it has a crafty feel to it: the ink soaks into the paper creating a blurry
text image very different from a mass-produced offset printed text. It has
been assembled in DIY style and speaks the language of amateurism and
makeshift. The transformation is subtle, and it is this subtlety that makes
the book subversive in an institutional library context. How do students deal
with their expectations that they will access authoritative and validated
knowledge on library shelves and instead encounter a book that was printed and
assembled by hand?[97](ch11.xhtml#footnote-429) Such publications circumvent
the chain of institutional validation: from the author, to the publisher, the
book trade, and lastly the librarian purchasing and cataloguing the book
according to the standard bibliographic
practices.[98](ch11.xhtml#footnote-428) A similar challenge to the stability
of the printed book and the related hierarchy of knowledge occurred when
students at Byam Shaw sought a copy of Jacques Ranciere’s Ignorant
Schoolmaster and found three copied and modified versions. In accordance with,
or as a response to, Ranciere’s pedagogical proposal, one copy featured
deleted passages that left blank spaces for the reader to fill and to
construct their own meaning in lieu of Ranciere’s
text.[99](ch11.xhtml#footnote-427)
This queering of the authority of the book as well as the normative,
institutional frameworks felt like a liberating practice. It involved an open
call for pirated books, a set of workshops and a series of
lectures,[100](ch11.xhtml#footnote-426) which built a structure that allowed
the Piracy Project to share concerns about the wider developments at the
university and the government’s funding cuts in education, while the project
could at the same time playfully subvert the dire and frustrating situation of
a library that is earmarked for closure.
The fact that the library’s acquisition budget was cut made the pirating
action even more meaningful. Many books were produced on the photocopy machine
in the college. Other copies were sent to the project by artists, writers,
curators and critics who responded to the international call. The initial
agreement was to accept any submission, no matter how controversial, illegal
or unethical it might be. This invited a variety of approaches and
contradicting voices, which were not muted by the self-censorship of their
originators, nor by the context in which they circulated. By resisting
generalised judgments, the project tried to practice critique in Judith
Butler’s sense. For Butler ‘judgments operate […] as ways to subsume a
particular under an already constituted category, whereas critique asks after
the occlusive constitution of the field of categories themselves. […] Critique
is able to call foundations into question, denaturalise social and political
hierarchy, and even establish perspectives by which a certain distance on the
naturalised world can be had.’[101](ch11.xhtml#footnote-425)
To create such a space for the critique of the naturalisation of authorship as
intellectual property was one of the aims of the Piracy Project: firstly by
understanding that there is always a choice through discovering and exploring
other cultures and nations dealing with (or deliberately suspending) Western
copyright, and secondly through the project’s collective practice itself.
## Collective Authorship, Institutional Framing
The collaborative mode and collectivity within the Piracy Project
differentiates its artistic strategy in principle from Prince’s or Noland’s
approaches, who both operate as individuals claiming individual authorship for
their work.
But how did the Piracy Project deal with the big authorship question? There
was an interesting shift here: when the project still operated within the art
college library, there was not much need for the articulation of authorship
because it was embedded in a community who contributed in many different ways.
Once the library was eventually shut after two years and the project was
hosted by art institutions, a demand for the definition and framing of
authorship arose.[102](ch11.xhtml#footnote-424) Here the relationship between
the individual and the collective requires constant and careful
negotiation.[103](ch11.xhtml#footnote-423) Members of collectives naturally
develop different priorities and the differences in time, labour and thought
invested by individuals makes one contributor want to claim ‘more authorship’
than another. These conflicts require trust, transparency and a decision to
value the less glamorous, more invisible and supportive work needed to
maintain the project as much as the authoring of a text or speaking on a
panel.[104](ch11.xhtml#footnote-422) We also do not necessarily speak with one
voice. Andrea grew up in Peru and Brazil, and I in Germany, so we have
different starting points and experiences: ‘we’ was therefore sometimes a
problematic category.
## Our Relationships Felt Temporarily Transformed
Walter Benjamin, in his text ‘The Author as Producer’, rightly called on
intellectuals to take into account the means of production as much as the
radical content of their writings.[105](ch11.xhtml#footnote-421) In
theoretical writing, modes of production are too often ignored, which means in
practice that theorists uncritically comply with the conventional
micropolitics of publishing and dissemination. In other words, radical men and
women write radical thoughts in books that are not radical at all in the way
they are produced, published and disseminated. Cultural philosopher Gary Hall
recounts with surprise a discussion headlined ‘Radical Publishing: What Are We
Struggling For?’ that was held at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) in
London in 2011. The invited panel speakers — Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi, David
Graeber, Peter Hallward, and Mark Fisher among others — were mostly concerned
with, as Hall remembers,
political transformations elsewhere: in the past, the future, Egypt, [….] but
there was very little discussion of anything that would actually affect the
work, business, role, and practices of the speakers themselves: radical ideas
of publishing with transformed modes of production, say. As a result, the
event in the end risked appearing mainly to be about a few publishers,
including Verso, Pluto, and Zero Books, that may indeed publish radical
political content but in fact operate according to quite traditional business
models […] promoting their authors and products and providing more goods for
the ticket-paying audience to buy. If the content of their publications is
politically transformative, their publishing models certainly are not, with
phenomena such as the student protests and ideas of communism all being turned
into commodities to be marketed and sold.[106](ch11.xhtml#footnote-420)
That truly radical practices are possible is demonstrated by Susan Kelly, when
she reflects on her involvement in collective practices of creative dissent
during the austerity protests in the UK in 2010 — roughly at the same time and
in the same climate that the panel at the ICA took
place.[107](ch11.xhtml#footnote-419) Kelly describes occasions when artists
and activists who were involved in political organising, direct action,
campaigning, and claiming and organising alternative social and cultural
spaces, came together. She sees these occasions as powerful moments that
provided a glimpse into what the beginnings of a transversal and overarching
movement might look like.[108](ch11.xhtml#footnote-418) It was an attempt to
devise the new modes of action, and new kinds of objects from our emerging
analyses of the situation while keeping the format open, avoiding the
replication of given positions, hierarchies and roles of teachers, students,
artists, onlookers and so on. […] We met people we had never met before, never
worked with or known, and for many of us, our relationships felt temporarily
transformed, our vulnerabilities exposed and prior positions and defenses left
irrelevant, or at least suspended.[109](ch11.xhtml#footnote-417)
Exactly because these moments of protest produced actions and props that
escaped authorship, it was even more alienating for the participants when a
collectively fabricated prop for a demonstration, a large papier-mâché
carrot[110](ch11.xhtml#footnote-416) that became a notorious image in the
press at the time, was retrospectively ascribed in an Artforum interview to be
the ‘authored’ work of an individual artist.[111](ch11.xhtml#footnote-415)
Kelly, correctly, is highly critical of such designation, which re-erects the
blockages and boundaries connected to regimes of authorship that collective
action aimed to dismantle in the first place. It is vital not to ignore the
‘complex set of open and contingent relationships, actions and manifestations
that composed this specific collective political work.’ We would have to ask,
to which of the activities in the making of the papier-mâché carrot would we
attribute authorship? Is it the paper sourcing, the gluing, the painting, the
carrying or the communicative work of organising the gatherings? What if the
roles and practices are fluid and cannot be delimited like this?
## How Not to Assign Authorship?
What about this text you are reading now? It is based on a five-year
collaboration to which numerous people contributed. Pirated books were given
to the Piracy Project as well as arguments, ideas, questions, knowledge and
practices in the form of conversations and workshops.
In that regard, this text is informed by a myriad of encounters in panel
discussions and debates, as well as in the classrooms supported by
institutions, activist spaces and art spaces.[112](ch11.xhtml#footnote-414)
All these people donated their valuable ideas to its writing. Various drafts
have been read and commented on by friends, PhD supervisors and an anonymous
peer reviewer, and it has been edited by the publishers in the process of
becoming part of the anthology you now hold in your hands or read on a screen.
In that light, do I simply and uncritically affirm the mechanisms I am
criticising by delivering a single-authored text to be printed and validated
within the prevailing audit culture?
What if I did not add my name to this text? If it went unsigned, so to speak?
If anonymity replaced the designation of authorship? The text has not been
written collectively or collaboratively, despite the conventional processes of
seeking comments from friendly and critical readers. This is my text, but what
would happen if I did not assert my right to be its named author?
How would the non-visibility of the author matter to the reader? We are used
to making judgements that are at least partially based on the gender, status,
authority and reputation of a writer. There are also questions of liability
and accountability with respect to the content of the
text.[113](ch11.xhtml#footnote-413) Given the long struggle of women writers
and writers of colour to gain the right to be acknowledged as author, the act
of not signing my text might be controversial or even counter productive. It
would also go against the grain of scholarship that aims to decolonise the
canon or fight against the prevailing gender inequality in scholarly
publishing.[114](ch11.xhtml#footnote-412) And more, we have to ask who is
actually in a position to afford not to assign individual names to works given
that authorship — as discussed above — is used as a marker for professional
survival and advancement.
In this specific context however, and as practice based research, it would be
worth testing out practically what such a text orphan would trigger within
dominant infrastructures of publishing and validation. How would
bibliographers catalogue such a text? How could it be referenced and cited?
And how would it live online with respect to search engines, if there is no
searchable name attached to it? Most of our current research repositories
don’t allow the upload of author-less texts, instead returning error messages:
‘The author field must be completed’. Or they require a personalised log-in,
which automatically tags the registered username to the uploaded text.
What if I used a pseudonym, a common practice throughout literary
history?[115](ch11.xhtml#footnote-411) Multiple identity pseudonyms, such as
‘Karen Eliot’ or ‘Monty Cantsin’ used by the Neoist movement in the 1980s and
1990s could be interesting as they provide a joint name under which anybody
could sign her or his work without revealing the author’s
identity.[116](ch11.xhtml#footnote-410) This strategy of using a multi-
identity avatar is currently practiced by a decentralised, international
collective of hacktivists operating under the name ‘Anonymous’. The
‘elimination of the persona [of the author], and by extension everything
associated with it, such as leadership, representation, and status, is’,
according to Gabriella Coleman, ‘the primary ideal of
Anonymous.’[117](ch11.xhtml#footnote-409)
What if we adopted such models for academia? If we unionised and put in place
a procedure to collectively publish our work anonymously, for example under a
multi-identity avatar instead of individual names — how would such a text,
non-attributable as it is, change the policies of evaluation and assessment
within the knowledge economy? Would the lack of an identifiable name allow the
text to resist being measured as (or reduced to) a quantifiable auditable
‘output’ and therefore allow the issue of individualistic authorship to be
politicised? Or would it rather, as an individual and solitary act, be
subjected — again — to the regimes of individualisation? It seems that only if
not assigning individual authorship became a widespread and unionised practice
could procedures be put in place that acknowledged non-authored, collective,
non-competitive practices.[118](ch11.xhtml#footnote-408)
However, as tempting and urgent as such a move might appear in order to allow
individualistic authorship to be politicised, such a step also produces a
challenging double bind. According to Sara Ahmed it actually does matter who
is speaking. ’The ’who ’ does make a difference, not in the form of an
ontology of the individual, but as a marker of a specific location from which
the subject writes’.[119](ch11.xhtml#footnote-407)
From a feminist and postcolonial perspective, the detachment of writing from
the empirical body is problematic. Ahmed points out: ‘The universalism of the
masculine perspective relies precisely on being disembodied, on lacking the
contingency of a body. A feminist perspective would surely emphasise the
implication of writing in embodiment, in order to re-historicise this supposed
universalism, to locate it, and to expose the violence of its contingency and
particularity (by declaring some-body wrote this text, by asking which body
wrote this text).’[120](ch11.xhtml#footnote-406) Gayatri Spivak for example
insists on marking the positionality of a speaking subject in order to account
for the often unacknowledged eurocentrism of western
philosophy.[121](ch11.xhtml#footnote-405)
If we acknowledged this double bind, we might eventually be able to invent
modes of being and working together that recognise the difference of the ’who’
that writes, and at the same time might be able to move on from the question
‘how can we get rid of the author’ to inventing processes of subjectivation
that we want to support and instigate.
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Munro, Cait (10 November 2014) ‘Is Cady Noland More Difficult To Work With
Than Richard Prince?’, artNet news,
cady-noland-as-psychotic-as-richard-prince-162310>
Myers, Julian (26 August 2009) Four Dialogues 2: On AAAARG, San Francisco
Museum of Modern Art — Open Space,
dialogues-2-on-aaaarg/>
Nedelsky, Jennifer (1993) ’Reconceiving Rights as Relationship’, Review of
Constitutional Studies / Revue d’études constitutionnelles 1.1, 1–26,
Open Book Publishers Authors’ Guide,
Piracy Project Catalogue. No se diga a nadie, [http://andpublishing.org/Public
Catalogue/PCat_record.php?cat_index=99](http://andpublishing.org/PublicCatalogue/PCat_record.php?cat_index=99)
Piracy Project Catalogue / Camille Bondon, Jacques Rancière: le mâitre
ignorant,
Piracy Project Catalogue / Neil Chapman, Deleuze, Proust and Signs,
Piracy Project (19 April 2012) ‘The Impermanent Book’, Rhizome,
Policante, Amedeo (2015) The Pirate Myth, Genealogies of an Imperial Concept
(Oxford and New York: Routledge).
Precarious Workers Brigade (24 April 2011) ‘Fragments Toward an Understanding
of a Week that Changed Everything…’, e-flux,
-week-that-changed-everything/>
Prince, Richard (13 April 2015) Birdtalk,
Rancière, Jacques (2010) Education, Truth and Emancipation (London:
Continuum).
— (2008) The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation
(Stanford: University Press California)
Rose, Mark (1993) Authors and Owners, The Invention of Copyright (Cambridge MA
and London: Harvard University Press).
Schor, Naomi (1989) ‘Dreaming Dissymmetry: Barthes, Foucault and Sexual
Difference’, in Elizabeth Weed (ed.), Coming to Terms: Feminism, Theory,
Politics (London: Routledge), pp. 47–58.
Sollfrank, Cornelia (2012) ‘Copyright Cowboys Performing the Law’, Journal of
New Media Caucus 8.2,
fall-2012-v-08-n-02-december-2nd-2012/copyright-cowboys-performing-the-law/>
Spivak, Gayatry Chakravorty (1988) ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’, in Cary Nelson
and Lawrence Grossberg (eds.), Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press), pp. 271–313.
Strathern, Marilyn (2005) Kinship, Law, and the Unexpected: Relatives Are
Always a Surprise (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
Thoburn, Nicholas (2016) Anti-Book, On the Art and Politics of Radical
Publishing (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press).
UK Government, Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (2015)
Creative Industries Economic Estimates January 2015,
estimates-january-2015/creative-industries-economic-estimates-january-2015
-key-findings>
— (1998) The Creative Industries Mapping Document,
documents-1998>
US Copyright Act (1976, amended 2016),
Wang, Elizabeth H. (1990) ‘(Re)Productive Rights: Copyright and the Postmodern
Artist’, Columbia-VLA Journal of Law & the Arts 14.2, 261–81,
[https://heinonline.org/HOL/Page?handle=hein.journals/cjla14&div=10&g_sent=1&casa_token=&collection=journals](https://heinonline.org/HOL/Page?handle=hein.journals/cjla14&div=10&g_sent=1&casa_token=&collection=journals)
Waugh, Seth (2007) ‘Sponsor Statement‘, in The Solomon R. Guggenheim
Foundation (ed.), Richard Prince (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz).
Wellmon, Chad and Andrew Piper (21 July 2017) ‘Publication, Power, Patronage:
On Inequality and Academic Publishing’, Critical Inquiry,
Wright, Stephen (2013) Towards a Lexicon of Usership (Eindhoven: Van
Abbemuseum).
Zwick, Tracy (29 August 2013) ‘Art in America’, [https://www.artinamerica
magazine.com/news-features/news/sothebys-wins-in-dispute-with-jancou-gallery-
over-cady-noland-artwork/](https://www.artinamericamagazine.com/news-
features/news/sothebys-wins-in-dispute-with-jancou-gallery-over-cady-noland-
artwork/)
[2](ch11.xhtml#footnote-524-backlink) Carys J. Craig, ‘Symposium:
Reconstructing the Author-Self: Some Feminist Lessons for Copyright Law’,
American University Journal of Gender, Social Policy & the Law 15\. 2 (2007),
207–68 (p. 224).
[3](ch11.xhtml#footnote-523-backlink) Mark Rose, Authors and Owners, The
Invention of Copyright (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press,
1993), p. 142.
