affect in Dean, Dockray, Ludovico, Broekman, Thoburn & Vilensky 2013

ime (such as Negri, Virno, and Rancière). There was a
strong sense of discovery, and this always gives one a particular energy. We
consciously strove to take the position of Russian cultural leftists who were
open-minded and focused on involvement in international cultural activist
networks, and we have been successful in realizing this aim.
MAGAZINE PLATFORM
NT I was a little concerned that starting a conversation about the ‘materialities’
of publishing with a question about writing and text might lead us in the wrong
direction, but as is clear from Jodi’s and Dmitry’s comments, writing is of
course a material practice with its own technological and publishing forms,
cognitive and affective patterns, temporal structures, and subjectifying powers.
With regard to the materialities of digital publishing, your description, Jodi,
of a ‘media storm’ emerging from the Occupy movement is very suggestive
of the way media flows can aggregate into a kind of quasi-autonomous entity,
taking on a life of its own that has agential effects as it draws participants up
into the event. In the past that might have been the function of a manifesto
or slogan, but with social media, as you suggest, the contributing parts to
this agential aggregate become many and various, including particular blogs,
still and moving image files, analytic frameworks, slogans or memes (‘We
are the 99%’), but

ly lose the book and the digital isn’t confined
to pixels on a screen.
WHATEVER BLOGGING
NT Turning to social media, I want to ask Jodi to comment more on the
technical structures of the blog. In Blog Theory you propose an intriguing
concept of ‘whatever blogging’ to describe the association of blogs with the
decline of symbolic efficiency, as expressions are severed from their content
and converted into quantitative values and graphic representations of
communication flow.14 The more we communicate, it seems, the more what is
communicated tends toward abstraction, and the evacuation of consequence
save for the perpetuation of communication. Can you describe the technical
features and affective qualities of this process, how the field of ‘whatever
blogging’ is constituted? And how might we oppose these tendencies? Can
we reaffirm writing as deliberation and meaning? Are there any ways to make
progressive use of the ‘whatever’ field?
JD The basic features of blogs include posts (which are time-stamped,
Materialities Of Independent Publishing 173

14. Jodi Dean, Blog
Theory: Feedback and
Capture in the Circuits
of Drive, Cambridge,
Polity Press, 2010.

permalinked, and archived), comments, and links. These features aren’t
necessarily separate insofar as posts have permalinks and can themselves
be comments; for example, that a specific blog has disabled its comment
featu

affect in Dockray, Pasquinelli, Smith & Waldorf 2010

at isn’t the state, or private
capital, or even cooperatives”3. At first gloss, the associative sector is
only a name for the remainder, the already outside; but, in the language of a
school, it is a constellation of relationships, affinities, new
subjectivities, and movements, flickering into existence through life and use,
An “engaged withdrawal” that simultaneously creates an exit and institutes in
the act of passing through. Which itself might bring us back to school, to the
Greek etymology of school, skhole, “a holding back”, a “keeping clear” of
space for reflective distance. On the one hand, perhaps this reflective space
simply allows theoretical knowledge to shape or affect performative action;
but on the other hand, the production of this “clearing” is not given,
certainly not now and certainly not by the institutions that claim to give it.
Reflective space is not the precondition for performative action. On the
contrary; performative action is the precondition for reflective space—or,
more appropriately, space and action must be coproduced.

Is the University even worth “saving”? We are right to respond with
indignation, or better, with an array of tactics—some procedural, some more
“direct”—against these incursions, which always seem to authorize themselves
by appeals to economic austerity, budget shortfalls, and tightened belts.
Perhaps wh

affect in USDC 2015

s.
Dkt.

No. 9,

Exs. B-D.)

No.

Elsevier includes copies of

two of its articles accessed via the Defendants'

Doda,

Dkt.

websites,

along

(Declaration of Paul F.

This showing demonstrates a

likelihood of success on Elsevier' s copyright infringement
claims.
Elsevier also shows a likelihood of success on its claim
under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act ("CFAA").
prohibits,

inter alia,

The CFAA

obtaining information from "any protected

computer" without authorization,

18 U.S. C. § 1030(a)(2)(C),

and

obtaining anything of value by accessing any protected computer
with intent to defraud.

Id.

§ (a) (4).

The definition of

"protected computer" includes one "which is used in or affecting
interstate or foreign commerce or communication,

including a

computer located outside the United States that

is used in a

manner that affects interstate or foreign commerce or
communication of the United States."
7

I .

§ (e) (2) (B);

Nexans

Wires S. A.
2006).

v.

Sa

Inc.

166 F.

App'x 559, 562 n. 5

(2d Cir.

Elsevier's ScienceDirect database is located on multiple

servers throughout the world and is accessed by educational
institutions and their students, and qualifies as a computer
used in interstate commerce, and therefore as a protected
computer under the CFAA.

See Woltermann Dec.

at 2-3. )

As

found above, Elsevier has shown that the Defendants' access to
ScienceDirect was unauthorized and accomplished via fraudulent
university credentials.

While the C fAA requires a civil

plaintiff to have suffered over $5,00

affect in Ludovico 2013

developers worked collectively on a
complex interface for searching and downloading from major independent online
e-book collections, turning them into a sort of temporary commons. Mars'
observation that, "when everyone is a librarian, the library is everywhere,"
explains the infinite and recursive de-centralization of personal digital
collections and the role of the digital in granting much wider access to
published content.