[4](ch11.xhtml#footnote-522-backlink) Craig, ‘Symposium: Reconstructing the
Author-Self’, p. 261.
[5](ch11.xhtml#footnote-521-backlink) Ibid., p. 267.
[6](ch11.xhtml#footnote-520-backlink) See also cultural theorist Gary Hall’s
discussion of Pirate Philosophy, as a potential way forward to overcome such
simplyfying dichotomies. ‘How can we [theorists] operate differently with
regard to our own work, business, roles, and practices to the point where we
actually begin to confront, think through, and take on (rather than take for
granted, forget, repress, ignore, or otherwise marginalize) some of the
implications of the challenge that is offered by theory to fundamental
humanities concepts such as the human, the subject, the author, the book,
copyright, and intellectual property, for the ways in which we create,
perform, and circulate knowledge and research?’ Gary Hall, Pirate Philosophy,
for a Digital Posthumanities (Cambridge, MA and London: The MIT Press, 2016),
p. 16.
[7](ch11.xhtml#footnote-519-backlink) Here ‘the producer is being imagined as
the origin of the product’. (Strathern, p. 156). Therefore ‘in law,
originality is simply the description of a causal relationship between a
person and a thing: to say that a work is original in law is to say nothing
more than that it originates from [can be attributed to] its creator’ (Barron,
p. 56). And conversely, in law ‘there can be no ‘copyright work’ […] without
some author who can be said to originate it’ (ibid., p. 55). Anne Barron, ‘No
Other Law? Author–ity, Property and Aboriginal Art’, in Lionel Bently and
Spyros Maniatis (eds.), Intellectual Property and Ethics (London: Sweet and
Maxwell, 1998), pp. 37–88, and Marilyn Strathern, Kinship, Law, and the
Unexpected: Relatives Are Always a Surprise (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2005).
See also Mario Biagioli’s and Marilyn Strathern’s discussion of the author-
work relationship as kinship in Mario Biagioli, ‘Plagiarism, Kinship and
Slavery’, Theory Culture Society 31.2–3 (2014), 65–91,
[9](ch11.xhtml#footnote-517-backlink) ‘In no case does copyright protection
for an original work of authorship extend to any idea, procedure, process,
system, method of operation, concept, principle, or discovery, regardless of
the form in which it is described, explained, illustrated, or embodied in such
work.’ US Copyright Law, Article 17, §102 (b), amendment 2016,
[10](ch11.xhtml#footnote-516-backlink) Susan Kelly, ‘“But that was my idea!”
Problems of Authorship and Validation in Contemporary Practices of Creative
Dissent’, Parallax 19.2 (2013), 53–69,
https://doi.org/[10.1080/13534645.2013.778496](https://doi.org/10.1080/13534645.2013.778496).
All references to this text refer to the version published on
[academia.edu](http://academia.edu), which is slightly different: ,
p. 6.
[11](ch11.xhtml#footnote-515-backlink) Kathleen Fitzpatrick’s working method
with her book Generous Thinking: A Radical Approach to Saving the University
(Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2019) presents an interesting
alternative to standard procedures in scholarly publishing. She published the
draft of her book online, inviting readers to comment. This could potentially
become a model for multiple authorship as well as an alternative to the
standard peer review procedures. I am quoting from the published draft
version: Kathleen Fitzpatrick, ‘Critique and Competition’ in Generous
Thinking: The University and the Public Good (Humanities Commons, 2018),
paragraph 1,
[12](ch11.xhtml#footnote-514-backlink) Kelly, ‘“But that was my idea!”’, p. 6.
[13](ch11.xhtml#footnote-513-backlink) I refer in this chapter to US copyright
law, if not indicated otherwise.
[14](ch11.xhtml#footnote-512-backlink) He also released the book with Printed
Matter at the New York Art Book Fair in 2011.
[15](ch11.xhtml#footnote-511-backlink) It took Prince and his collaborator
John McWhinney over a year to find a printer with the guts to print this
facsimile. The one he eventually found was based in Iceland.
[16](ch11.xhtml#footnote-510-backlink) Prince states in his blog entry ‘Second
Thoughts on Being Original’, that he made 300 copies. ‘My plan was to show up
once a week, same day, same time, same place, until all three hundred copies
were gone.’ Birdtalk, 13 April 2015,
Booksellers’ web pages, such as Printed Matter, N.Y. and
[richardprincebooks.com](http://richardprincebooks.com), list an edition of
500. See:
[17](ch11.xhtml#footnote-509-backlink) Mark Krupnick, ‘JD Salinger Obituary’,
The Guardian, 28 January 2010,
/jd-salinger-obituary>
[18](ch11.xhtml#footnote-508-backlink) Kim Gordon, ‘Band Paintings: Kim Gordon
Interviews Richard Prince’, Interview Magazine, 18 June 2012,
[http://www.interviewmagazine.com/art/kim-gordon-richard-
prince#](http://www.interviewmagazine.com/art/kim-gordon-richard-prince)
[19](ch11.xhtml#footnote-507-backlink) The inside flap of his replica stated a
price of $62. On this afternoon on the sidewalk outside Central Park, he sold
his copies for $40. When I was browsing the shelves at the New York art
bookshop Printed Matter in 2012 I saw copies for $200 and in 2018 it is priced
at $1200 and $3500 for a signed copy on Abebooks,
[https://www.abebooks.co.uk/servlet/SearchResults?isbn=&an=richard%20prince
&tn=catcher%20rye&n=100121503&cm_sp=mbc-_-ats-_-used](https://www.abebooks.co.uk/servlet/SearchResults?isbn=&an=richard%252520prince&tn=catcher%252520rye&n=100121503&cm_sp=mbc-_-ats-_-used)
[20](ch11.xhtml#footnote-506-backlink) Kenneth Goldsmith, ‘Richard Prince’s
Latest Act of Appropriation: The Catcher in the Rye’, Harriet: A Poetry Blog,
19 April 2012,
princes-latest-act-of-appropriation-the-catcher-in-the-rye/>
[21](ch11.xhtml#footnote-505-backlink) In 1977 Douglas Crimp curated the
exhibition ‘Pictures’ at Artists’ Space in New York with artists Troy
Brauntuch, Jack Goldstein, Sherrie Levine, Robert Longo and Philip Smith.
Artist Cornelia Sollfrank interprets ‘the non-specific title of the show’ as a
first indication of the aesthetic strategies presented in the exhibition. The
presentation of reproduced visual materials marked, according to Sollfrank, ‘a
major challenge to the then predominant modernist discourse.’ Cornelia
Sollfrank, ‘Copyright Cowboys Performing the Law’, Journal of New Media Caucus
8.2 (2012),
fall-2012-v-08-n-02-december-2nd-2012/copyright-cowboys-performing-the-law/>
[22](ch11.xhtml#footnote-504-backlink) As Benjamin Buchloh writes ‘these
processes of quotation, excerption, framing and staging that constitute the
strategies of the work […] necessitate [the] uncovering strata of
representation. Needless to say we are not in search of sources of origin, but
of structures of signification: underneath each picture there is always
another picture.’ Benjamin Buchloh, ‘Pictures’, in David Evans (ed.),
Appropriation, Documents of Contemporary Art (London: Whitechapel Gallery,
2009), p. 78\. Originally published in October 8 (1979), 75–88.
[23](ch11.xhtml#footnote-503-backlink) October’s editors — including among
others Rosalind Krauss, Hal Foster, Craig Owens, and Benjamin Buchloh —
provided a theoretical context for this emerging art by introducing French
structuralist and poststructuralist theory, i.e. the writings of Roland
Barthes, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Derrida to the English speaking world.
[24](ch11.xhtml#footnote-502-backlink) Nate Harrison, ‘The Pictures
Generation, the Copyright Act of 1976, and the Reassertion of Authorship in
Postmodernity’, art&education.net, 29 June 2012,
pictures-generation-the-copyright-act-of-1976-and-the-reassertion-of-
authorship-in-postmodernity/>
[25](ch11.xhtml#footnote-501-backlink) Sherrie Levine, ‘Statement//1982’, in
David Evans (ed.), Appropriation, Documents of Contemporary Art (London:
Whitechapel Gallery, 2009), p. 81.
[26](ch11.xhtml#footnote-500-backlink) Nate Harrison, ‘The Pictures
Generation, the Copyright Act of 1976, and the Reassertion of Authorship in
Postmodernity’, art&education.net, 29 June 2012,
pictures-generation-the-copyright-act-of-1976-and-the-reassertion-of-
authorship-in-postmodernity/>
[27](ch11.xhtml#footnote-499-backlink) Ibid.
[28](ch11.xhtml#footnote-498-backlink) Quoting this line from Prince book, Why
I Go to the Movies Alone (New York: Barbara Gladstone Gallery, 1994), the
sponsor statement in the catalogue for Prince’s solo show Spiritual America at
The Guggenheim Museum in New York continues: ‘although his [work is] primarily
appropriated […] from popular culture, [it] convey[s] a deeply personal
vision. His selection of mediums and subject matter […] suggest a uniquely
individual logic […] with wit and an idiosyncratic eye, Richard Prince has
that rare ability to analyze and translate contemporary experience in new and
unexpected ways.’ Seth Waugh, ‘Sponsor Statement‘, in The Solomon R.
Guggenheim Foundation (ed.), Richard Prince (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2007).
[29](ch11.xhtml#footnote-497-backlink) See Hal Foster, ‘(Post)modern
Polemics’, in Recodings: Art, Spectacle, Cultural Politics (Port Townsend, WA:
Bay Press, 1985).
[30](ch11.xhtml#footnote-496-backlink) See note 47.
[31](ch11.xhtml#footnote-495-backlink) One might argue that this performative
act of claiming intellectual property is an attempt to challenge J. D.
Salinger’s notorious protectiveness about his writing. Salinger sued the
Swedish writer Fredrik Colting successfully for copyright infringement. Under
the pseudonym John David California, Colting had written a sequel to The
Catcher in the Rye. The sequel, 60 Years Later Coming Through The Rye, depicts
the protagonist Holden Caulfield’s adventures as an old man. In 2009, the US
District Court Judge in Manhattan, Deborah A. Batts, issued a preliminary
injunction indefinitely barring the publication, advertising or distribution
of the book in the US. See Sewell Chan, ‘Judge Rules for J. D. Salinger in
“Catcher” Copyright Suit’, The New York Times, 1 July 2009,
‘In a settlement agreement reached between Salinger and Colting in 2011,
Colting has agreed not to publish or otherwise distribute the book, e-book, or
any other editions of 60 Years Later in the U.S. or Canada until The Catcher
in the Rye enters the public domain. Notably, however, Colting is free to sell
the book in other international territories without fear of interference, and
a source has told Publishers Weekly that book rights have already been sold in
as many as a half-dozen territories, with the settlement documents included as
proof that the Salinger Estate will not sue. In addition, the settlement
agreement bars Colting from using the title “Coming through the Rye”; forbids
him from dedicating the book to Salinger; and would prohibit Colting or any
publisher of the book from referring to The Catcher in the Rye, Salinger, the
book being “banned” by Salinger, or from using the litigation to promote the
book.’ Andrew Albanese, ‘J. D. Salinger Estate, Swedish Author Settle
Copyright Suit’, Publishers Weekly, 11 January 2011,
news/article/45738-j-d-salinger-estate-swedish-author-settle-copyright-
suit.html>
[32](ch11.xhtml#footnote-494-backlink) Elizabeth H. Wang, ‘(Re)Productive
Rights: Copyright and the Postmodern Artist’, Columbia-VLA Journal of Law &
the Arts 14.2 (1990), 261–81 (p. 281),
[https://heinonline.org/HOL/Page?handle=hein.journals/cjla14&div=10&g_sent=1&casa_token=&collection=journals](https://heinonline.org/HOL/Page?handle=hein.journals/cjla14&div=10&g_sent=1&casa_token=&collection=journals)
[34](ch11.xhtml#footnote-492-backlink) Thirty paintings created by Prince
contained forty-one of Cariou’s photographs. The images had been taken from
Cariou’s book Yes Rasta (Brooklyn: powerHouse Books, 2000) and used by Prince
in his painting series Canal Zone, which was shown at Gagosian Gallery, New
York, in 2008.
[35](ch11.xhtml#footnote-491-backlink) It might be no coincidence (or then
again, it might) that the district court judge in this case, Deborah Batts, is
the same judge who ruled in the 2009 case in which Salinger successfully
brought suit for copyright infringement against Swedish author Fredrik Colting
for 60 Years Later Coming Through the Rye, a sequel to Salinger’s book. See
note 31.
[36](ch11.xhtml#footnote-490-backlink) ’In determining whether the use made of
a work in any particular case is a fair use the factors to be considered shall
include — (1) the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use
is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes; (2) the
nature of the copyrighted work; (3) the amount and substantiality of the
portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and (4) the
effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted
work.’ US Copyright Act of 1976, amended 2016,
[37](ch11.xhtml#footnote-489-backlink) ‘What is critical is how the work in
question appears to the reasonable observer, not simply what an artist might
say about a particular piece or body of work.’ Cariou v Prince, et al., court
document, No. 11–1197-cv, page 14,
[http://www.ca2.uscourts.gov/decisions/isysquery/f6e88b8b-48af-401c-
96a0-54d5007c2f33/1/doc/11-1197_complete_opn.pdf#xml=http://www.ca2.uscourts.gov/decisions/isysquery
/f6e88b8b-48af-401c-
96a0-54d5007c2f33/1/hilite/](http://www.ca2.uscourts.gov/decisions/isysquery
/f6e88b8b-48af-401c-
96a0-54d5007c2f33/1/doc/11-1197_complete_opn.pdf%23xml=http://www.ca2.uscourts.gov/decisions/isysquery
/f6e88b8b-48af-401c-96a0-54d5007c2f33/1/hilite/)
[38](ch11.xhtml#footnote-488-backlink) The court opinion states: ‘These
twenty-five of Prince’s artworks manifest an entirely different aesthetic from
Cariou’s photographs. Where Cariou’s serene and deliberately composed
portraits and landscape photographs depict the natural beauty of Rastafarians
and their surrounding environs, Prince’s crude and jarring works, on the other
hand, are hectic and provocative. Cariou’s black-and-white photographs were
printed in a 9 1/2” x 12” book. Prince has created collages on canvas that
incorporate color, feature distorted human and other forms and settings, and
measure between ten and nearly a hundred times the size of the photographs.
Prince’s composition, presentation, scale, color palette, and media are
fundamentally different and new compared to the photographs, as is the
expressive nature of Prince’s work.’ Ibid., pp. 12–13.
[39](ch11.xhtml#footnote-487-backlink) Prince’s deposition testimony stated
that he ‘do[es]n’t really have a message,’ that he was not ‘trying to create
anything with a new meaning or a new message,’ and that he ‘do[es]n’t have any
[…] interest in [Cariou’s] original intent.’ Court Opinion, p. 13\. For full
deposition see Greg Allen (ed.), The Deposition of Richard Prince in the Case
of Cariou v. Prince et al. (Zurich: Bookhorse, 2012).
[40](ch11.xhtml#footnote-486-backlink) The court opinion includes a dissent by
Circuit Judge Clifford Wallace sitting by designation from the US Court of
Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, ‘I, for one, do not believe that I am in a
position to make these fact- and opinion-intensive decisions on the twenty-
five works that passed the majority’s judicial observation. […] nor am I
trained to make art opinions ab initio.’ Ibid., p. 5\.
‘Furthermore, Judge Wallace questions the majority’s insistence on analyzing
only the visual similarities and differences between Cariou’s and Prince’s art
works, “Unlike the majority, I would allow the district court to consider
Prince’s statements reviewing fair use … I see no reason to discount Prince’s
statements as the majority does.” In fact, Judge Wallace remarks that he views
Prince’s statements as “relevant to the transformativeness analysis.” Judge
Wallace does not believe that a simple visual side-by-side analysis is enough
because this would call for judges to “employ [their] own artistic
Judgment[s].”’ Sergio Muñoz Sarmiento and Lauren van Haaften-Schick, citing
court documents. ‘Cariou v. Prince: Toward a Theory of Aesthetic-Judicial
Judgements’, Texas A&M Law Review, vol. 1, 2013–2014, p. 948.
[41](ch11.xhtml#footnote-485-backlink) Court opinion, p. 18.
[42](ch11.xhtml#footnote-484-backlink) Ibid., p. 17.
[43](ch11.xhtml#footnote-483-backlink) Ibid., pp. 4–5.
[44](ch11.xhtml#footnote-482-backlink) Ibid., p. 18.
[45](ch11.xhtml#footnote-481-backlink) Muñoz Sarmiento and van Haaften-Schick,
‘Aesthetic-Judicial Judgements’, p. 945.
[46](ch11.xhtml#footnote-480-backlink) Court opinion, p. 15.
[47](ch11.xhtml#footnote-479-backlink) The court opinion states: ‘He is a
leading exponent of this genre and his work has been displayed in museums
around the world, including New York’s Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and
Whitney Museum, San Francisco’s Museum of Modern Art, Rotterdam’s Museum
Boijmans van Beuningen, and Basel’s Museum für Gegenwartskunst.’ Ibid., p. 5.
[48](ch11.xhtml#footnote-478-backlink) Muñoz Sarmiento and van Haaften-Schick,
‘Aesthetic-Judicial Judgements’, p. 945.
[49](ch11.xhtml#footnote-477-backlink) The New York Times reports Prince had
not to destroy the five paintings at issue. Randy Kennedy, ‘Richard Prince
Settles Copyright Suit With Patrick Cariou Over Photographs’, New York Times,
18 March 2014, [https://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/03/18/richard-prince-
settles-copyright-suit-with-patrick-cariou-over-
photographs/?_php=true&_type=blogs&_r=0](https://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/03/18
/richard-prince-settles-copyright-suit-with-patrick-cariou-over-
photographs/?_php=true&_type=blogs&_r=0)
[50](ch11.xhtml#footnote-476-backlink) Court opinion, p. 13.
[52](ch11.xhtml#footnote-474-backlink) In 2016 photographer Donald Graham
filed a lawsuit against Prince with regard to Prince’s use of Graham’s
Instagram pictures. Again, the image shows a photographic representation of
Rastafarians. And similar to the Cariou case Prince appropriates Graham’s and
Cariou’s cultural appropriation of Rastafarian culture.
[53](ch11.xhtml#footnote-473-backlink) Cait Munro quotes Cady Noland from
Sarah Thornton’s book 33 Artists in 3 Acts. Noland gave Thornton her first
interview for twenty-four years: ‘Noland, an extremely talented artist, has
become so obsessed with her old work that she’s been unable to create anything
new in years. She admits to Thornton that ‘I’d like to get into a studio and
start making work,’ but that tracking the old work has become a ‘full-time
thing’. Cait Munro, ‘Is Cady Noland More Difficult To Work With Than Richard
Prince?’, artNet news, 10 November 2014,
/is-cady-noland-as-psychotic-as-richard-prince-162310>;
[54](ch11.xhtml#footnote-472-backlink) Martha Buskirk, ‘Marc Jancou, Cady
Noland, and the Case of the Authorless Artwork’, Hyperallergic, 9 December
2013,
an-authorless-artwork/>
[55](ch11.xhtml#footnote-471-backlink) Marc Jancou Fine Art Ltd. v Sotheby’s,
Inc., New York State Unified Court System, 2012 NY Slip Op 33163(U), 13
November 2012,
op-33163-u.pdf?ts=1396133024>
[56](ch11.xhtml#footnote-470-backlink) ‘The author of a work of visual art —
(1) shall have the right — (A) to claim authorship of that work, and (B) to
prevent the use of his or her name as the author of any work of visual art
which he or she did not create; (2) shall have the right to prevent the use of
his or her name as the author of the work of visual art in the event of a
distortion, mutilation, or other modification of the work which would be
prejudicial to his or her honor or reputation; and (3) subject to the
limitations set forth in section 113(d), shall have the right — (A) to prevent
any intentional distortion, mutilation, or other modification of that work
which would be prejudicial to his or her honor or reputation, and any
intentional distortion, mutilation, or modification of that work is a
violation of that right, and (B) to prevent any destruction of a work of
recognized stature, and any intentional or grossly negligent destruction of
that work is a violation of that right’, from US Code, Title 17, § 106A, Legal
Information Institute, Cornell Law School,
[59](ch11.xhtml#footnote-467-backlink) Jancou’s claim was dismissed by the New
York Supreme Court in the same year. The Court’s decision was based on the
language of Jancou’s consignment agreement with Sotheby’s, which gave
Sotheby’s the right to withdraw Cowboys Milking ‘at any time before the sale’
if, in Sotheby’s judgment, ‘there is doubt as to its authenticity or
attribution.’ Tracy Zwick, ‘Art in America’, 29 August 2013,
dispute-with-jancou-gallery-over-cady-noland-artwork/>
[60](ch11.xhtml#footnote-466-backlink) It might be important here to recall
that both Richard Prince and Cady Noland are able to afford the expensive
costs incurred by a court case due to their success in the art market.
[61](ch11.xhtml#footnote-465-backlink) The legal grounds for Noland’s move,
the federal Visual Artists Rights Act of 1990, is based on French moral rights
or author rights (droit d’auteur), which are inspired by the humanistic and
individualistic values of the French Revolution and form part of European
copyright law. They conceive the work as an intellectual and creative
expression that is directly connected to its creator. Legal scholar Lionel
Bently observes ‘the prominence of romantic conceptions of authorship’ in the
recognition of moral rights, which are based on concepts of the originality
and authenticity of the modern subject (Lionel Bently, ‘Copyright and the
Death of the Author in Literature and Law’, Modern Law Review, 57 (1994),
973–86 (p. 977)). ‘Authenticity is the pure expression, the expressivity, of
the artist, whose soul is mirrored in the work of art.’ (Cornelia Klinger,
‘Autonomy-Authenticity-Alterity: On the Aesthetic Ideology of Modernity’ in
Modernologies: Contemporary Artists Researching Modernity and Modernism,
exhibition catalogue (Barcelona: Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, 2009),
pp. 26–28 (p. 29)) Moral rights are the personal rights of authors, which
cannot be surrendered fully to somebody else because they conceptualize
authorship as authentic extension of the subject. They are ‘rights of authors
and artists to be named in relation to the work and to control alterations of
the work.’ (Bently, ‘Copyright and the Death of the Author’, p. 977) In
contrast to copyright, moral rights are granted in perpetuity, and fall to the
estate of an artist after his or her death.
Anglo-American copyright, employed in Prince’s case, on the contrary builds
the concept of intellectual property mainly on economic and distribution
rights, against unauthorised copying, adaptation, distribution and display.
Copyright lasts for a certain amount of time, after which the work enters the
public domain. In most countries the copyright term expires seventy years
after the death of the author. Non-perpetual copyright attempts to strike a
balance between the needs of the author to benefit economically from his or
her work and the interests of the public who benefit from the use of new work.
[62](ch11.xhtml#footnote-464-backlink) Bently, ‘Copyright and the Death of the
Author’, p. 974.
[63](ch11.xhtml#footnote-463-backlink) Geert Lovink and Andrew Ross, ‘Organic
Intellectual Work’, in Geert Lovink and Ned Rossiter (eds.), My Creativity
Reader: A Critique of Creative Industries (Amsterdam: Institute of Network
Cultures, 2007), pp. 225–38 (p. 230),
[64](ch11.xhtml#footnote-462-backlink) UK Government Department for Digital,
Culture, Media and Sports, The Creative Industries Mapping Document, 1998,
documents-1998>
[65](ch11.xhtml#footnote-461-backlink) UK Government, Department for Media,
Culture & Sport, Creative Industries Economic Estimates January 2015,
estimates-january-2015/creative-industries-economic-estimates-january-2015
-key-findings>
[66](ch11.xhtml#footnote-460-backlink) See critical discussion of the creative
industries paradigm and the effects of related systems of governance on the
precarisation of the individual: Lovink and Rossiter, My Creativity, and
Isabell Lorey, State of Insecurity: Government of the Precarious (London:
Verso, 2015).
[67](ch11.xhtml#footnote-459-backlink) University of the Arts London,
‘Intellectual Property Know-How for the Creative Sector’. This site was
initially accessed on 30 March 2015. In 2018 it was taken down and integrated
into the UAL Intellectual Property Advice pages. Their downloadable PDFs still
show the ‘Own-it’ logo,
/freelance-and-business-advice/intellectual-property-advice>
[68](ch11.xhtml#footnote-458-backlink) Patricia Aufderheide, Peter Jaszi,
Bryan Bello, and Tijana Milosevic, Copyright, Permissions, and Fair Use Among
Visual Artists and the Academic and Museum Visual Arts Communities: An Issues
Report (New York: College Art Association, 2014).
[69](ch11.xhtml#footnote-457-backlink) Ibid., p. 5.
[70](ch11.xhtml#footnote-456-backlink) Sixty-six percent of all those who
reported that they had abandoned or avoided a project because of an actual or
perceived inability to obtain permissions said they would be ‘very likely’ to
use copyrighted works of others more than they have in the past were
permissions not needed. Ibid., p. 50.
[71](ch11.xhtml#footnote-455-backlink) The Copyright, Permissions, and Fair
Use Report gives some intriguing further observations: ‘Permissions roadblocks
result in deformed or even abandoned work. Exhibition catalogues may be issued
without relevant images because rights cannot be cleared. Editors of art
scholarship reported journal articles going to print with blank spots where
reproductions should be, because artists’ representatives disagreed with the
substance of the article; and one book was published with last-minute
revisions and deletions of all images because of a dispute with an estate —
with disastrous results for sales. Journal editors have had to substitute
articles or go without an article altogether because an author could not
arrange permissions in time for publication. In one case, after an author’s
manuscript was completed, an estate changed position, compelling the author
both to rewrite and to draw substitute illustrations. Among other things, the
cost of permissions leads to less work that features historical overviews and
comparisons, and more monographs and case studies. Scholarship itself is
distorted and even censored by the operation of the permissions culture. […]
In some cases, the demands of rights holders have extended to altering or
censoring the scholarly argument about a work. Catalogue copy sometimes is
altered because scholarly arguments and perspectives are unacceptable to
rights holders.’ These actions are in some cases explicitly seen as
censorship. Ibid., p. 52.
[72](ch11.xhtml#footnote-454-backlink) Ibid., p. 51.
[73](ch11.xhtml#footnote-453-backlink) Ben Mauk, ‘Who Owns This Image?’, The
New Yorker, 12 February 2014,
owns-this-image>
[74](ch11.xhtml#footnote-452-backlink) Jennifer Nedelsky, ’Reconceiving Rights
as Relationship’, in Review of Constitutional Studies / Revue d’études
constitutionnelles 1.1 (1993), 1–26 (p. 16),
[75](ch11.xhtml#footnote-451-backlink) Deborah J. Halbert, Resisting
Intellectual Property (London: Routledge, 2005), pp. 1–2.
[76](ch11.xhtml#footnote-450-backlink) See for example Amedeo Policante
examining the relationship between empire and pirate, claiming that the pirate
can exist only in a relationship with imperial foundations. ‘Upon the naming
of the pirate, in fighting it and finally in celebrating its triumph over it,
Empire erects itself. There is no Empire without a pirate, a terrorizing
common enemy, an enemy of all. At the same time, there is no pirate without
Empire. In fact, pirates as outlaws cannot be understood in any other way but
as legal creatures. In other words, they exist only in a certain extreme,
liminal relationship with the law.’ Amedeo Policante, The Pirate Myth,
Genealogies of an Imperial Concept (Oxford and New York: Routledge, 2015), p.
viii.
[77](ch11.xhtml#footnote-449-backlink) Ramon Lobato, ‘The Paradoxes of
Piracy’, in Lars Eckstein and Anja Schwarz (eds.), Postcolonial Piracy: Media
Distribution and Cultural Production in the Global South (London and New York:
Bloomsbury, 2014), pp. 121–34 (pp. 121, 123).
[78](ch11.xhtml#footnote-448-backlink) Daniel Heller-Roazen, The Enemy of All:
Piracy and the Law of Nations (New York: Zone Books, 2009), p. 35, as cited by
Gary Hall, Pirate Philosophy, p. 16.
[79](ch11.xhtml#footnote-447-backlink) ‘Etymology of Pirate’, in English Words
of (Unexpected) Greek Origin, 2 March 2012,
[80](ch11.xhtml#footnote-446-backlink) The Piracy Project is a collaboration
between AND Publishing and Andrea Francke initiated in London in 2010.
[81](ch11.xhtml#footnote-445-backlink) Andrea Francke visited pirate book
markets in Lima, Peru in 2010. The Red Mansion Prize residency enabled us to
research book piracy in Beijing and Shanghai in 2012. A research residency at
SALT Istanbul in 2012 facilitated field research in Turkey.
[82](ch11.xhtml#footnote-444-backlink) See also Stephen Wright’s Towards a
Lexicon of Usership (Eindhoven: Van Abbemuseum, 2013) proposing to replace the
term (media) ‘piracy’ with ‘usership’. He explains: ‘On the one hand, the most
notorious and ruthless cultural pirates today are Google and its subsidiaries
like YouTube (through the institutionalized rip-off of user-generated value
broadly known as Page-Rank), Facebook, and of course Warner Bros etc., but
also academic publishers such as the redoubtable Routledge. On the other hand,
all the user-run and user-driven initiatives like aaaaarg, or
[pad.ma](http://pad.ma), or until recently the wonderful Dr Auratheft. But,
personally, I would hesitate to assimilate such scaled-up, de-creative, user-
propelled examples with anything like “cultural piracy”. They are, through
usership, enriching what would otherwise fall prey to cultural piracy.’ Email
to the author, 1 August 2012.
See also: Andrea Francke and Eva Weinmayr (eds.), Borrowing, Poaching,
Plagiarising, Pirating, Stealing, Gleaning, Referencing, Leaking, Copying,
Imitating, Adapting, Faking, Paraphrasing, Quoting, Reproducing, Using,
Counterfeiting, Repeating, Translating, Cloning (London: AND Publishing,
2014).
[83](ch11.xhtml#footnote-443-backlink) Richard Prince’s ‘Catcher in the Rye’
forms part of the Piracy Collection. Not the book copy priced at £1,500, just
an A4 colour printout of the cover, downloaded from the Internet. On the shelf
it sits next to Salinger’s copy, which we bought at Barnes and Noble for £20.
[84](ch11.xhtml#footnote-442-backlink) Craig, ‘Symposium: Reconstructing the
Author-Self’, p. 246.
[85](ch11.xhtml#footnote-441-backlink) Michel Foucault, ‘What Is an Author?’,
in [Donald F.
Bouchard](https://www.amazon.co.uk/s/ref=dp_byline_sr_book_2?ie=UTF8&text=Donald+F.+Bouchard
&search-alias=books-uk&field-author=Donald+F.+Bouchard&sort=relevancerank)
(ed.), Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977), pp. 113–38.
[86](ch11.xhtml#footnote-440-backlink) See The Piracy Project, ‘The
Impermanent Book’, Rhizome, 19 April 2012,
[87](ch11.xhtml#footnote-439-backlink) It might be no coincidence that Roland
Barthes’ seminal short essay ‘Death of the Author’ was published in the
magazine Aspen at the same time, when photocopy machines were beginning to be
widely used in libraries and offices.
[88](ch11.xhtml#footnote-438-backlink) Eva Hemmungs Wirtén, No Trespassing,
Authorship, Intellectual Property Rights and the Boundaries of Globalization
(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004), p. 66.
[89](ch11.xhtml#footnote-437-backlink) See No se diga a nadie, The Piracy
Project Catalogue,
[90](ch11.xhtml#footnote-436-backlink) In an essay in Granta Magazine, Daniel
Alarcon explains the popularity of book piracy in Peru due to the lack of
formal distribution. ‘Outside Lima, the pirate book industry is the only one
that matters’ explains Alarcon. Iquitos, the largest city in the Peruvian
Amazon, with nearly 400,000 residents, had until 2007 no formal bookstore and
in 2010 only two. Trujillo, the country’s third largest city, has one.