This access, however, emphasizes the intrinsic fragility of the digital - its
complete dependence on electricity and networks, on the integrity of storage
media and on updated hard and software. Among the few artists to have
conceptually explored this fragility as it affects books is David Guez, whose
work _Humanpédia_7 can be defined as an extravagant type of "time-based art".
The work is clearly inspired by Ray Bradbury's _Fahrenheit 451_ , in which a
small secret community conspires against a total ban on books by memorizing
entire tomes, preserving and orally transmitting their contents. Guez applies
this strategy to Wikipedia, calling for people to memorize a Wikipedia
article, thereby implying that our brains can store information more reliably
than computers.

So what, in the end, will be the role of old-fashioned libraries?
Paradoxically enough, they could become the best place to learn how to
digitize books or how to print out and bind digitized books

affect in Marczewska, Adema, McDonald & Trettien 2018

at lies betwixt
and between writing and reading, text and reader, and
between texts themselves. It is restless and unruly, its
dimensions under perpetual renegotiation. To begin here
requires that we acknowledge that criticism does not rest on
solid ground; it too is a restless and unruly set of practices
given to proliferation and digression. To begin here is to enter
into a set of generative traversals that forge fragments into
new relations that in turn push against the given limits of our
inherited architectures of knowledge. To begin here is to
relinquish the fantasy that a text or texts may ever be fully,
finally known, and reconceive of our work as a series of partial
engagements and affective encounters that participate in
texts’ constant remaking.

32

Frances McDonald & Whitney Trettien

References
Adema, Janneke. 2015. “Cutting Scholarship Together/Apart: Rethinking the Political
Economy of Scholarly Book Publishing.” In The Routledge Companion to Remix
Studies, ed. By Eduardo Navas, Owen Gallagher, and xtine burrough. London:
Routledge.
Barad, Karen. 2012. “Matter feels, converses, suffers, desires, yearns and remembers”:
Interview with Karen Barad. In New Materialism: Interviews and Cartographies, ed. by
Rick Dolphijn and Iris van der Tuin. Ann Arbor: Open Humanities Press.
Haraway, Donna. 1994. “A Game of Cat's Cradle: Science Studies, Feminist Theory, Cultur

affect in Mars & Medak 2019

form or are pay-walled, while the users in the developing economies use them to
find publications they don’t have access to in print to start with.
As for libraries, in the shift to the digital they were denied the right to provide
access that has now radically expanded (Sullivan, 2012), so they are losing their
central position in the dissemination and access to knowledge. The decades of
retrenchment in social security, unemployment support, social housing, arts and
education have made libraries, with their resources open to broad communities,
into a stand-in for failing welfare institutions (Mattern, 2014). But with the onset
of 2008 crisis, libraries have been subjected to brutal cuts, affecting their ability
to stay open, service their communities and in particular the marginalized
groups and children (Kean, 2017). Just as universities, libraries have thus seen
their capacity to address structural exclusions of marginalized groups and
provide support to those affected by precarity compromised.
Libraries thus find themselves struggling to provide legitimation for the support
they receive. So they re-invent and re-brand themselves as ‘third places’ of
socialization for the elderly and the youth (Engel-Johnson, 2017), spaces where
the unemployed can find assistance with their job applications and the socially
marginalized a public location with no economic pressures. All these functions,
however, are not something that public libraries didn’t do before, along with
what was their primary function – providing universal access to all written
knowledge, in which they are however nowadays – in the digital economy –
severely limited.
All that innovat

affect in Mattern 2014

rastructure can effectively
scaffold such a motley collection of social services?

Again, we need to look to the infrastructural ecology — the larger network of
public services and knowledge institutions of which each library is a part.
How might towns, cities and regions assess what their various public (and
private) institutions are uniquely qualified and sufficiently resourced to do,
and then deploy those resources most effectively? Should we regard the library
as the territory of the civic _mind_ and ask other social services to attend
to the civic _body_? The assignment of social responsibility isn’t so black
and white — nor are the boundaries between mind and body, cognition and affect
— but libraries do need to collaborate with other institutions to determine
how they leverage the resources of the infrastructural ecology to serve their
publics, with each institution and organization contributing what it’s best
equipped to contribute — and each operating with a clear sense of its mission
and obligation.

Libraries have a natural affinity with cultural institutions. Just this
spring, New York Mayor Bill de Blasio [appointed Tom
Finkelpearl](http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/07/arts/design/mayor-de-blasio-
names-tom-finkelpearl-of-the-queens-museum.html?_r=1) as the city’s new
Commissioner of Cultural Affairs. A former president of the Queens Museum,
Finkelpearl oversaw

affect in Mars & Medak 2017

ing “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
da

affect in Medak, Mars & WHW 2015

was always a project with certain
nuances and inconsistencies, but over-all it succeeded beyond almost anybody’s wildest dreams. Like
many dreams, it turned into a nightmare in the end,
the one from which we are now trying to awake.
The place to start is with what the situationists
called détournement. The idea was to abolish the
property form in art by taking all of past art and
culture as a commons from which to copy and correct. We see this at work in Guy Debord’s texts and
films. They do not quote from past works, as to do
so acknowledges their value and their ownership.
The elements of détournement are nothing special.
They are raw materials for constructing theories,
narratives, affects of a subjectivity no longer bound
by the property form.
Such a project was recuperated soon enough
back into the art world as “appropriation.” Richard
Prince is the dialectical negation of Guy Debord,

Metadata Punk

111

in that appropriation values both the original fragment and contributes not to a subjectivity outside of
property but rather makes a career as an art world
star for the appropriating artist. Of such dreams is
mediocrity made.
If there was a more promising continuation of
détournement it had little to do with the art world.
Détournement became a social movement in all but
name. Crucially, it involved an advance in tools,
from Napster to Bitorrent and beyond. It enabl

affect in Sollfrank 2018

artworks and original documents,
books and other text formats, videos, film, or sound and music. Unlike the
large shadow libraries introduced above, which aim to provide access to
hundreds of thousands, if not millions of mainly academic papers and books,
thus trying to fully cover the world of scholarly and academic works, the
smaller artist-run projects are of different nature. While UbuWeb’s founder,
for instance, also promotes a generally unrestricted access to cultural goods,
his approach with UbuWeb is to build a curated archive with copies of artworks
that he considers to be relevant for his very context.34 The selection is
based on personal assessment and preference and cared for affectionately.
Despite its comprehensiveness, it still can be considered a “personal website”
on which the artist shares things relevant to him. As such, he is in good
company with similar “artist-run shadow libraries”, which all provide a
technical infrastructure with which they share resources, while the resources
are of specific relevance to their providers.

Just like the large pirate libraries, these artistic archiving and library
practices challenge the notion of culture as private property and remind us
that it is not an unquestionable absolute. As Jonathan Lethem contends,
“[culture] rather is a social negotiation, tenuously forged, endlessly
revised, and imperfect in its every i

affect in Sollfrank & Dockray 2013

inly an evolution. I don’t think that progression is so linear, that it’s
pure loss, or anything like that.

[36:44]
Form and content

[36:49] For me what’s interesting is to try and examine how structure and
form, or structure and content, form and content – I mean, that’s kind of
another on-going question, how structure is not divorced from content.
Structure is not simply a container for the content, any more than the mind
and body are distinct entities – but that the structure that something takes
influences the shape that content takes, and also the ways that people might
approach that context, or use it in this kind of things. And likewise, the
content begins to affect the structure as well. [37:47] Why I’m interested in
structures is because they aren’t deterministic, they don’t determine what’s
going to happen. And all the projects that you mention are things that I think
of, let’s say, as platforms or something, in the sense that they have… they
involve a lot of people quite often, more than just me, and they also have…
the duration is not specified in advance, and what’s going to happen in them
is not specified in advance. [38:30] So they’re experimental in that way, and
they have that in common. And that is what’s interesting to me, is the
production of situations where we don’t know what’s going to happen. [38:51]
And some

affect in Stalder 2018

it) and the election of Donald Trump to the
office of president of the United States of America. The main events
driving the renewal of democracy took place on a metropolitan level,
namely the emergence of a network of "rebel cities," led by Barcelona
and Madrid. There, community-based social movements established their
candidates in the highest offices. These cities are now putting in place
practical examples that other cities could emulate and adapt. For the
concerns of this book, the most important concept put forward is that of
"technological sovereignty": to bring the technological infrastructure,
and its developmental potential, back under the control of those who are
using it and are affected by it; that is, the citizens of the
metropolis.

Over the last 18 months, the imbalances between the two trajectories
have become even more extreme because authoritarian tendencies and
surveillance capitalism have been strengthened more quickly than the
commons-oriented practices could establish themselves. But it does not
change the fact that there are fundamental alternatives embedded in the
digital condition. Despite structural transformations that affect how we
do things, there is no inevitability about what we want to do
individually and, even more importantly, collectively.

::: {.poem}
::: {.lineGroup}
Zurich/Vienna, July 2017[]{#Page_ix type="pagebreak" title="ix"}
:::
:::
:::

[Acknowledgments]{.chapterTitle} {#ack}

t and through these goods. The beginnings of this
development were captured by Émile Zola in his 1883 novel *The Ladies\'
Paradise*, which was set in the new world of a semi-fictitious
department store bearing that name. In its opening scene, the young
protagonist Denise Baudu and her brother Jean, both of whom have just
moved to Paris from a provincial town, encounter for the first time the
artfully arranged women\'s clothing -- exhibited with all sorts of
tricks involving lighting, mirrors, and mannequins -- in the window
displays of the store. The sensuality of the staged goods is so
overwhelming that both of them are not only struck dumb, but Jean even

blushes.

nternet, and
through the experiences of dealing with it, they have encroached upon
far greater portions of all societies.
:::
:::

::: {.section}
The Culturalization of the World {#c1-sec-0006}
--------------------------------

The number of participants in cultural processes, however, is not the
only thing that has increased. Parallel to that development, the field
of the cultural has expanded as well -- that is, those areas of life
that are not simply characterized by unalterable necessities, but rather
contain or generate competing options and thus require conscious
decisions.