According to Alarcon, an officially produced book costs twenty percent of an
average worker’s weekly income, therefore the pirate printing industry fills
this gap — an activity that is not seriously restricted by the state. In fact,
Alarcon claims that the government is involved in the pirate printing industry
as a way to control what is being read. Pirated books are openly sold in book
markets and by street vendors at traffic crossings, therefore they ‘reach
sectors of the market that formal book publishers cannot or don’t care to
access. In a similar vein, the few prestigious private universities’ book
check-out time is exactly twenty-four hours, the very turnaround for the copy
shops in the neighbourhood to make a photocopied version of the checked-out
library books. Daniel Alarcon, ‘Life Amongst the Pirates’, Granta Magazine, 14
January 2010,
[91](ch11.xhtml#footnote-435-backlink) A discussion of the vast variety of
approaches here would exceed the scope of this text. If you are interested,
please visit our searchable Piracy Collection catalogue, which provides short
descriptions of the pirates’ approaches and strategies,
[92](ch11.xhtml#footnote-434-backlink) For the performative debate A Day at
the Courtroom hosted by The Showroom in London, the Piracy Project invited
three copyright lawyers from different cultural and legal backgrounds to
discuss and assess selected cases from the Piracy Project from the perspective
of their differing jurisdictions. The final verdict was given by the audience,
who positioned the ‘case’ on a colour scale ranging from illegal (red) to
legal (blue). The scale replaced the law’s fundamental binary of legal —
illegal, allowing for greater complexity and nuance. The advising scholars and
lawyers were Lionel Bently (Professor of Intellectual Property at the
University of Cambridge), Sergio Muñoz Sarmiento (Art and Law, New York),
Prodromos Tsiavos (Project lead for Creative Commons, England, Wales and
Greece). A Day at the Courtroom, The Showroom London, 15 June 2013. See a
transcript of the debate in Francke and Weinmayr, Borrowing, Poaching,
Plagiarising.
[93](ch11.xhtml#footnote-433-backlink) Aaaaaarg.fail operates on an invitation
only basis; [memoryoftheworld.org](http://memoryoftheworld.org) is openly
accessible.
[94](ch11.xhtml#footnote-432-backlink) Julian Myers, Four Dialogues 2: On
AAAARG, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art — Open Space, 26 August 2009, . This
constructive approach has been observed by Jonas Andersson generally with p2p
sharing networks, which ’have begun to appear less as a reactive force (i.e.
breaking the rules) and more as a proactive one (setting the rules). […]
Rather than complain about the conservatism of established forms of
distribution they simply create new, alternative ones.’ Jonas Andersson, ‘For
the Good of the Net: The Pirate Bay as a Strategic Sovereign’, Culture Machine
10 (2009), p. 64.
[95](ch11.xhtml#footnote-431-backlink) This process was somewhat fraught,
because at the same time David Cameron launched his perfidious ‘Big Society’
concept, which proposed that members of the community should volunteer at
institutions, such as local public libraries, which otherwise could not
survive because of government cuts.
[96](ch11.xhtml#footnote-430-backlink) See the Piracy Project catalogue: Neil
Chapman, Deleuze, Proust and Signs,
[97](ch11.xhtml#footnote-429-backlink) Of course unconventional publications
can and are being collected, but these are often more arty objects, flimsy or
oversized, undersized etc. and frequently end up in the special collections,
framed and categorised ‘as different’ from the main stack of the collections.
[98](ch11.xhtml#footnote-428-backlink) When The Piracy Project was invited to
create a reading room at the New York Art Book Fair in 2012, a librarian from
the Pratt Institute dropped by every single day, because she was so fixed on
the questions, the pirate books and their complex strategies of queering the
category of authorship posed to standardised bibliographic practices. Based on
this question we organised a cataloguing workshop ‘Putting the Piracy
Collection on the shelf’ at Grand Union in Birmingham, where we developed a
new cataloguing vocabulary for cases in the collection. See
union.org.uk/gallery/putting-the-piracy-collection-on-the-shelves/>
See also Karen Di Franco’s reflection on the cataloguing workshop ‘The Library
Medium’ in Francke and Weinmayr, Borrowing, Poaching, Plagiarising.
[99](ch11.xhtml#footnote-427-backlink) See Piracy Project catalogue: Camille
Bondon, Jacques Rancière: le mâitre ignorant, .
Rancière’s pedagogical proposal suggests that ‘the most important quality of a
schoolmaster is the virtue of ignorance’. (Rancière, 2010, p. 1). In his book
The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation Jacques
Rancière uses the historic case of the French teacher Joseph Jacotot, who was
exiled in Belgium and taught French classes to Flemish students whose language
he did not know and vice versa. Reportedly he gave his students a French text
to read alongside its translation and, without mediation or explanation, let
the students figure out the relationship between the two texts themselves. By
intentionally using his ignorance as teaching method, Rancière claims, Jacotot
removed himself as the centre of the classroom, as the one who knows. This
teaching method arguably destabilises the hierarchical relationship of
knowledge (between student and teacher) and therefore ‘establishes equality as
the centre of the educational process’. Annette Krauss, ‘Sites for Unlearning:
On the Material, Artistic and Political Dimensions of Processes of
Unlearning’, PhD, Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, 2017, p. 113\. Jacques
Rancière, Education, Truth and Emancipation (London: Continuum, 2010). Jacques
Rancière, The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation
(Stanford: University Press California, 1987).
[100](ch11.xhtml#footnote-426-backlink) ‘AND Publishing announces The Piracy
Lectures’, Art Agenda, 4 May 2011,
publishing-announces-the-piracy-lectures/>
[101](ch11.xhtml#footnote-425-backlink) Judith Butler, ‘What is Critique? An
Essay on Foucault’s Virtue’, Transversal 5 (2001),
[102](ch11.xhtml#footnote-424-backlink) Institutions that hosted long and
short-term reading rooms or invited us for workshops included: The Showroom
London, Grand Union Birmingham, Salt Istanbul, ZKM Academy for Media Arts
Cologne, Kunstverein Munich. The Bluecoat Liverpool, Truth is Concrete,
Steirischer Herbst Graz, Printed Matter New York, New York Art Book Fair at
MoMA PS1, 281 Vancouver, Rum 46 Aarhus, Miss Read, Kunstwerke Berlin.
Institutions that invited us for talks or panel discussions included:
Whitechapel Art Gallery, Open Design Conference Barcelona, Institutions by
Artists Vancouver, Academy of Fine Arts Leipzig, Freie University Berlin, and
various art academies and universities across Europe.
[103](ch11.xhtml#footnote-423-backlink) At times, we signed ‘the Piracy
Project’ (the title) under our own names (the artist-authors), because it felt
suitable to take the credit for all our personal work, instead of
strengthening the ‘umbrella organisation’ AND. When the editor of Rhizome
asked us to write about the project, we authored the jointly written text as
‘by Piracy Project’. On other occasions we framed it ‘The Piracy Project is a
collaboration of the artists x and y, as part of AND Publishing’s research
program.’ At some point, the Piracy Project outgrew AND Publishing because it
took up all our time, and we began to question whether the Piracy Project was
part of AND, or whether AND was part of the Piracy Project.
[104](ch11.xhtml#footnote-422-backlink) This less glamourous work includes
answering emails, booking flights, organising rooms and hosting, in short the
administrative work required to run and maintain such a project. The feminist
discourse of domestic and reproductive labour is relevant here, but a more
detailed discussion exceeds the scope of this text.
[105](ch11.xhtml#footnote-421-backlink) Walter Benjamin, ‘The Author as
Producer’, New Left Review 1.62 (1970), 83–96. See also Hall, Pirate
Philosophy, pp. 127–232.
[106](ch11.xhtml#footnote-420-backlink) Ibid., p. 129.
[107](ch11.xhtml#footnote-419-backlink) Several gatherings, such as ‘Direct
Weekend’ and ‘Long Weekend’ at various art colleges in London involved
Precarious Workers Brigade, Carrot Workers, tax evasion campaigners, UK Uncut,
alternative media groups, feminist alliances, anti-poverty groups. See
Precarious Workers Brigade, ‘Fragments Toward an Understanding of a Week that
Changed Everything…’, e-flux 24 (April 2011),
-week-that-changed-everything/>
[108](ch11.xhtml#footnote-418-backlink) Susan Kelly describes Felix Guattari’s
use of the term transversality ‘as a conceptual tool to open hitherto closed
logics and hierarchies and to experiment with relations of interdependency in
order to produce new assemblages and alliances […] and different forms of
(collective) subjectivity that break down oppositions between the individual
and the group.’ Susan Kelly, ‘The Transversal and the Invisible: How do You
Really Make a Work of Art that Is not a Work of Art?’, Transversal 1 (2005), . See also Gerald Raunig’s
description of transversal activist practice: as ‘There is no longer any
artificially produced subject of articulation; it becomes clear that every
name, every linkage, every label has always already been collective and must
be newly constructed over and over again. In particular, to the same extent to
which transversal collectives are only to be understood as polyvocal groups,
transversality is linked with a critique of representation, with a refusal to
speak for others, in the name of others, with abandoning identity, with a loss
of a unified face, with the subversion of the social pressure to produce
faces.’ Gerald Raunig, ‘Transversal Multitudes’, Transversal 9 (2002),
[109](ch11.xhtml#footnote-417-backlink) Kelly, ‘”But that was my idea!”’, p.
3.
[110](ch11.xhtml#footnote-416-backlink) The carrot is used as ‘a symbol of the
promise of paid work and future fulfilment made to those working under
conditions of free labour in the cultural sector.’ Ibid.
[111](ch11.xhtml#footnote-415-backlink) In an interview published in Artforum,
David Graeber says: ‘Another artist I know, for example, made a sculpture of a
giant carrot used during a protest at Millbank; I think it was actually thrown
through the window of Tory headquarters and set on fire. She feels it was her
best work, but her collective, which is mostly women, insisted on collective
authorship, and she feels unable to attach her name to the work.’ ‘Another
World: Michelle Kuo Talks with David Graeber’, Artforum International (Summer
2012), p. 270,
david-graeber-31099>
[112](ch11.xhtml#footnote-414-backlink) Artist Rosalie Schweiker, who read a
draft of this text, suggested that I make a list of the name of every person
involved in the project in order to demonstrate this generative and expansive
mode of working.
[113](ch11.xhtml#footnote-413-backlink) Such an action might even infringe
legal requirements or contracts. Open Book Publishers’ contract, for example,
states: ‘The author hereby asserts his/her right to be identified in relation
to the work on the title page and cover and the publisher undertakes to comply
with this requirement. A copyright notice in the Author’s name will be printed
in the front pages of the Work.’ Open Book Publishers, Authors’ Guide, p. 19,
[114](ch11.xhtml#footnote-412-backlink) For a discussion of gender inequality
in recent scholarly publishing see Chad Wellmon and Andrew Piper ‘Publication,
Power, Patronage: On Inequality and Academic Publishing’, Critical Inquiry (21
July 2017), publication_power_and_patronage_on_inequality_and_academic_publishing/
[115](ch11.xhtml#footnote-411-backlink) See Gérard Genette’s discussion of the
‘pseudonym effect’ as conceptual device. He distinguishes between the reader
not knowing about the use of the pseudonym and the conceptual effect of the
reader having information about the use of a pseudonym. Gérard Genette,
Paratexts, Thresholds of Interpretation (Cambridge University Press, 1997).
[116](ch11.xhtml#footnote-410-backlink) The Neoist movement developed in
Canada, North America and Europe in the late 1970s. It selected one signature
name for multiple identities and authors, who published, performed and
exhibited under this joint name. It is different from a collective name, as
any person could sign her or his work with these joint names without revealing
the author’s identity. See letter exchanges between cultural theorist Florian
Cramer and artist and writer Stewart Home: ‘I would like to describe “Monty
Cantsin” as a multiple identity, “Karen Eliot” as a multiple pen-name and,
judging from the information I have, “Luther Blissett” as a collective
phantom.’ Florian Cramer, 2 October 1995, in Stewart Home and Florian Cramer,
House of Nine Squares: Letters on Neoism, Psychogeography & Epistemological
Trepidation, . See also
Nicholas Thoburn’s research into the political agency of anonymous authorship.
Nicholas Thoburn, Anti-Book, On the Art and Politics of Radical Publishing
(Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2016) pp. 168–223.
[117](ch11.xhtml#footnote-409-backlink) Anonymous started on 4chan, an online
imageboard where users post anonymously. ‘The posts on 4chan have no names or
any identifiable markers attached to them. The only thing you are able to
judge a post by is its content and nothing else.’ Gabriella Coleman, Hacker,
Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy: The Many Faces of Anonymous (London and New York:
Verso, 2014), p. 47.
[118](ch11.xhtml#footnote-408-backlink) I thank Susan Kelly for making this
point while reviewing my text.
[119](ch11.xhtml#footnote-407-backlink) It is interesting to come back to
Foucault’s text ‘What is an author’ and complicate his own position as
authorial subject. Referring to Naomi Schor and Gayatri Spivak, Sara Ahmed
suggests, that ‘Foucault effaces the sexual specificity of his own narrative
and perspective as a male philosopher. The refusal to enter the discourse as
an empirical subject, a subject which is both sexed and European, may finally
translate into a universalising mode of discourse, which negates the
specificity of its own inscription (as a text)’. See Naomi Schor, ‘Dreaming
Dissymmetry: Barthes, Foucault and Sexual Difference’, in Elizabeth Weed
(ed.), Coming to Terms: Feminism, Theory, Politics (London: Routledge, 1989),
pp. 47–58; and Gayatry Chakravorty Spivak, ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’, in Cary
Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (eds.), Marxism and the Interpretation of
Culture (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1988), pp. 271–313.
[120](ch11.xhtml#footnote-406-backlink) Sara Ahmed, Differences That Matter,
Feminist Theory and Postmodernism (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press,
2004) p. 125.
[121](ch11.xhtml#footnote-405-backlink) Spivak, ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’,
pp. 271–313.
Mars & Medak
Knowledge Commons and Activist Pedagogies
2017
KNOWLEDGE COMMONS AND ACTIVIST PEDAGOGIES: FROM IDEALIST POSITIONS TO COLLECTIVE ACTIONS
Conversation with Marcell Mars and Tomislav Medak (co-authored with Ana Kuzmanic)
Marcell Mars is an activist, independent scholar, and artist. His work has been
instrumental in development of civil society in Croatia and beyond. Marcell is one
of the founders of the Multimedia Institute – mi2 (1999) (Multimedia Institute,
2016a) and Net.culture club MaMa in Zagreb (2000) (Net.culture club MaMa,
2016a). He is a member of Creative Commons Team Croatia (Creative Commons,
2016). He initiated GNU GPL publishing label EGOBOO.bits (2000) (Monoskop,
2016a), meetings of technical enthusiasts Skill sharing (Net.culture club MaMa,
2016b) and various events and gatherings in the fields of hackerism, digital
cultures, and new media art. Marcell regularly talks and runs workshops about
hacking, free software philosophy, digital cultures, social software, semantic web
etc. In 2011–2012 Marcell conducted research on Ruling Class Studies at Jan Van
Eyck in Maastricht, and in 2013 he held fellowship at Akademie Schloss Solitude
in Stuttgart. Currently, he is PhD researcher at the Digital Cultures Research Lab at
Leuphana Universität Lüneburg.
Tomislav Medak is a cultural worker and theorist interested in political
philosophy, media theory and aesthetics. He is an advocate of free software and
free culture, and the Project Lead of the Creative Commons Croatia (Creative
Commons, 2016). He works as coordinator of theory and publishing activities at
the Multimedia Institute/MaMa (Zagreb, Croatia) (Net.culture club MaMa, 2016a).
Tomislav is an active contributor to the Croatian Right to the City movement
(Pravo na grad, 2016). He interpreted to numerous books into Croatian language,
including Multitude (Hardt & Negri, 2009) and A Hacker Manifesto (Wark,
2006c). He is an author and performer with the internationally acclaimed Zagrebbased performance collective BADco (BADco, 2016). Tomislav writes and talks
about politics of technological development, and politics and aesthetics.
Tomislav and Marcell have been working together for almost two decades.
Their recent collaborations include a number of activities around the Public Library
project, including HAIP festival (Ljubljana, 2012), exhibitions in
Württembergischer Kunstverein (Stuttgart, 2014) and Galerija Nova (Zagreb,
2015), as well as coordinated digitization projects Written-off (2015), Digital
Archive of Praxis and the Korčula Summer School (2016), and Catalogue of
Liberated Books (2013) (in Monoskop, 2016b).
243
CHAPTER 12
Ana Kuzmanic is an artist based in Zagreb and Associate Professor at the
Faculty of Civil Engineering, Architecture and Geodesy at the University in Split
(Croatia), lecturing in drawing, design and architectural presentation. She is a
member of the Croatian Association of Visual Artists. Since 2007 she held more
than a dozen individual exhibitions and took part in numerous collective
exhibitions in Croatia, the UK, Italy, Egypt, the Netherlands, the USA, Lithuania
and Slovenia. In 2011 she co-founded the international artist collective Eastern
Surf, which has “organised, produced and participated in a number of projects
including exhibitions, performance, video, sculpture, publications and web based
work” (Eastern Surf, 2017). Ana's artwork critically deconstructs dominant social
readings of reality. It tests traditional roles of artists and viewers, giving the
observer an active part in creation of artwork, thus creating spaces of dialogue and
alternative learning experiences as platforms for emancipation and social
transformation. Grounded within a postdisciplinary conceptual framework, her
artistic practice is produced via research and expression in diverse media located at
the boundaries between reality and virtuality.