The term "culturalization of the economy" refers to the central position
of knowledge-based, meaning-based, and affect-oriented processes in the
creation of value. With the emergence of consumption as the driving
force behind the production of goods and the concomitant necessity of
having not only to satisfy existing demands but also to create new ones,
the cultural and affective dimensions of the economy began to gain
significance. I have already discussed the beginnings of product
staging, advertising, and public relations. In addition to all of the
continuities that remain with us from that time, it is also possible to
point out a number of major changes that consumer society has undergone
since the late 1960s. These changes can be delineated by examining the
greater role played by design, which has been called the "core
discipline of the creative
economy."[^51^](#c1-note-0051){#c1-note-0051a}

As a field of its own, design originated alongside industrialization,
when, in collaborative processes, the activities of planning and
designing were separated from thos

alternatives. Media, according to one of the core ideas
of these new approaches, are less a sphere in which an external reality
is depicted; rather, they are themselves a constitutive element of
reality.
:::

::: {.section}
### Media as lifeworlds {#c1-sec-0011}

Another branch of new media theories, that of Marshall McLuhan and the
Toronto School of Communication,[^69^](#c1-note-0069){#c1-note-0069a}
[]{#Page_43 type="pagebreak" title="43"}reached a similar conclusion on
different grounds. In 1964, McLuhan aroused a great deal of attention
with his slogan "the medium is the message." He maintained that every
medium of communication, by means of its media-specific characteristics,
directly affected the consciousness, self-perception, and worldview of
every individual.[^70^](#c1-note-0070){#c1-note-0070a} This, he
believed, happens independently of and in addition to whatever specific
message a medium might be conveying. From this perspective, reality does
not exist outside of media, given that media codetermine our personal
relation to and behavior in the world. For McLuhan and the Toronto
School, media were thus not channels for transporting content but rather
the all-encompassing environments -- galaxies -- in which we live.

Such ideas were circulating much earlier and were intensively developed
by artists, many of whom were beginning to experiment with new
electronic media. An im

le yet again, not least through the
ongoing development of improved software. Now, many stages of production
that had previously required professional or semi-professional expertise
and equipment could also be carried out by engaged laymen. As a
consequence, the focus of interest broadened to include not only the
development of alternative production groups but also the possibility of
a flexible means of rapid intervention in existing structures. Media --
both television and the internet -- were understood as environments in
which one could act without directly representing a reality outside of
the media. Television was analyzed down to its own legalities, which
could then be manipulated to affect things beyond the media.
Increasingly, culture jamming and the campaigns of so-called
communication guerrillas were blurring the difference between media and
political activity.[^77[]{#Page_47 type="pagebreak"
title="47"}^](#c1-note-0077){#c1-note-0077a}

This difference was dissolved entirely by a new generation of
politically motivated artists, activists, and hackers, who transferred
the tactics of civil disobedience -- blockading a building with a
sit-in, for instance -- to the
internet.[^78^](#c1-note-0078){#c1-note-0078a} When, in 1994, the
Zapatista Army of National Liberation rose up in the south of Mexico,
several media projects were created to support its mostly peaceful
opposition

ciety, on the contrary, is that it frees the
individual from such multifarious relationships. Society, according to
Tönnies, separates its members from one another. Although they
coordinate their activity with others, they do so in order to pursue
partial, short-term, and personal goals. Not only are people separated,
but so too are different areas of life. In a market-oriented society,
for instance, the economy is conceptualized as an independent sphere. It
can therefore break away from social connections to be organized simply
by limited formal or legal obligations between actors who, beyond these
obligations, have nothing else to do with one another. Costs or benefits
that inadvertently affect people who are uninvolved in a given market
transaction are referred to by economists as "externalities," and market
participants do not need to care about these because they are strictly
pursuing their own private interests. One of the consequences of this
form of social relationship is a heightened social dynamic, for now it
is possible to introduce changes into one area of life without
considering its effects on other areas. In the end, the dissolution of
mutual obligations, increased uncertainty, and the reduction of many
social connections go hand in hand with what Marx and Engels referred to
in *The Communist Manifesto* as "unfeeling hard cash."

From this perspective, the historical d

attention of its members toward one another. Through
the common production of culture, it also structures how the members
perceive the world and how they are able to design themselves and their
potential actions in it. It is thus a co­operative mechanism of
filtering, interpretation, and constitution. Through the everyday
referential work of its members, the community selects a manageable
amount of information from the excess of potentially available
information and brings it into a meaningful context, whereby it
validates the selection itself and orients the activity of each of its
members.

The new communal formations consist of self-referential worlds whose
constructive common practice affects the foundations of social activity
itself -- the constitution of space and time. How? The spatio-temporal
horizon of digital communication is a global (that is, placeless) and
ongoing present. The technical vision of digital communication is always
the here and now. With the instant transmission of information,
everything that is not "here" is inaccessible and everything that is not
"now" has disappeared. Powerful infrastructure has been built to achieve
these effects: data centers, intercontinental networks of cables,
satellites, high-performance nodes, and much more. Through globalized
high-frequency trading, actors in the financial markets have realized
this []{#Page_90 type="pagebreak"

of labour can be applied with equal
success to mental operations, and that it ensures, by its adoption, the
same economy of time."

[83](#c2-note-0083a){#c2-note-0083}  This structure, which is known as
"Von Neumann architecture," continues to form the basis of almost all
computers.

[84](#c2-note-0084a){#c2-note-0084}  "Gordon Moore Says Aloha to
Moore\'s Law," *The Inquirer* (April 13, 2005), online.[]{#Page_192
type="pagebreak" title="192"}

[85](#c2-note-0085a){#c2-note-0085}  Miriam Meckel, *Next: Erinnerungen
an eine Zukunft ohne uns* (Reinbeck bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 2011). One
could also say that this anxiety has been caused by the fact that the
automation of labor has begun to affect middle-class jobs as well.

[86](#c2-note-0086a){#c2-note-0086}  Steven Levy, "Can an Algorithm
Write a Better News Story than a Human Reporter?" *Wired* (April 24,
2012), online.

[87](#c2-note-0087a){#c2-note-0087}  Alexander Pschera, *Animal
Internet: Nature and the Digital Revolution*, trans. Elisabeth Laufer
(New York: New Vessel Press, 2016).

[88](#c2-note-0088a){#c2-note-0088}  The American intelligence services
are not unique in this regard. *Spiegel* has reported that, in Russia,
entire "bot armies" have been mobilized for the "propaganda battle."
Benjamin Bidder, "Nemzow-Mord: Die Propaganda der russischen Hardliner,"
*Spiegel Online* (February 28, 2015), online.

[89](#c2-n

xtreme cases, for instance when a profile is suddenly
deleted or a group is removed. This can happen on account of a rule
whose existence does not necessarily have to be public or
transparent,[^36^](#c3-note-0036){#c3-note-0036a} or because of an
external intervention that will only be communicated if it is in the
providers\' interest to do so. Such cases make it clear that, at any
time, service providers can take away the possibilities for action that
they offer. This results in a paradoxical experience on the part of
users: the very environments that open up new opportunities for them in
their personal lives prove to be entirely beyond influence when it comes
to fundamental decisions that affect everyone. And, as the majority of
people gradually lose the ability to co-determine how the "big
questions" are answered, a very []{#Page_142 type="pagebreak"
title="142"}small number of actors is becoming stronger than ever. This
paradox of new opportunities for action and simultaneous powerlessness
has been reflected in public debate, where there has also been much
(one-sided) talk about empowerment and the loss of
control.[^37^](#c3-note-0037){#c3-note-0037a} It would be better to
discuss a shift in power that has benefited the elite at the expense of
the vast majority of people.
:::

::: {.section}
### Networks as monopolies {#c3-sec-0007}

Whereas the dominance of output legitimation is

zed" is one reason why there has yet to be widespread public
protest against comprehensive surveillance programs. We have been warned
of the establishment of a "police state in reserve," which can be
deployed at any time, but these warnings seem to have fallen on deaf
ears.[^49^](#c3-note-0049){#c3-note-0049a}
:::

::: {.section}
### The normalization of post-democracy {#c3-sec-0009}

At best, it seems as though the reflex of many people is to respond to
even fundamental political issues by considering only what might be
useful or pleasant for themselves in the short term. Apparently, many
people consider it normal to []{#Page_146 type="pagebreak"
title="146"}be excluded from decisions that affect broad and significant
areas of their life. The post-democracy of social mass media, which has
deeply permeated the constitution of everyday life and the constitution
of subjects, is underpinned by the ever advancing post-democracy of
politics. It changes the expectations that citizens have for democratic
institutions, and it makes their increasing erosion seem expected and
normal to broad strata of society. The violation of fundamental and
constitutional civil rights, such as those concerning the protection of
data, is increasingly regarded as unavoidable and -- from the pragmatic
perspective of the individual -- not so bad. This has of course
benefited political decision-makers, who have sh

operations are not transparent
because they are shielded from the outside world and thus from
democratic control.[^56^](#c3-note-0056){#c3-note-0056a} This
ever-expanding "post-democracy" is not simply liberal democracy with a
few problems that can be eliminated through well-intentioned reforms.
Rather, a new social system has emerged in which allegedly relaxed
control over social activity is compensated for by a heightened level of
control over the data and structural conditions pertaining to the
activity itself. In this system, both the virtual and the physical world
are altered to achieve particular goals -- goals determined by just a
few powerful actors -- without the inclusion of those affected by these
changes and often without them being able to notice the changes at all.
Whoever refuses to share his or her data freely comes to look suspicious
and, regardless of the motivations behind this anonymity, might even be
regarded as a potential enemy. In July 2014, for instance, the following
remarks were included in Facebook\'s terms of use: "On Facebook people
connect using their real names and identities. \[...\] Claiming to be
another person \[...\] or creating multiple accounts undermines
community []{#Page_148 type="pagebreak" title="148"}and violates
Facebook\'s terms."[^57^](#c3-note-0057){#c3-note-0057a} For the police
and the intelligence agencies in particular, all activiti

affect in Thylstrup 2019

a political cultural
memory paradigm that is arguably even more complex—or at least appears more
messy to us now—than that of analog institutions, whose politics we have had
time to get used to. In order to grasp the political stakes of mass
digitization, therefore, we need to approach mass digitization projects not as
a continuation of the existing politics of cultural memory, or as purely
technical endeavors, but rather as emerging sociopolitical and sociotechnical
phenomena that introduce new forms of cultural memory politics.