ABOUT THE CONVERSATION
I have known Marcell Mars since student days, yet our professional paths have
crossed only sporadically. In 2013 I asked Marcell’s input about potential
interlocutors for this book, and he connected me to McKenzie Wark. In late 2015,
when we started working on our own conversation, Marcell involved Tomislav
Medak. Marcell’s and Tomislav’s recent works are closely related to arts, so I
requested Ana Kuzmanic’s input in these matters. Since the beginning of the
conversation, Marcell, Tomislav, Ana, and I occasionally discussed its generalities
in person. Yet, the presented conversation took place in a shared online document
between November 2015 and December 2016.
NET.CULTURE AT THE DAWN OF THE CIVIL SOCIETY
Petar Jandrić & Ana Kuzmanic (PJ & AK): In 1999, you established the
Multimedia Institute – mi2 (Multimedia Institute, 2016a); in 2000, you established
the Net.culture club MaMa (both in Zagreb, Croatia). The Net.culture club MaMa
has the following goals:
To promote innovative cultural practices and broadly understood social
activism. As a cultural center, it promotes wide range of new artistic and
cultural practices related in the first place to the development of
communication technologies, as well as new tendencies in arts and theory:
from new media art, film and music to philosophy and social theory,
publishing and cultural policy issues.
As a community center, MaMa is a Zagreb’s alternative ‘living room’ and
a venue free of charge for various initiatives and associations, whether they
are promoting minority identities (ecological, LBGTQ, ethnic, feminist and
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others) or critically questioning established social norms. (Net.culture club
MaMa, 2016a)
Please describe the main challenges and opportunities from the dawn of Croatian
civil society. Why did you decide to establish the Multimedia Institute – mi2 and
the Net.culture club MaMa? How did you go about it?
Marcell Mars & Tomislav Medak (MM & TM): The formative context for
our work had been marked by the process of dissolution of Yugoslavia, ensuing
civil wars, and the rise of authoritarian nationalisms in the early 1990s. Amidst the
general turmoil and internecine bloodshed, three factors would come to define
what we consider today as civil society in the Croatian context. First, the newly
created Croatian state – in its pursuit of ethnic, religious and social homogeneity –
was premised on the radical exclusion of minorities. Second, the newly created
state dismantled the broad institutional basis of social and cultural diversity that
existed under socialism. Third, the newly created state pursued its own nationalist
project within the framework of capitalist democracy. In consequence, politically
undesirable minorities and dissenting oppositional groups were pushed to the
fringes of society, and yet, in keeping with the democratic system, had to be
allowed to legally operate outside of the state, its loyal institutions and its
nationalist consensus – as civil society. Under the circumstances of inter-ethnic
conflict, which put many people in direct or indirect danger, anti-war and human
rights activist groups such as the Anti-War Campaign provided an umbrella under
which political, student and cultural activists of all hues and colours could find a
common context. It is also within this context that the high modernism of cultural
production from the Yugoslav period, driven out from public institutions, had
found its recourse and its continuity.
Our loose collective, which would later come together around the Multimedia
Institute and MaMa, had been decisively shaped by two circumstances. The first
was participation of the Anti-War Campaign, its BBS network ZaMir (Monoskop,
2016c) and in particular its journal Arkzin, in the early European network culture.
Second, the Open Society Institute, which had financed much of the alternative and
oppositional activities during the 1990s, had started to wind down its operations
towards end of the millennium. As the Open Society Institute started to spin off its
diverse activities into separate organizations, giving rise to the Croatian Law
Center, the Center for Contemporary Art and the Center for Drama Art, activities
related to Internet development ended up with the Multimedia Institute. The first
factor shaped us as activists and early adopters of critical digital culture, and the
second factor provided us with an organizational platform to start working
together. In 1998 Marcell was the first person invited to work with the Multimedia
Institute. He invited Vedran Gulin and Teodor Celakoski, who in turn invited other
people, and the group organically grew to its present form.
Prior to our coming together around the Multimedia Institute, we have been
working on various projects such as setting up the cyber-culture platform Labinary
in the space run by the artist initiative Labin Art Express in the former miner town
of Labin located in the north-western region of Istria. As we started working
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together, however, we began to broaden these activities and explore various
opportunities for political and cultural activism offered by digital networks. One of
the early projects was ‘Radioactive’ – an initiative bringing together a broad group
of activists, which was supposed to result in a hybrid Internet/FM radio. The radio
never arrived into being, yet the project fostered many follow-up activities around
new media and activism in the spirit of ‘don’t hate the media, become the media.’
In these early days, our activities had been strongly oriented towards technological
literacy and education; also, we had a strong interest in political theory and
philosophy. Yet, the most important activity at that time was opening the
Net.culture club MaMa in Zagreb in 2000 (Net.culture club MaMa, 2016a).
PJ & AK: What inspired you to found the Net.culture club MaMa?
MM & TM: We were not keen on continuing the line of work that the
Multimedia Institute was doing under the Open Society Institute, which included,
amongst other activities, setting up the first non-state owned Internet service
provider ZamirNet. The growing availability of Internet access and computer
hardware had made the task of helping political, cultural and media activists get
online less urgent. Instead, we thought that it would be much more important to
open a space where those activists could work together. At the brink of the
millennium, institutional exclusion and access to physical resources (including
space) needed for organizing, working together and presenting that work was a
pressing problem. MaMa was one of the only three independent cultural spaces in
Zagreb – capital city of Croatia, with almost one million inhabitants! The Open
Society Institute provided us with a grant to adapt a former downtown leather-shop
in the state of disrepair and equip it with latest technology ranging from servers to
DJ decks. These resources were made available to all members of the general
public free of charge. Immediately, many artists, media people, technologists, and
political activists started initiating own programs in MaMa. Our activities ranged
from establishing art servers aimed at supporting artistic and cultural projects on
the Internet (Monoskop, 2016d) to technology-related educational activities,
cultural programs, and publishing. By 2000, nationalism had slowly been losing its
stranglehold on our society, and issues pertaining to capitalist globalisation had
arrived into prominence. At MaMa, the period was marked by alter-globalization,
Indymedia, web development, East European net.art and critical media theory.
The confluence of these interests and activities resulted in many important
developments. For instance, soon after the opening of MaMa in 2000, a group of
young music producers and enthusiasts kicked off a daily music program with live
acts, DJ sessions and meetings to share tips and tricks about producing electronic
music. In parallel, we had been increasingly drawn to free software and its
underlying ethos and logic. Yugoslav legacy of social ownership over means of
production and worker self-management made us think how collectivized forms of
cultural production, without exclusions of private property, could be expanded
beyond the world of free software. We thus talked some of our musician friends
into opening the free culture label EGOBOO.bits and publishing their music,
together with films, videos and literary texts of other artists, under the GNU
General Public License. The EGOBOO.bits project had soon become uniquely
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successful: producers such as Zvuk broda, Blashko, Plazmatick, Aesqe, No Name
No Fame, and Ghetto Booties were storming the charts, the label gradually grew to
fifty producers and formations, and we had the artists give regular workshops in
DJ-ing, sound editing, VJ-ing, video editing and collaborative writing at schools
and our summer camp Otokultivator. It inspired us to start working on alternatives
to the copyright regime and on issues of access to knowledge and culture.
PJ & AK: The civil society is the collective conscious, which provides leverage
against national and corporate agendas and serves as a powerful social corrective.
Thus, at the outbreak of the US invasion to Iraq, Net.culture club MaMa rejected a
$100 000 USAID grant because the invasion was:
a) a precedent based on the rationale of pre-emptive war, b) being waged in
disregard of legitimate processes of the international community, and c)
guided by corporate interests to control natural resources (Multimedia
Institute, 2003 in Razsa, 2015: 82).
Yet, only a few weeks later, MaMa accepted a $100 000 grant from the German
state – and this provoked a wide public debate (Razsa, 2015; Kršić, 2003; Stubbs,
2012).
Now that the heat of the moment has gone down, what is your view to this
debate? More generally, how do you decide whose money to accept and whose
money to reject? How do you decide where to publish, where to exhibit, whom to
work with? What is the relationship between idealism and pragmatism in your
work?
MM & TM: Our decision seems justified yet insignificant in the face of the
aftermath of that historical moment. The unilateral decision of US and its allies to
invade Iraq in March 2003 encapsulated both the defeat of global protest
movements that had contested the neoliberal globalisation since the early 1990s
and the epochal carnage that the War on Terror, in its never-ending iterations, is
still reaping today. Nowadays, the weaponized and privatized security regime
follows the networks of supply chains that cut across the logic of borders and have
become vital both for the global circuits of production and distribution (see Cowen,
2014). For the US, our global policeman, the introduction of unmanned weaponry
and all sorts of asymmetric war technologies has reduced the human cost of war
down to zero. By deploying drones and killer robots, it did away with the
fundamental reality check of own human casualties and made endless war
politically plausible. The low cost of war has resulted in the growing side-lining of
international institutions responsible for peaceful resolution of international
conflicts such as the UN.
Our 2003 decision carried hard consequences for the organization. In a capitalist
society, one can ensure wages either by relying on the market, or on the state, or on
private funding. The USAID grant was our first larger grant after the initial spinoff money from the Open Society Institute, and it meant that we could employ
some people from our community over the period of next two years. Yet at the
same time, the USAID had become directly involved in Iraq, aiding the US forces
and various private contractors such as Halliburton in the dispossession and
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plunder of the Iraqi economy. Therefore, it was unconscionable to continue
receiving money from them. In light of its moral and existential weight, the
decision to return the money thus had to be made by the general assembly of our
association.
People who were left without wages were part and parcel of the community that
we had built between 2000 and 2003, primarily through Otokultivator Summer
Camps and Summer Source Camp (Tactical Tech Collective, 2016). The other
grant we would receive later that year, from the Federal Cultural Foundation of the
German government, was split amongst a number of cultural organizations and
paid for activities that eventually paved the way for Right to the City (Pravo na
grad, 2016). However, we still could not pay the people who decided to return
USAID money, so they had to find other jobs. Money never comes without
conditionalities, and passing judgements while disregarding specific economic,
historic and organizational context can easily lead to apolitical moralizing.
We do have certain principles that we would not want to compromise – we do
not work with corporations, we are egalitarian in terms of income, our activities are
free for the public. In political activities, however, idealist positions make sense
only for as long as they are effective. Therefore, our idealism is through and
through pragmatic. It is in the similar manner that we invoke the ideal of the
library. We are well aware that reality is more complex than our ideals. However,
the collective sense of purpose inspired by an ideal can carry over into useful
collective action. This is the core of our interest …
PJ & AK: There has been a lot of water under the bridge since the 2000s. From
a ruined post-war country, Croatia has become an integral part of the European
Union – with all associated advantages and problems. What are the main today’s
challenges in maintaining the Multimedia Institute and its various projects? What
are your future plans?
MM & TM: From the early days, Multimedia Institute/MaMa took a twofold
approach. It has always supported people working in and around the organization
in their heterogeneous interests including but not limited to digital technology and
information freedoms, political theory and philosophy, contemporary digital art,
music and cinema. Simultaneously, it has been strongly focused to social and
institutional transformation.
The moment zero of Croatian independence in 1991, which was marked by war,
ethnic cleansing and forceful imposition of contrived mono-national identity, saw
the progressive and modernist culture embracing the political alternative of antiwar movement. It is within these conditions, which entailed exclusion from access
to public resources, that the Croatian civil society had developed throughout the
1990s. To address this denial of access to financial and spatial resources to civil
society, since 2000 we have been organizing collective actions with a number of
cultural actors across the country to create alternative routes for access to resources
– mutual support networks, shared venues, public funding, alternative forms of
funding. All the while, that organizational work has been implicitly situated in an
understanding of commons that draws on two sources – the social contract of the
free software community, and the legacy of social ownership under socialism.
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Later on, this line of work has been developed towards intersectional struggles
around spatial justice and against privatisation of public services that coalesced
around the Right to the City movement (2007 till present) (Pravo na grad, 2016)
and the 2015 Campaign against the monetization of the national highway network.
In early 2016, with the arrival of the short-lived Croatian government formed by
a coalition of inane technocracy and rabid right wing radicals, many institutional
achievements of the last fifteen years seemed likely to be dismantled in a matter of
months. At the time of writing this text, the collapse of broader social and
institutional context is (again) an imminent threat. In a way, our current situation
echoes the atmosphere of Yugoslav civil wars in 1990s. Yet, the Croatian turn to
the right is structurally parallel to recent turn to the right that takes place in most
parts of Europe and the world at large. In the aftermath of the global neoliberal
race to the bottom and the War on Terror, the disenfranchised working class vents
its fears over immigration and insists on the return of nationalist values in various
forms suggested by irresponsible political establishments. If they are not spared the
humiliating sense of being outclassed and disenfranchised by the neoliberal race to
the bottom, why should they be sympathetic to those arriving from the
impoverished (semi)-periphery or to victims of turmoil unleashed by the endless
War on Terror? If globalisation is reducing their life prospects to nothing, why
should they not see the solution to their own plight in the return of the regime of
statist nationalism?
At the Multimedia Institute/MaMa we intend to continue our work against this
collapse of context through intersectionalist organizing and activism. We will
continue to do cultural programs, publish books, and organise the Human Rights
Film Festival. In order to articulate, formulate and document years of practical
experience, we aim to strengthen our focus on research and writing about cultural
policy, technological development, and political activism. Memory of the
World/Public Library project will continue to develop alternative infrastructures
for access, and develop new and existing networks of solidarity and public
advocacy for knowledge commons.
LOCAL HISTORIES AND GLOBAL REALITIES
PJ & AK: Your interests and activities are predominantly centred around
information and communication technologies. Yet, a big part of your social
engagement takes place in Eastern Europe, which is not exactly on the forefront of
technological innovation. Can you describe the dynamics of working from the
periphery around issues developed in global centres of power (such as the Silicon
Valley)?
MM & TM: Computers in their present form had been developed primarily in
the Post-World War II United States. Their development started from the military
need to develop mathematics and physics behind the nuclear weapons and counterair defense, but soon it was combined with efforts to address accounting, logistics
and administration problems in diverse fields such as commercial air traffic,
governmental services, banks and finances. Finally, this interplay of the military
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and the economy was joined by enthusiasts, hobbyists, and amateurs, giving the
development of (mainframe, micro and personal) computer its final historical
blueprint. This story is written in canonical computing history books such as The
Computer Boys Take Over: Computers, Programmers, and the Politics of
Technical Expertise. There, Nathan Ensmenger (2010: 14) writes: “the term
computer boys came to refer more generally not simply to actual computer
specialists but rather to the whole host of smart, ambitious, and technologically
inclined experts that emerged in the immediate postwar period.”
Very few canonical computing history books cover other histories. But when
that happens, we learn a lot. Be that Slava Gerovitch’s From Newspeak to
Cyberspeak (2002), which recounts the history of Soviet cybernetics, or Eden
Medina’s Cybernetic Revolutionaries (2011), which revisits the history of socialist
cybernetic project in Chile during Allende’s government, or the recent book by
Benjamin Peters How Not to Network a Nation (2016), which describes the history
of Soviet development of Internet infrastructure. Many (other) histories are yet to
be heard and written down. And when these histories get written down, diverse
things come into view: geopolitics, class, gender, race, and many more.
With their witty play and experiments with the medium, the early days of the
Internet were highly exciting. Big corporate websites were not much different from
amateur websites and even spoofs. A (different-than-usual) proximity of positions
of power enabled by the Internet allowed many (media-art) interventions, (rebirth
of) manifestos, establishment of (pseudo)-institutions … In these early times of
Internet’s history and geography, (the Internet subculture of) Eastern Europe
played a very important part. Inspired by Alexei Shulgin, Lev Manovich wrote ‘On
Totalitarian Interactivity’ (1996) where he famously addressed important
differences between understanding of the Internet in the West and the East. For the
West, claims Manovich, interactivity was a perfect vehicle for the ideas of
democracy and equality. For the East, however, interactivity was merely another
form of (media) manipulation. Twenty years later, it seems that Eastern Europe
was well prepared for what the Internet would become today.