## Framing, Mapping, and Diagnosing Mass Digitization

Interrogating the phenomenon of mass digitization, this book asks the question
of how mass digitization affects the politics of cultural memory institutions.
As a matter of practice, something is clearly changing in the conversion of
bounded—and scarce—historical material into ubiquitous ephemeral data. In
addition to the technical aspects of digitization, mass digitization is also
changing the political territory of cultural memory objects. Global commercial
platforms are increasingly administering and operating their scanning
activities in favor of the digital content they reap from the national “data
tombs” of museums and libraries and the feedback loops these generate. This
integration of commercial platforms into the otherwise primarily public
institutional set-up of cultural memory has

ith the aim of showing the
diversity of mass digitization, but also how it, as a phenomenon, ultimately
places the user in the dilemma of digital capitalism with its ethos of access,
speed, and participation (in varying degrees). The choices also have their
limitations, however. In their Western bias, which is partly rooted in this
author’s lack of language skills (specifically in Russian and Chinese), for
instance, they fail to capture the breadth and particularities of the
infrapolitics of mass digitization in other parts of the world. Much more
research is needed in this area.

The final part of the book, “diagnosing,” zooms in on the pathologies of mass
digitization in relation to affective questions of desire and uncertainty.
This part argues that instead of approaching mass digitization projects as
rationalized and instrumental projects, we should rather acknowledge them as
ambivalent spatio-temporal projects of desire and uncertainty. Indeed, as the
third part concludes, it is exactly uncertainty and desire that organizes the
new spatio-temporal infrastructures of cultural memory institutions, where
notions such as serendipity and the infrapolitics of platforms have taken
precedence over accuracy and sovereign institutional politics. The third part
thus calls into question arguments that imagine mass digitization as
instrumentalized projects that either undermine or produce values of
serendipity, as well as overarching narratives of how mass digitization
produces uncomplicated forms of individualized empowerment and freedom.
Instead, the chapter draws attention to the new cultural logics of platforms
that affect the cultural politics of mass digitization projects.

Crucially, then, this book seeks neither to condemn nor celebrate mass
digitization, but rather to unpack the phenomenon and anchor it in its
contemporary political reality. It offers a story of the ways in which mass
digitization produces new cultural memory institutions online that may be
entwined in the cultural politics of their analog origins, but also raises new
political questions to the collections.

## Setting the Stage: Assembling the Motley Crew of Mass Digitization

The dream and practice of mass digitizing cultural works has been around for
decades and, as this section attests, the projects vary significantly in
shape, size,

n of
railways.74 Over the following decades, it primarily designated fixed
installations designed to facilitate and foster mobility. It did not enter
English vocabulary until 1927, and as late as 1951, the word was still
described by English sources as “new” (OED).75 When NATO adopted the term in
the 1950s, it gained a military tinge. Since then, “infrastructure” has
proliferated into ever more contexts and disciplines, becoming a “plastic
word”76 often used to signify any vital and widely shared human-constructed
resource.77

What makes infrastructures central for understanding the politics of mass
digitization? Primarily, they are crucial to understanding how industrialism
has affected the ways in which we organize and engage with knowledge, but the
politics of infrastructures are also becoming increasingly significant in the
late-sovereign, late-capitalist landscape.

The infrastructures of mass digitization mediate, combine, connect, and
converge upon different institutions, social networks, and devices, augmenting
the actors that take part in them with new agential possibilities by expanding
the radius of their action, strengthening and prolonging the reach of their
performance, and setting them free for other activities through their
accelerating effects, time often reinvested in other infrastructures, such as,
for instance, social media activities. The infrastructur

“glocal”
configurations with digital networks at their cores. The increasing
significance of these glocal configurations has not only cultural but also
democratic consequences, since they often leave users powerless when it comes
to influencing their cores.112 This more fundamental problematic also pertains
to mass digitization, a phenomenon that operates in an environment that
constructs and encourages less Habermasian public spheres than “relations of
sociability,” from which “aggregate outcomes emerge not from an act of
collective decision-making, but through the accumulation of decentralized,
individual decisions that, taken together, nonetheless conduce to a
circumstance that affects the entire group.”113 For example, despite the
flexibility Google Books allows us in terms of search and correlation, we have
very little sway over its construction, even though we arguably influence its
dynamics. The limitations of our influence on the cores of mass digitization
assemblages have implications not only for how we conceive of institutional
power, but also for our own power within these matrixes.

## Notes

1. Borghi 2012, 420. 2. Latour 2008. 3. For more on this, see Hicks 2018;
Abbate 2012; Ensmenger 2012. In the case of libraries, (white) women still
make out the majority of the workforce, but there is a disproportionate amount
of men in senior positions, in compari

of the book” to the
triumphalist mythologizing of liquid virtual books that were shedding their
analog ties like butterflies shedding their cocoons.