PJ & AK: The dominant (historical) narrative of information and
communication technologies is predominantly based in the United States.
However, Silicon Valley is not the only game in town … What are the main
differences between approaches to digital technologies in the US and in Europe?
MM & TM: In the ninties, the lively European scene, which equally included
the East Europe, was the centre of critical reflection on the Internet and its
spontaneous ‘Californian ideology’ (Barbrook & Cameron, 1996). Critical culture
in Europe and its Eastern ‘countries in transition’ had a very specific institutional
landscape. In Western Europe, art, media, culture and ‘post-academic’ research in
humanities was by and large publicly funded. In Eastern Europe, development of
the civil society had been funded by various international foundations such as the
Open Society Institute aka the Soros Foundation. Critical new media and critical
art scene played an important role in that landscape. A wide range of initiatives,
medialabs, mailing lists, festivals and projects like Next5minutes (Amsterdam/
Rotterdam), Nettime & Syndicate (mailing lists), Backspace & Irational.org
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(London), Ljudmila (Ljubljana), Rixc (Riga), C3 (Budapest) and others constituted
a loose network of researchers, theorists, artists, activists and other cultural
workers.
This network was far from exclusively European. It was very well connected to
projects and initiatives from the United States such as Critical Art Ensemble,
Rhizome, and Thing.net, to projects in India such as Sarai, and to struggles of
Zapatistas in Chiapas. A significant feature of this loose network was its mutually
beneficial relationship with relevant European art festivals and institutions such as
Documenta (Kassel), Transmediale/HKW (Berlin) or Ars Electronica (Linz). As a
rule of thumb, critical new media and art could only be considered in a conceptual
setup of hybrid institutions, conferences, forums, festivals, (curated) exhibitions
and performances – and all of that at once! The Multimedia Institute was an active
part of that history, so it is hardly a surprise that the Public Library project took a
similar path of development and contextualization.
However, European hacker communities were rarely hanging out with critical
digital culture crowds. This is not the place to extensively present the historic
trajectory of different hacker communities, but risking a gross simplification here
is a very short genealogy. The earliest European hacker association was the
German Chaos Computer Club (CCC) founded in 1981. Already in the early
1980s, CCC started to publicly reveal (security) weaknesses of corporate and
governmental computer systems. However, their focus on digital rights, privacy,
cyberpunk/cypherpunk, encryption, and security issues prevailed over other forms
of political activism. The CCC were very successful in raising issues, shaping
public discussions, and influencing a wide range of public actors from digital rights
advocacy to political parties (such as Greens and Pirate Party). However, unlike the
Italian and Spanish hackers, CCC did not merge paths with other social and/or
political movements. Italian and Spanish hackers, for instance, were much more
integral to autonomist/anarchist, political and social movements, and they have
kept this tradition until the present day.
PJ & AK: Can you expand this analysis to Eastern Europe, and ex-Yugoslavia
in particular? What were the distinct features of (the development of) hacker
culture in these areas?
MM & TM: Continuing to risk a gross simplification in the genealogy, Eastern
European hacker communities formed rather late – probably because of the
turbulent economic and political changes that Eastern Europe went through after
1989.
In MaMa, we used to run the programme g33koskop (2006–2012) with a goal to
“explore the scope of (term) geek” (Multimedia Institute, 2016b). An important
part of the program was to collect stories from enthusiasts, hobbyists, or ‘geeks’
who used to be involved in do-it-yourself communities during early days of
(personal) computing in Yugoslavia. From these makers of first 8-bit computers,
editors of do-it-yourself magazines and other early day enthusiasts, we could learn
that technical and youth culture was strongly institutionally supported (e.g. with
nation-wide clubs called People’s Technics). However, the socialist regime did not
adequately recognize the importance and the horizon of social changes coming
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from (mere) education and (widely distributed) use of personal computers. Instead,
it insisted on an impossible mission of own industrial computer production in order
to preserve autonomy on the global information technology market. What a
horrible mistake … To be fair, many other countries during this period felt able to
achieve own, autonomous production of computers – so the mistake has reflected
the spirit of the times and the conditions of uneven economic and scientific
development.
Looking back on the early days of computing in former Yugoslavia, many geeks
now see themselves as social visionaries and the avant-garde. During the 1990s
across the Eastern Europe, unfortunately, they failed to articulate a significant
political agenda other than fighting the monopoly of telecom companies. In their
daily lives, most of these people enjoyed opportunities and privileges of working in
a rapidly growing information technology market. Across the former Yugoslavia,
enthusiasts had started local Linux User Groups: HULK in Croatia, LUGOS in
Slovenia, LUGY in Serbia, Bosnia and Hercegovina, and Macedonia. In the spirit
of their own times, many of these groups focused on attempts to convince the
business that free and open source software (at the time GNU/Linux, Apache,
Exim …) was a viable IT solution.
PJ & AK: Please describe further developments in the struggle between
proponents of proprietary software and the Free Software Movement.
MM & TM: That was the time before Internet giants such as Google, Amazon,
eBay or Facebook built their empires on top of Free/Libre/Open Source Software.
GNU General Public Licence, with its famous slogan “free as in free speech, not
free as in free beer” (Stallman, 2002), was strong enough to challenge the property
regime of the world of software production. Meanwhile, Silicon Valley
experimented with various approaches against the challenge of free software such
as ‘tivoizations’ (systems that incorporate copyleft-based software but impose
hardware restrictions to software modification), ‘walled gardens’ (systems where
carriers or service providers control applications, content and media, while
preventing them from interacting with the wider Internet ecosystem), ‘software-asa-service’ (systems where software is hosted centrally and licensed through
subscription). In order to support these strategies of enclosure and turn them into
profit, Silicon Valley developed investment strategies of venture capital or
leveraged buyouts by private equity to close the proprietary void left after the
success of commons-based peer production projects, where a large number of
people develop software collaboratively over the Internet without the exclusion by
property (Benkler, 2006).
There was a period when it seemed that cultural workers, artists and hackers
would follow the successful model of the Free Software Movement and build a
universal commons-based platform for peer produced, shared and distributed
culture, art, science and knowledge – that was the time of the Creative Commons
movement. But that vision never materialized. It did not help, either, that start-ups
with no business models whatsoever (e.g. De.lic.io.us (bookmarks), Flickr
(photos), Youtube (videos), Google Reader (RSS aggregator), Blogspot, and
others) were happy to give their services for free, let contributors use Creative
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Commons licences (mostly on the side of licenses limiting commercial use and
adaptations), let news curators share and aggregate relevant content, and let Time
magazine claim that “You” (meaning “All of us”) are The Person of the Year
(Time Magazine, 2006).
PJ & AK: Please describe the interplay between the Free Software Movement
and the radically capitalist Silicon Valley start-up culture, and place it into the
larger context of political economy of software development. What are its
consequences for the hacker movement?
MM & TM: Before the 2008 economic crash, in the course of only few years,
most of those start-ups and services had been sold out to few business people who
were able to monetize their platforms, users and usees (mostly via advertisement)
or crowd them out (mostly via exponential growth of Facebook and its ‘magic’
network effect). In the end, almost all affected start-ups and services got shut down
(especially those bought by Yahoo). Nevertheless, the ‘golden’ corporate start-up
period brought about a huge enthusiasm and the belief that entrepreneurial spirit,
fostered either by an individual genius or by collective (a.k.a. crowd) endeavour,
could save the world. During that period, unsurprisingly, the idea of hacker
labs/spaces exploded.
Fabulous (self)replicating rapid prototypes, 3D printers, do-it-yourself, the
Internet of Things started to resonate with (young) makers all around the world.
Unfortunately, GNU GPL (v.3 at the time) ceased to be a priority. The
infrastructure of free software had become taken for granted, and enthusiastic
dancing on the shoulders of giants became the most popular exercise. Rebranding
existing Unix services (finger > twitter, irc > slack, talk > im), and/or designing the
‘last mile’ of user experience (often as trivial as adding round corners to the
buttons), would often be a good enough reason to enclose the project, do the
slideshow pitch, create a new start-up backed up by an angel investor, and hope to
win in the game of network effect(s).
Typically, software stack running these projects would be (almost) completely
GNU GPL (server + client), but parts made on OSX (endorsed for being ‘true’
Unix under the hood) would stay enclosed. In this way, projects would shift from
the world of commons to the world of business. In order to pay respect to the open
source community, and to keep own reputation of ‘the good citizen,’ many
software components would get its source code published on GitHub – which is a
prime example of that game of enclosure in its own right. Such developments
transformed the hacker movement from a genuine political challenge to the
property regime into a science fiction fantasy that sharing knowledge while
keeping hackers’ meritocracy regime intact could fix all world’s problems – if only
we, the hackers, are left alone to play, optimize, innovate and make that amazing
technology!
THE SOCIAL LIFE OF DIGITAL TECHNOLOGIES
PJ & AK: This brings about the old debate between technological determinism
and social determinism, which never seems to go out of fashion. What is your take,
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as active hackers and social activists, on this debate? What is the role of
(information) technologies in social development?
MM & TM: Any discussion of information technologies and social
development requires the following parenthesis: notions used for discussing
technological development are shaped by the context of parallel US hegemony
over capitalist world-system and its commanding role in the development of
information technologies. Today’s critiques of the Internet are far from celebration
of its liberatory, democratizing potential. Instead, they often reflect frustration over
its instrumental role in the expansion of social control. Yet, the binary of freedom
and control (Chun, 2008), characteristic for ideological frameworks pertaining to
liberal capitalist democracies, is increasingly at pains to explain what has become
evident with the creeping commercialization and concentration of market power in
digital networks. Information technologies are no different from other generalpurpose technologies on which they depend – such as mass manufacture, logistics,
or energy systems.
Information technologies shape capitalism – in return, capitalism shapes
information technologies. Technological innovation is driven by interests of
investors to profit from new commodity markets, and by their capacity to optimize
and increase productivity of other sectors of economy. The public has some
influence over development of information technologies. In fact, publicly funded
research and development has created and helped commercialize most of the
fundamental building blocks of our present digital infrastructures ranging from
microprocessors, touch-screens all the way to packet switching networks
(Mazzucato, 2013). However, public influence on commercially matured
information technologies has become limited, driven by imperatives of
accumulation and regulatory hegemony of the US.
When considering the structural interplay between technological development
and larger social systems, we cannot accept the position of technological
determinism – particularly not in the form of Promethean figures of enterpreneurs,
innovators and engineers who can solve the problems of the world. Technologies
are shaped socially, yet the position of outright social determinism is inacceptable
either. The reproduction of social relations depends on contingencies of
technological innovation, just as the transformation of social relations depends on
contingencies of actions by individuals, groups and institutions. Given the
asymmetries that exist between the capitalist core and the capitalist periphery, from
which we hail, strategies for using technologies as agents of social change differ
significantly.
PJ & AK: Based on your activist experience, what is the relationship between
information technologies and democracy?
MM & TM: This relation is typically discussed within the framework of
communicative action (Habermas, 1984 [1981], 1987 [1981]) which describes how
the power to speak to the public has become radically democratized, how digital
communication has coalesced into a global public sphere, and how digital
communication has catalysed the power of collective mobilization. Information
technologies have done all that – but the framework of communicative action
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describes only a part of the picture. Firstly, as Jodi Dean warns us in her critique of
communicative capitalism (Dean, 2005; see also Dean, 2009), the self-referential
intensity of communication frequently ends up as a substitute for the hard (and
rarely rewarding) work of political organization. Secondly, and more importantly,
Internet technologies have created the ‘winner takes all’ markets and benefited
more highly skilled workforce, thus helping to create extreme forms of economic
inequality (Brynjolfsson & McAfee, 2011). Thus, in any list of world’s richest
people, one can find an inordinate number of entrepreneurs from information
technology sector. This feeds deeply into neoliberal transformation of capitalist
societies, with growing (working and unemployed) populations left out of social
welfare which need to be actively appeased or policed. This is the structural
problem behind liberal democracies, electoral successes of the radical right, and
global “Trumpism” (Blyth, 2015). Intrinsic to contemporary capitalism,
information technologies reinforce its contradictions and pave its unfortunate trail
of destruction.
PJ & AK: Access to digital technologies and digital materials is dialectically
intertwined with human learning. For instance, Stallman’s definition of free
software directly addresses this issue in two freedoms: “Freedom 1: The freedom
to study how the program works, and change it to make it do what you wish,” and
“Freedom 3: The freedom to improve the program, and release your improvements
(and modified versions in general) to the public, so that the whole community
benefits” (Stallman, 2002: 43). Please situate the relationship between access and
learning in the contemporary context.
MM & TM: The relationships between digital technologies and education are
marked by the same contradictions and processes of enclosure that have befallen
the free software. Therefore, Eastern European scepticism towards free software is
equally applicable to education. The flip side of interactivity is audience
manipulation; the flip side of access and availability is (economic) domination.
Eroded by raising tuitions, expanding student debt, and poverty-level wages for
adjunct faculty, higher education is getting more and more exclusive. However,
occasional spread of enthusiasm through ideas such as MOOCs does not bring
about more emancipation and equality. While they preach loudly about unlimited
access for students at the periphery, neoliberal universities (backed up by venture
capital) are actually hoping to increase their recruitment business (models).
MOOCs predominantly serve members of privileged classes who already have
access to prestige universities, and who are “self-motivated, self-directed, and
independent individuals who would push to succeed anywhere” (Konnikova,
2014). It is a bit worrying that such rise of inequality results from attempts to
provide materials freely to everyone with Internet access!
The question of access to digital books for public libraries is different. Libraries
cannot afford digital books from world’s largest publishers (Digitalbookworld,
2012), and the small amount of already acquired e-books must destroyed after only
twenty six lendings (Greenfield, 2012). Thus, the issue of access is effectively left
to competition between Amazon, Google, Apple and other companies. The state of
affairs in scientific publishing is not any better. As we wrote in the collective open
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letter ‘In solidarity with Library Genesis and Sci-Hub’ (Custodians.online, 2015),
five for-profit publishers (Elsevier, Springer, Wiley-Blackwell, Taylor & Francis
and Sage) own more than half of all existing databases of academic material, which
are licensed at prices so scandalously high that even Harvard, the richest university
of the Global North, has complained that it cannot afford them any longer. Robert
Darnton, the past director of Harvard Library, says: “We faculty do the research,
write the papers, referee papers by other researchers, serve on editorial boards, all
of it for free … and then we buy back the results of our labor at outrageous prices.”
For all the work supported by public money benefiting scholarly publishers,
particularly the peer review that grounds their legitimacy, prices of journal articles
prohibit access to science to many academics – and all non-academics – across the
world, and render it a token of privilege (Custodians.online, 2015).
PJ & AK: Please describe the existing strategies for struggle against these
developments. What are their main strengths and weaknesses?
MM & TM: Contemporary problems in the field of production, access,
maintenance and distribution of knowledge regulated by globally harmonized
intellectual property regime have brought about tremendous economic, social,
political and institutional crisis and deadlock(s). Therefore, we need to revisit and
rethink our politics, strategies and tactics. We could perhaps find inspiration in the
world of free software production, where it seems that common effort, courage and
charming obstinacy are able to build alternative tools and infrastructures. Yet, this
model might be insufficient for the whole scope of crisis facing knowledge
production and dissemination. The aforementioned corporate appropriations of free
software such as ‘tivoizations,’ ‘walled gardens,’ ‘software-as-a-service’ etc. bring
about the problem of longevity of commons-based peer-production.
Furthermore, the sense of entitlement for building alternatives to dominant
modes of oppression can only arrive at the close proximity to capitalist centres of
power. The periphery (of capitalism), in contrast, relies on strategies of ‘stealing’
and bypassing socio-economic barriers by refusing to submit to the harmonized
regulation that sets the frame for global economic exchange. If we honestly look
back and try to compare the achievements of digital piracy vs. the achievements of
reformist Creative Commons, it is obvious that the struggle for access to
knowledge is still alive mostly because of piracy.
PJ & AK: This brings us to the struggle against (knowledge as) private
property. What are the main problems in this struggle? How do you go about them?
MM & TM: Many projects addressing the crisis of access to knowledge are
originated in Eastern Europe. Examples include Library Genesis, Science Hub,
Monoskop and Memory of the World. Balázs Bodó’s research (2016) on the ethos
of Library Genesis and Science Hub resonates with our beliefs, shared through all
abovementioned projects, that the concept of private property should not be taken
for granted. Private property can and should be permanently questioned,
challenged and negotiated. This is especially the case in the face of artificial
scarcity (such as lack of access to knowledge caused by intellectual property in
context of digital networks) or selfish speculations over scarce basic human
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resources (such as problems related to housing, water or waterfront development)
(Mars, Medak, & Sekulić, 2016).
The struggle to challenge the property regime used to be at the forefront of the
Free Software Movement. In the spectacular chain of recent events, where the
revelations of sweeping control and surveillance of electronic communications
brought about new heroes (Manning, Assange, Snowden), the hacker is again
reduced to the heroic cypherpunk outlaw. This firmly lies within the old Cold War
paradigm of us (the good guys) vs. them (the bad guys). However, only rare and
talented people are able to master cryptography, follow exact security protocols,
practice counter-control, and create a leak of information. Unsurprisingly, these
people are usually white, male, well-educated, native speakers of English.
Therefore, the narrative of us vs. them is not necessarily the most empowering, and
we feel that it requires a complementary strategy that challenges the property
regime as a whole. As our letter at Custodians.online says:
We find ourselves at a decisive moment. This is the time to recognize that the
very existence of our massive knowledge commons is an act of collective
civil disobedience. It is the time to emerge from hiding and put our names
behind this act of resistance. You may feel isolated, but there are many of us.
The anger, desperation and fear of losing our library infrastructures, voiced
across the Internet, tell us that. This is the time for us custodians, being dogs,
humans or cyborgs, with our names, nicknames and pseudonyms, to raise our
voices. Share your writing – digitize a book – upload your files. Don’t let our
knowledge be crushed. Care for the libraries – care for the metadata – care
for the backup. (Custodians.online, 2015)
FROM CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE TO PUBLIC LIBRARY
PJ & AK: Started in 2012, The Public Library project (Memory of the World,
2016a) is an important part of struggle against commodification of knowledge.
What is the project about; how did it arrive into being?
MM & TM: The Public Library project develops and affirms scenarios for
massive disobedience against current regulation of production and circulation of
knowledge and culture in the digital realm. Started in 2012, it created a lot of
resonance across the peripheries of an unevenly developed world of study and
learning. Earlier that year, takedown of the book-sharing site Library.nu produced
the anxiety that the equalizing effects brought about by piracy would be rolled
back. With the takedown, the fact that access to most recent and most relevant
knowledge was (finally) no longer a privilege of the rich academic institutions in a
few countries of the Global West, and/or the exclusive preserve of the academia to
boot – has simply disappeared into thin air. Certainly, various alternatives from
deep semi-periphery have quickly filled the gap. However, it is almost a miracle
that they still continue to exist in spite of prosecution they are facing on everyday
basis.
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Our starting point for the Public Library project is simple: public library is the
institutional form devised by societies in order to make knowledge and culture
accessible to all its members regardless their social or economic status. There is a
political consensus across the board that this principle of access is fundamental to
the purpose of a modern society. Only educated and informed citizens are able to
claim their rights and fully participate in the polity for common good. Yet, as
digital networks have radically expanded availability of literature and science,
provision of de-commodified access to digital objects has been by and large denied
to public libraries. For instance, libraries frequently do not have the right to
purchase e-books for lending and preservations. If they do, they are limited in
regards to how many times and under what conditions they can lend digital objects
before the license and the object itself is revoked (Greenfield, 2012). The case of
academic journals is even worse. As journals become increasingly digital, libraries
can provide access and ‘preserve’ them only for as long as they pay extortionate
subscriptions. The Public Library project fills in the space that remains denied to
real-world public libraries by building tools for organizing and sharing electronic
libraries, creating digitization workflows and making books available online.
Obviously, we are not alone in this effort. There are many other platforms, public
and hidden, that help people to share books. And the practice of sharing is massive.
PJ & AK: The Public Library project (Memory of the World, 2016a) is a part of
a wider global movement based, amongst other influences, on the seminal work of
Aaron Swartz. This movement consists of various projects including but not
limited to Library Genesis, Aaaaarg.org, UbuWeb, and others. Please situate The
Public Library project in the wider context of this movement. What are its distinct
features? What are its main contributions to the movement at large?
MM & TM: The Public Library project is informed by two historic moments in
the development of institution of public library The first defining moment
happened during the French Revolution – the seizure of library collections from
aristocracy and clergy, and their transfer to the Bibliothèque Nationale and
municipal libraries of the post-revolutionary Republic. The second defining
moment happened in England through working class struggles to make knowledge
accessible to the working class. After the revolution of 1848, that struggle resulted
in tax-supported public libraries. This was an important part of the larger attempt
by the Chartist movement to provide workers with “really useful knowledge”
aimed at raising class consciousness through explaining functioning of capitalist
domination and exploring ways of building workers’ own autonomous culture
(Johnson, 1988). These defining revolutionary moments have instituted two
principles underpinning the functioning of public libraries: a) general access to
knowledge is fundamental to full participation in the society, and b)
commodification of knowledge in the form of book trade needs to be limited by
public de-commodified non-monetary forms of access through public institutions.
In spite of enormous expansion of potentials for providing access to knowledge
to all regardless of their social status or geographic location brought about by the
digital technologies, public libraries have been radically limited in pursuing their
mission. This results in side-lining of public libraries in enormous expansion of
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commodification of knowledge in the digital realm, and brings huge profits to
academic publishers. In response to these limitations, a number of projects have
sprung up in order to maintain public interest by illegal means.
PJ & AK: Can you provide a short genealogy of these projects?
MM & TM: Founded in 1996, Ubu was one of the first online repositories.
Then, in 2001, Textz.com started distributing texts in critical theory. After
Textz.com got shot down in early 2004, it took another year for Aaaaarg to emerge
and Monoskop followed soon thereafter. In the latter part of the 2000s, Gigapedia
started a different trajectory of providing access to comprehensive repositories.
Gigapedia was a game changer, because it provided access to thousands and
thousands of scholarly titles and made access to that large corpus no longer limited
to those working or studying in the rich institutions of the Global North. In 2012
publishing industry shut down Gigapedia (at the time, it was known as Library.nu).
Fortunately, the resulting vacuum did not last for long, as Library.nu repository got
merged into the holdings of Library Genesis. Building on the legacy of Soviet
scholars who devised the ways of shadow production and distribution of
knowledge in the form of samizdat and early digital distribution of texts in the
post-Soviet period (Balázs, 2014), Library Genesis has built a robust infrastructure
with the mission to provide access to the largest online library in existence while
keeping a low profile. At this moment Library Genesis provides access to books,
and its sister project Science Hub provides access to academic journals. Both
projects are under threat of closure by the largest academic publisher Reed
Elsevier. Together with the Public Library project, they articulate a position of civil
disobedience.
PJ & AK: Please elaborate the position of civil disobedience. How does it
work; when is it justified?
MM & TM: Legitimating discourses usually claim that shadow libraries fall
into the category of non-commercial fair use. These arguments are definitely valid,
yet they do not build a particularly strong ground for defending knowledge
commons. Once they arrive under attack, therefore, shadow libraries are typically
shut down. In our call for collective disobedience, therefore, we want to make a
larger claim. Access to knowledge as a universal condition could not exist if we –
academics and non-academics across the unevenly developed world – did not
create own ways of commoning knowledge that we partake in producing and
learning. By introducing the figure of the custodian, we are turning the notion of
property upside down. Paraphrasing the Little Prince, to own something is to be
useful to that which you own (Saint-Exupéry, 1945). Custodians are the political
subjectivity of that disobedient work of care.
Practices of sharing, downloading, and uploading, are massive. So, if we want to
prevent our knowledge commons from being taken away over and over again, we
need to publicly and collectively stand behind our disobedient behaviour. We
should not fall into the trap of the debate about legality or illegality of our
practices. Instead, we should acknowledge that our practices, which have been
deemed illegal, are politically legitimate in the face of uneven opportunities
between the Global North and the Global South, in the face of commercialization
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of education and student debt in the Global North … This is the meaning of civil
disobedience – to take responsibility for breaking unjust laws.
PJ & AK: We understand your lack of interest for debating legality –
nevertheless, legal services are very interested in your work … For instance,
Marcell has recently been involved in a law suit related to Aaaaarg. Please describe
the relationship between morality and legality in your (public) engagement. When,
and under which circumstances, can one’s moral actions justify breaking the law?
MM & TM: Marcell has been recently drawn into a lawsuit that was filed
against Aaaaarg for copyright infringement. Marcell, the founder of Aaaaarg Sean
Dockray, and a number of institutions ranging from universities to continentalscale intergovernmental organizations, are being sued by a small publisher from
Quebec whose translation of André Bazin’s What is Cinema? (1967) was twice
scanned and uploaded to Aaaaarg by an unknown user. The book was removed
each time the plaintiff issued a takedown notice, resulting in minimal damages, but
these people are nonetheless being sued for 500.000 Canadian dollars. Should
Aaaaarg not be able to defend its existence on the principle of fair use, a valuable
common resource will yet again be lost and its founder will pay a high price. In this
lawsuit, ironically, there is little economic interest. But many smaller publishers
find themselves squeezed between the privatization of education which leaves
students and adjuncts with little money for books and the rapid concentration of
academic publishing. For instance, Taylor and Francis has acquired a smaller
humanities publisher Ashgate and shut it down in a matter of months (Save
Ashgate Publishing petition, 2015).
The system of academic publishing is patently broken. It syphons off public
funding of science and education into huge private profits, while denying living
wages and access to knowledge to its producers. This business model is legal, but
deeply illegitimate. Many scientists and even governments agree with this
conclusion – yet, situation cannot be easily changed because of entrenched power
passed down from the old models of publishing and their imbrication with
allocation of academic prestige. Therefore, the continuous existence of this model
commands civil disobedience.
PJ & AK: The Public Library project (Memory of the World, 2016a) operates
in various public domains including art galleries. Why did you decide to develop
The Public Library project in the context of arts? How do you conceive the
relationship between arts and activism?
MM & TM: We tend to easily conflate the political with the aesthetic.
Moreover, when an artwork expressedly claims political character, this seems to
grant it recognition and appraisal. Yet, socially reflective character of an artwork
and its consciously critical position toward the social reality might not be outright
political. Political action remains a separate form of agency, which is different than
that of socially reflexive, situated and critical art. It operates along a different logic
of engagement. It requires collective mobilization and social transformation.
Having said that, socially reflexive, situated and critical art cannot remain detached
from the present conjuncture and cannot exist outside the political space. Within
the world of arts, alternatives to existing social sensibilities and realities can be
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articulated and tested without paying a lot of attention to consistency and
plausibility. Whereas activism generally leaves less room for unrestricted
articulation, because it needs to produce real and plausible effects.
With the generous support of the curatorial collective What, How and for Whom
(WHW) (2016), the Public Library project was surprisingly welcomed by the art
world, and this provided us with a stage to build the project, sharpen its arguments
and ascertain legitimacy of its political demands. The project was exhibited, with
WHW and other curators, in some of the foremost art venues such as Reina Sofía
in Madrid, Württembergischer Kunstverein in Stuttgart, 98 Weeks in Beirut,
Museum of Contemporary Art Metelkova in Ljubljana, and Calvert 22 in London.
It is great to have a stage where we can articulate social issues and pursue avenues
of action that other social institutions might find risky to support. Yet, while the
space of art provides a safe haven from the adversarial world of political reality, we
think that the addressed issues need to be politicized and that other institutions,
primarily institutions of education, need to stand behind the demand for universal
access. For instance, teaching and research at the University in Zagreb critically
depends on the capacity of its faculty and students to access books and journals
from sources that are deemed illegal – in our opinion, therefore, the University
needs to take a public stand for these forms of access. In the world of
commercialized education and infringement liability, expecting the University to
publicly support us seems highly improbable. However, it is not impossible! This
was recently demonstrated by the Zürich Academy of Arts, which now hosts a
mirror of Ubu – a crucial resource for its students and faculty alike
(Custodians.online, 2016).
PJ & AK: In the current climate of economic austerity, the question of
resources has become increasingly important. For instance, Web 2.0. has narrowed
available spaces for traditional investigative journalism, and platforms such as
Airbnb and Uber have narrowed spaces for traditional labor. Following the same
line of argument, placing activism into art galleries clearly narrows available
spaces for artists. How do you go about this problem? What, if anything, should be
done with the activist takeover of traditional forms of art? Why?
MM & TM: Art can no longer stand outside of the political space, and it can no
longer be safely stowed away into a niche of supposed autonomy within bourgeois
public sphere detached from commodity production and the state. However, art
academies in Croatia and many other places throughout the world still churn out
artists on the premise that art is apolitical. In this view artists can specialize in a
medium and create in isolation of their studios – if their artwork is recognized as
masterful, it will be bought on the marketplace. This is patently a lie! Art in Croatia
depends on bonds of solidarity and public support.
Frequently it is the art that seeks political forms of engagement rather than vice
versa. A lot of headspace for developing a different social imaginary can be gained
from that venturing aspect of contemporary art. Having said that, art does not need
to be political in order to be relevant and strong.
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THE DOUBLE LIFE OF HACKER CULTURE
PJ & AK: The Public Library project (Memory of the World, 2016a) is essentially
pedagogical. When everyone is a librarian, and all books are free, living in the
world transforms into living with the world – so The Public Library project is also
essentially anti-capitalist. This brings us to the intersections between critical
pedagogy of Paulo Freire, Peter McLaren, Henry Giroux, and others – and the
hacker culture of Richard Stallman, Linus Torvalds, Steven Lévy, and others. In
spite of various similarities, however, critical pedagogy and hacker culture disagree
on some important points.
With its deep roots in Marxism, critical theory always insists on class analysis.
Yet, imbued in the Californian ideology (Barbrook and Cameron, 1996), the hacker
culture is predominantly individualist. How do you go about the tension between
individualism and collectivism in The Public Library project? How do you balance
these forces in your overall work?
MM & TM: Hacker culture has always lived a double life. Personal computers
and the Internet have set up a perfect projection screen for a mind-set which
understands autonomy as a pursuit for personal self-realisation. Such mind-set sees
technology as a frontier of limitless and unconditional freedom, and easily melds
with entrepreneurial culture of the Silicon Valley. Therefore, it is hardly a surprise
that individualism has become the hegemonic narrative of hacker culture.
However, not all hacker culture is individualist and libertarian. Since the 1990s, the
hacker culture is heavily divided between radical individualism and radical
mutualism. Fred Turner (2006), Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron (1996) have
famously shown that radical individualism was built on freewheeling counterculture of the American hippie movement, while radical mutualism was built on
collective leftist traditions of anarchism and Marxism. This is evident in the Free
Software Movement, which has placed ethics and politics before economy and
technology. In her superb ethnographic work, Biella Coleman (2013) has shown
that projects such as GNU/Linux distribution Debian have espoused radically
collective subjectivities. In that regard, these projects stand closer to mutualist,
anarchist and communist traditions where collective autonomy is the foundation of
individual freedom.
Our work stands in that lineage. Therefore, we invoke two collective figures –
amateur librarian and custodian. These figures highlight the labor of communizing
knowledge and maintaining infrastructures of access, refuse to leave the commons
to the authority of professions, and create openings where technologies and
infrastructures can be re-claimed for radically collective and redistributive
endeavours. In that context, we are critical of recent attempts to narrow hacker
culture down to issues of surveillance, privacy and cryptography. While these
issues are clearly important, they (again) reframe the hacker community through
the individualist dichotomy of freedom and privacy, and, more broadly, through
the hegemonic discourse of the post-historical age of liberal capitalism. In this
way, the essential building blocks of the hacker culture – relations of production,
relations of property, and issues of redistribution – are being drowned out, and
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collective and massive endeavour of commonizing is being eclipsed by the
capacity of the few crypto-savvy tricksters to avoid government control.
Obviously, we strongly disagree with the individualist, privative and 1337 (elite)
thrust of these developments.
PJ & AK: The Public Library project (Memory of the World, 2016a) arrives
very close to visions of deschooling offered by authors such as Ivan Illich (1971),
Everett Reimer (1971), Paul Goodman (1973), and John Holt (1967). Recent
research indicates that digital technologies offer some fresh opportunities for the
project of deschooling (Hart, 2001; Jandrić, 2014, 2015b), and projects such as
Monoskop (Monoskop, 2016) and The Public Library project (Memory of the
World, 2016a) provide important stepping-stones for emancipation of the
oppressed. Yet, such forms of knowledge and education are hardly – if at all –
recognised by the mainstream. How do you go about this problem? Should these
projects try and align with the mainstream, or act as subversions of the mainstream,
or both? Why?