The most widely publicized mass digitization project to date, Google Books,
precipitated the entire emotional spectrum that could arise from these textual
transversals: from fears that control over culture was slipping from authors
and publishers into the hands of large tech companies, to hopeful ideas about
the democratizing potential of bringing knowledge that was once locked up in
dusty tomes at places like Harvard and Stanford, and to a utopian
mythologizing of the transcendent potential of mass digitization. Moreover,
Google Books also affected legal and professional transformations of the
infrastructural set-up of the book, creating new precedents and a new
professional ethos. The cultural, legal, and political significance of Google
Books, whether positive or negative, not only emphasizes its fundamental role
in shaping current knowledge landscapes, it also allows us to see Google Books
as a prism that reflects more general political tendencies toward
globalization, privatization, and digitization, such as modulations in
institutional infrastructures, legal landscapes, and aesthetic and political
conventions. But how did the unlikely marriage between a tech company and
cultural memory institutions even come about? Who drove it

in the occupational history of
Google Books, the craftspeople of the printed book were being challenged by a
new breed of artificers who were excelling not so much in how to print, which
book sellers to negotiate with, or how to sell books to people, but rather in
the medium-specific tactical skills of the digital, such as building software
and devising search technologies, skills they were leveraging to their own
gain to create new “monopolies of knowledge” in the process.

As previously mentioned, the concerns expressed by publishers and authors in
regards to remuneration was accompanied by a more abstract sense of a loss of
control over their works and how this loss of control would affect the
copyrights. These concerns did not arise out of thin air, but were part of a
more general discourse on digital information as something that _cannot_ be
secured and controlled in the same way as analog commodities can. Indeed, it
seemed that authors and publishers were part of a world entirely different
from Google Books: while publishers and authors were still living in and
defending a “regime of scarcity,” 23 Google Books, by contrast, was busy
building a “realm of plenitude and infinite replenishment.” As such, the clash
between the traditional infrastructures of the analog book and the new
infrastructures of Google Books was symptomatic of the underlying radical
reorganizatio

oles of
giver and receiver, and the first giver and second giver/returner, were
difficult to decode. Indeed, the binding nature of the relationship between
Google Books and cultural memory institutions proved to be much more complex
than the simple physical exchange of books and digital files. As the next
section outlines, this complex system of cultural production was held together
by contractual arrangement—central joints, as it were, connecting data and
works, public and private, local and global, in increasingly complex ways. For
Google Books, these contractual relations appear as the connective tissues
that make these assemblages possible, and which are therefore fundamental to
their affective dimensions.

## The Infrapolitics of Contract

In common parlance a contract is a legal tool that formalizes a “mutual
agreement between two or more parties that something shall be done or forborne
by one or both,” often enforceable by law.39 Contractual systems emerged with
the medieval merchant regime, and later evolved with classical liberalism into
an ideological revolt against paternalist systems as nothing less than
freedom, a legal construct that could destroy the sentimental bonds of
personal dependence.40 As the classic liberal social scientist William Graham
Sumner argued, “[c]ontract … is rational … realistic, cold, and matter-of-
fact.” The rational nature of contracts also affected their temporality, since
a contract endures only “so long as the reason for it endures,” and their
spatiality, relegating any form of sentiment from the public sphere to “the
sphere of private and personal relations.”41

Sentiments prevailed, however, as the contracts tying together Google and
cultural memory institutions emerged. Indeed, public and professional
evaluations of the agreements often took an affective, even sexualized, form.
The economist Paul Courant situated libraries “in bed with Google”42; library
consultant and media experts Jeff Ubois and Peter B. Kaufman recounted _how_
they got in bed with Google—“[w]e were approached singly, charmed in
confidence, the stranger was beguiling, and we embraced” 43; communication
scholar Evelyn Bottando announced that “libraries not only got in bed with
Google. They got married”44; and librarian Jessamyn West finally pondered on
the relationship ruins, “[s]till not sure, after all that, how we got this all
so wrong. Didn’t we both want the same thing? Maybe it really wasn’t us, it
was them. Most days it’s hard to remember wha

nerated by
feedback systems, Google’s core nevertheless remains lodged on American soil.
This is underlined by the fact that Google Books still effectively belongs to
US jurisdiction.69 Google Books is thus on the one hand a globalized company
in terms of both content and institutional framework; yet it also remains an
_American_ multinational corporation, constrained by US regulation and social
standards, and ultimately reinforcing the capacities of the American state.
While Google Books operates as a networked glocal project with universal
aspirations, then, it also remains fenced in by its legal and cultural
apparatuses.

In sum, just as a country’s regulatory and political apparatus affects the
politics of its cultural memory institutions in the analog world, so is the
politics of Google Books co-determined by the operations of Google. Thus,
curatorial choices are made not only on the basis of content, but also of the
location of server parks, existing company units, lobbying efforts, public
policy concerns, and so on. And the institutional identity of Google Books is
profoundly late-sovereign in this regard: on one hand it thrives on and
operates with horizontal network formations; on the other, it still takes into
account and has to operate with, and around, sovereign epistemologies and
political apparatuses. These vertical and horizontal lines ultimately rewire
the politics

al.
refer to here is of course the claims of Erez Aiden and Jean-Baptiste Michel
among others, who promote “culturomics,” that is, the use of huge amounts of
digital information—in this case the corpus of Google Books—to track changes
in language, culture, and history. See Aiden and Michel 2013; and Michel et
al. 2011. 66. Neubert 2008; and Weiss and James 2012, 1–3. 67. I am indebted
to Gayatri Spivak here, who makes this argument about New York in the context
of globalization; see Spivak 2000. 68. In this respect Google mirrors the
glocalization strategies of media companies in general; see Thussu 2007, 19.
69. Although the decisions of foreign legislation of course also affect the
workings of Google, as is clear from the growing body of European regulatory
casework on Google such as the right to be forgotten, competition law, tax,
etc.