MM & TM: We are currently developing a more fine-tuned approach to
educational aspects of amateur librarianship. The forms of custodianship over
knowledge commons that underpin the practices behind Monoskop, Public Library,
Aaaaarg, Ubu, Library Genesis, and Science Hub are part and parcel of our
contemporary world – whether you are a non-academic with no access to scholarly
libraries, or student/faculty outside of the few well-endowed academic institutions
in the Global North. As much as commercialization and privatization of education
are becoming mainstream across the world, so are the strategies of reproducing
one’s knowledge and academic research that depend on the de-commodified access
of shadow libraries.
Academic research papers are narrower in scope than textbooks, and Monoskop
is thematically more specific than Library Genesis. However, all these practices
exhibit ways in which our epistemologies and pedagogies are built around
institutional structures that reproduce inequality and differentiated access based on
race, gender, class and geography. By building own knowledge infrastructures, we
build different bodies of knowledge and different forms of relating to our realities –
in words of Walter Mignolo, we create new forms of epistemic disobedience
(2009). Through Public Library, we have digitized and made available several
collections that represent epistemologically different corpuses of knowledge. A
good example of that is the digital collection of books selected by Black Panther
Herman Wallace as his dream library for political education (Memory of the
World, 2016b).
PJ & AK: Your work breaks traditional distinctions between professionals and
amateurs – when everyone becomes a librarian, the concepts of ‘professional
librarian’ and ‘amateur librarian’ become obsolete. Arguably, this tension is an
inherent feature of the digital world – similar trends can be found in various
occupations such as journalism and arts. What are the main consequences of the
new (power) dynamics between professionals and amateurs?
MM & TM: There are many tensions between amateurs and professionals.
There is the general tension, which you refer to as “the inherent feature of the
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digital world,” but there are also more historically specific tensions. We, amateur
librarians, are mostly interested in seizing various opportunities to politicize and
renegotiate the positions of control and empowerment in the tensions that are
already there. We found that storytelling is a particularly useful, efficient and
engaging way of politicization. The naïve and oft overused claim – particularly
during the Californian nineties – of the revolutionary potential of emerging digital
networks turned out to be a good candidate for replacement by a story dating back
two centuries earlier – the story of emergence of public libraries in the early days
of the French bourgeois revolution in the 19th century.
The seizure of book collections from the Church and the aristocracy in the
course of revolutions casts an interesting light on the tensions between the
professionals and the amateurs. Namely, the seizure of book collections didn’t lead
to an Enlightenment in the understanding of the world – a change in the paradigm
how we humans learn, write and teach each other about the world. Steam engine,
steam-powered rotary press, railroads, electricity and other revolutionary
technological innovations were not seen as results of scientific inquiry. Instead,
they were by and large understood as developments in disciplines such as
mechanics, engineering and practical crafts, which did not challenge religion as the
foundational knowledge about the world.
Consequently, public prayers continued to act as “hoped for solutions to cattle
plagues in 1865, a cholera epidemic in 1866, and a case of typhoid suffered by the
young Prince (Edward) of Wales in 1871” (Gieryn, 1983). Scientists of the time
had to demarcate science from both the religion and the mechanics to provide a
rationale for its supriority as opposed to the domains of spiritual and technical
discovery. Depending on whom they talked to, asserts Thomas F. Gieryn, scientists
would choose to discribe the science as either theoretical or empirical, pure or
applied, often in contradictory ways, but with a clear goal to legitimate to
authorities both the scientific endavor and its claim to resources. Boundary-work of
demarcation had the following characteristics:
(a) when the goal is expansion of authority or expertise into domains claimed
by other professions or occupations, boundary-work heightens the contrast
between rivals in ways flattering to the ideologists’ side;
(b) when the goal is monopolization of professional authority and resources,
boundary-work excludes rivals from within by defining them as outsiders
with labels such as ‘pseudo,’ ‘deviant,’ or ‘amateur’;
(c) when the goal is protection of autonomy over professional activities,
boundary-work exempts members from responsibility for consequences of
their work by putting the blame on scapegoats from outside. (Gieryn, 1983:
791–192)
Once institutionally established, modern science and its academic system have
become the exclusive instances where emerging disciplines had now to seek
recognition and acceptance. The new disciplines (and their respective professions),
in order to become acknowledged by the scientific community as legitimate, had to
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repeat the same boundary-work as the science in general once had to go through
before.
The moral of this story is that the best way for a new scientific discipline to
claim its territory was to articulate the specificity and importance of its insights in a
domain no other discipline claimed. It could achieve that by theorizing,
formalizing, and writing own vocabulary, methods and curricula, and finally by
asking the society to see its own benefit in acknowledging the discipline, its
practitioners and its practices as a separate profession – giving it the green light to
create its own departments and eventually join the productive forces of the world.
This is how democratization of knowledge led to the professionalization of science.
Another frequent reference in our storytelling is the history of
professionalization of computing and its consequences for the fields and disciplines
where the work of computer programmers plays an important role (Ensmenger,
2010: 14; Krajewski, 2011). Markus Krajewski in his great book Paper Machines
(2011), looking back on the history of index card catalog (an analysis that is
formative for our understanding of the significance of library catalog as an
epistemic tool), introduced a thought-provoking idea of the logical equivalence of
the developed index card catalog and the Turing machine, thus making the library a
vanguard of the computing. Granting that equivalence, we however think that the
professionalization of computing much better explains the challenges of today’s
librarianship and tensions between the amateur and professional librarians.
The world recognized the importance and potential of computer technology
much before computer science won its own autonomy in the academia. Computer
science first had to struggle and go through its own historical phase of boundarywork. In 1965 the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) had decided to
pool together various attempts to define the terms and foundations of computer
science analysis. Still, the field wasn’t given its definition before Donald Knuth
and his colleagues established the algorithm as as the principle unit of analysis in
computer science in the first volume of Knuth’s canonical The Art of Computer
Programming (2011) [1968]. Only once the algorithm was posited as the main unit
of study of computer science, which also served as the basis for ACM’s
‘Curriculum ‘68’ (Atchison et al., 1968), the path was properly paved for the future
departments of computer science in the university.
PJ & AK: What are the main consequences of these stories for computer
science education?
MM & TM: Not everyone was happy with the algorithm’s central position in
computer science. Furthermore, since the early days, computer industry has been
complaining that the university does not provide students with practical
knowledge. Back in 1968, for instance, IBM researcher Hal Sackman said:
new departments of computer science in the universities are too busy
teaching simon-pure courses in their struggle for academic recognition to pay
serious time and attention to the applied work necessary to educate
programmers and systems analysts for the real world. (in Ensmenger, 2010:
133)
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Computer world remains a weird hybrid where knowledge is produced in both
academic and non-academic settings, through academic curricula – but also
through fairs, informal gatherings, homebrew computer clubs, hacker communities
and the like. Without the enthusiasm and the experiments with ways how
knowledge can be transferred and circulated between peers, we would have
probably never arrived to the Personal Computer Revolution in the beginning of
1980s. Without the amount of personal computers already in use, we would have
probably never experienced the Internet revolution in the beginning of 1990s. It is
through such historical development that computer science became the academic
centre of the larger computer universe which spread its tentacles into almost all
other known disciplines and professions.
PJ & AK: These stories describe the process of professionalization. How do
you go about its mirror image – the process of amateurisation?
MM & TM: Systematization, vocabulary, manuals, tutorials, curricula – all the
processes necessary for achieving academic autonomy and importance in the world
– prime a discipline for automatization of its various skills and workflows into
software tools. That happened to photography (Photoshop, 1990; Instagram, 2010),
architecture (AutoCAD, 1982), journalism (Blogger, 1999; WordPress, 2003),
graphic design (Adobe Illustrator, 1986; Pagemaker, 1987; Photoshop, 1988;
Freehand, 1988), music production (Steinberg Cubase, 1989), and various other
disciplines (Memory of the World, 2016b).
Usually, after such software tool gets developed and introduced into the
discipline, begins the period during which a number of amateurs start to ‘join’ that
profession. An army of enthusiasts with a specific skill, many self-trained and with
understanding of a wide range of software tools, join. This phenomenon often
marks a crisis as amateurs coming from different professional backgrounds start to
compete with certified and educated professionals in that field. Still, the future
development of the same software tools remains under control by software
engineers, who become experts in established workflows, and who promise further
optimizations in the field. This crisis of old professions becomes even more
pronounced if the old business models – and their corporate monopolies – are
challenged by the transition to digital network economy and possibly face the
algorithmic replacement of their workforce and assets.
For professions under these challenging conditions, today it is often too late for
boundary-work described in our earlier answer. Instead of maintaining authority
and expertise by labelling upcoming enthusiasts as ‘pseudo,’ ‘deviant,’ or
‘amateur,’ therefore, contemporary disciplines need to revisit own roots, values,
vision and benefits for society and then (re-)articulate the corpus of knowledge that
the discipline should maintain for the future.
PJ & AK: How does this relate to the dichotomy between amateur and
professional librarians?
MM & TM: We regard the e-book management software Calibre (2016),
written by Kovid Goyal, as a software tool which has benefited from the
knowledge produced, passed on and accumulated by librarians for centuries.
Calibre has made the task of creating and maintaining the catalog easy.
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Our vision is to make sharing, aggregating and accessing catalogs easy and
playful. We like the idea that every rendered catalog is stored on a local hard disk,
that an amateur librarian can choose when to share, and that when she decides to
share, the catalog gets aggregated into a library together with the collections of
other fellow amateur librarians (at https://library.memoryoftheworld.org). For the
purpose of sharing we wrote the Calibre plugin named let’s share books and set up
the related server infrastructure – both of which are easily replicable and
deployable into distributed clones.
Together with Voja Antonić, the legendary inventor of the first eight-bit
computer in Yugoslavia, we also designed and developed a series of book scanners
and used them to digitize hundreds of books focused to Yugoslav humanities such
as the Digital Archive of Praxis and the Korčula Summer School (2016), Catalogue
of Liberated Books (2013), books thrown away from Croatian public libraries
during ideological cleansing of the 1990s Written-off (2015), and the collection of
books selected by the Black Panther Herman Wallace as his dream library for
political education (Memory of the World, 2016b).
In our view, amateur librarians are complementary to professional librarians,
and there is so much to learn and share between each other. Amateur librarians care
about books which are not (yet) digitally curated with curiosity, passion and love;
they dare to disobey in pursuit for the emancipatory vision of the world which is
now under threat. If we, amateur librarians, ever succeed in our pursuits – that
should secure the existing jobs of professional librarians and open up many new
and exciting positions. When knowledge is easily accessed, (re)produced and
shared, there will be so much to follow up upon.
TOWARDS AN ACTIVIST PUBLIC PEDAGOGY
PJ & AK: You organize talks and workshops, publish books, and maintain a major
regional hub for people interested in digital cultures. In Croatia, your names are
almost synonymous with social studies of the digital – worldwide, you are
recognized as regional leaders in the field. Such engagement has a prominent
pedagogical component – arguably, the majority of your work can be interpreted as
public pedagogy. What are the main theoretical underpinnings of your public
pedagogy? How does it work in practice?
MM & TM: Our organization is a cluster of heterogeneous communities and
fields of interest. Therefore, our approaches to public pedagogy hugely vary. In
principle, we subscribe to the idea that all intelligences are equal and that all
epistemology is socially structured. In practice, this means that our activities are
syncretic and inclusive. They run in parallel without falling under the same
umbrella, and they bring together people of varying levels of skill – who bring in
various types of knowledge, and who arrive from various social backgrounds.
Working with hackers, we favour hands-on approach. For a number of years
Marcell has organized weekly Skill Sharing program (Net.culture club MaMa,
2016b) that has started from very basic skills. The bar was incrementally raised to
today’s level of the highly specialized meritocratic community of 1337 hackers. As
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the required skill level got too demanding, some original members left the group –
yet, the community continues to accommodate geeks and freaks. At the other end,
we maintain a theoretically inflected program of talks, lectures and publications.
Here we invite a mix of upcoming theorists and thinkers and some of the most
prominent intellectuals of today such as Jacques Rancière, Alain Badiou, Saskia
Sassen and Robert McChesney. This program creates a larger intellectual context,
and also provides space for our collaborators in various activities.
Our political activism, however, takes an altogether different approach. More
often than not, our campaigns are based on inclusive planning and direct decision
making processes with broad activist groups and the public. However, such
inclusiveness is usually made possible by a campaigning process that allows
articulation of certain ideas in public and popular mobilization. For instance, before
the Right to the City campaign against privatisation of the pedestrian zone in
Zagreb’s Varšavska Street coalesced together (Pravo na grad, 2016), we tactically
used media for more than a year to clarify underlying issues of urban development
and mobilize broad public support. At its peak, this campaign involved no less than
200 activists involved in the direct decision-making process and thousands of
citizens in the streets. Its prerequisite was hard day-to-day work by a small group
of people organized by the important member of our collective Teodor Celakoski.
PJ & AK: Your public pedagogy provides great opportunity for personal
development – for instance, talks organized by the Multimedia Institute have been
instrumental in shaping our educational trajectories. Yet, you often tackle complex
problems and theories, which are often described using complex concepts and
language. Consequently, your public pedagogy is inevitably restricted to those who
already possess considerable educational background. How do you balance the
popular and the elitist aspects of your public pedagogy? Do you intend to try and
reach wider audiences? If so, how would you go about that?
MM & TM: Our cultural work equally consists of more demanding and more
popular activities, which mostly work together in synergy. Our popular Human
Rights Film Festival (2016) reaches thousands of people; yet, its highly selective
programme echoes our (more) theoretical concerns. Our political campaigns are
intended at scalability, too. Demanding and popular activities do not contradict
each other. However, they do require very different approaches and depend on
different contexts and situations. In our experience, a wide public response to a
social cause cannot be simply produced by shaping messages or promoting causes
in ways that are considered popular. The response of the public primarily depends
on a broadly shared understanding, no matter its complexity, that a certain course
of action has an actual capacity to transform a specific situation. Recognizing that
moment, and acting tactfully upon it, is fundamental to building a broad political
process.
This can be illustrated by the aforementioned Custodians.online letter (2015)
that we recently co-authored with a number of our fellow library activists against
the injunction that allows Elsevier to shut down two most important repositories
providing access to scholarly writing: Science Hub and Library Genesis. The letter
is clearly a product of our specific collective work and dynamic. Yet, it clearly
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articulates various aspects of discontent around this impasse in access to
knowledge, so it resonates with a huge number of people around the world and
gives them a clear indication that there are many who disobey the global
distribution of knowledge imposed by the likes of Elsevier.
PJ & AK: Your work is probably best described by John Holloway’s phrase
“in, against, and beyond the state” (Holloway, 2002, 2016). What are the main
challenges of working under such conditions? How do you go about them?
MM & TM: We could situate the Public Library project within the structure of
tactical agency, where one famously moves into the territory of institutional power
of others. While contesting the regulatory power of intellectual property over
access to knowledge, we thus resort to appropriation of universalist missions of
different social institutions – public libraries, UNESCO, museums. Operating in an
economic system premised on unequal distribution of means, they cannot but fail
to deliver on their universalist promise. Thus, while public libraries have a mission
to provide access to knowledge to all members of the society, they are severely
limited in what they can do to accomplish that mission in the digital realm. By
claiming the mission of universal access to knowledge for shadow libraries,
collectively built shared infrastructures redress the current state of affairs outside of
the territory of institutions. Insofar, these acts of commoning can indeed be
regarded as positioned beyond the state (Holloway, 2002, 2016).
Yet, while shadow libraries can complement public libraries, they cannot
replace public libraries. And this shifts the perspective from ‘beyond’ to ‘in and
against’: we all inhabit social institutions which reflect uneven development in and
between societies. Therefore, we cannot simply operate within binaries: powerful
vs. powerless, institutional vs. tactical. Our space of agency is much more complex
and blurry. Institutions and their employees resist imposed limitations, and
understand that their spaces of agency reach beyond institutional limitations.
Accordingly, the Public Library project enjoys strong and unequivocal complicity
of art institutions, schools and libraries for its causes and activities. While
collectively building practices that abolish the present state of affairs and reclaim
the dream of universal access to knowledge, we rearticulate the vision of a
radically equal society equipped with institutions that can do justice to that
“infinite demand” (Critchley, 2013). We are collectively pursuing this collective
dream – in words of our friend and our continuing inspiration Aaron Swartz: “With
enough of us, around the world, we’ll not just send a strong message opposing the
privatization of knowledge – we’ll make it a thing of the past. Will you join us?”
(Swartz, 2008).