# 3
Sovereign Soul Searching: The Politics of Europeana

## Introduction

In 2008, the European Commission launched the European mass digitization
project, Europeana, to great fanfare. Although the EC’s official
communications framed the project as a logical outcome of years of work on
converging European digital library infrastructures, the project was received
in the press as a European counterresponse to Google Books.1 The popular media
framings of Europeana were focused in particular on two narratives: that
Europeana was a

se infrastructures take? In a sense, the complex
infrastructural set-up of Europeana as it played out in the EU’s framework
ended up extending along two different axes: a vertical axis of national and
supranational sovereignty, where the tectonic territorial plates of nation-
states and continents move relative to each other by converging, diverging,
and transforming; and a horizontal axis of deterritorializing flows that
stream within, between, and throughout sovereign territories consisting both
of capital interests (in the form of transnational lobby organizations working
to protect, promote, and advance the interests of multinational companies or
nongovernmental organizations) and the affective relations of users.

## Harmonizing Europe: From Canon to Copyright

Even if the EU is less concerned with upholding the regulatory boundaries of
the nation-state in mass digitization, bordering effects are still found in
mass digitized collections—this time in the form of copyright regulation. As
in the case of Google Books, mass digitization also raised questions in Europe
about the future role of copyright in the digital sphere. On the one hand,
cultural industries were concerned about the implications of mass digitization
for their production and copyrights32; on the other hand, educational
institutions and digital industries were interested in “unlocking” the
cognitive and cult

he transportation from the Europeana platform to Google
happens smoothly, without any friction or notice, and if one didn’t look at
the change in URL, one would hardly notice the change at all since the
interface appears almost similar. Yet, what are the implications of this
networked nature? An obvious consequence is that Europeana is structurally
dependent on the social media and search engine companies. According to one
Europeana report, Google is the biggest source of traffic to the Europeana
portal, accounting for more than 50 percent of visits. Any changes in Google’s
algorithm and ranking index therefore significantly impact traffic patterns on
the Europeana portal, which in turn affects the number of Europeana pages
indexed by Google, which then directly impacts on the number of overall visits
to the Europeana portal.86 The same holds true for Facebook, Pinterest,
Google+, etc.

Held together, the feedback mechanisms, the statistical variance, and the
networked infrastructures of Europeana show just how difficult it is to
collect Europe in the digital sphere. This is not to say that territorial
sentiments don’t have power, however—far from it. Within the digital sphere we
are already seeing territorial statements circulated in Europe on both
national and supranational scales, with potentially far-reaching implications
on both. Yet, there is little to suggest that the t

erres himself exclaims “I no longer really
know how to say it: the parasite parasites the parasites.”1 Serres thus uses
his parasitic model to make a claim about the nature of cybernetic
technologies and the flow of information, arguing that “cybernetics gets more
and more complicated, makes a chain, then a network. Yet it is founded on the
theft of information, quite a simple thing.”2 The logic of the parasite,
Serres argues, is the logic of the interrupter, the “excluded third” or
“uninvited guest” who intercepts and confuses relations in a process of theft
that has a value both of destruction and a value of construction. The parasite
is thus a generative force, inventing, affecting, and transforming relations.
Hence, parasitism refers not only to an act of interference but also to an
interruption that “invents something new.”3

Michel Serres’s then-radical philosophy of the parasite is today echoed by a
broader recognition of the parasite as not only a dangerous entity, but also a
necessary mediator. Indeed, as Jeanette Samyn notes, we are today witnessing a
“pro-parasitic” movement in science in which “scientists have begun to
consider parasites and other pathogens not simply as problems but as integral
components of ecosystems.”4 In this new view, “… the parasite takes from its
host without ever taking its place; it creates new room, feeding off

rategies often use these three tropes to elicit images of pleasure
and playfulness in mass digitization projects; yet, as the following sections
show, they also raise significant questions of control and agency, not least
against the backdrop of ever-increasing scales of information production.

## Too Much—Never Enough

The question of scale in mass digitization is often posed as a rational quest
for knowledge accumulation and interoperability. Yet this section argues that
digitized collections are more than just rational projects; they strike deep
affective cords of desire, domination, and anxiety. As Couze Venn reminds us,
collections harbor an intimate connection between cognition and affective
economy. In this connection, the rationalized drive to collect is often
accompanied by a slippage, from a rationalized urge to a pathological drive
ultimately associated with desire, power, domination, anxiety, nostalgia,
excess, and—sometimes even—compulsion and repetition.15 The practice of
collecting objects thus not only signals a rational need but often also
springs from desire, and as psychoanalysis has taught us, a sense of lack is
the reflection of desire. As Slavoj Zizek puts it, “desire’s _raison d’être_
is not to realize its goal, to find full satisfaction, but to reproduce itself
as desire.” 16 Therefore, no matter how much we collect, the collector will
rarely ex

e flaneur” and locating the central tenets of computer culture with the
“intoxication of the flânerie. Screens as streets and homes … of the crowd?”28
Later, artist Steven Goldate provided a simple equation between online and
offline spaces, noting among other things that “What the city and the street
was to the flaneur, the Internet and the Superhighway have become to the
Cyberflaneur.”29

Scholars, too, explored the potentials and limits of thinking about the user
of the Internet in flaneurian terms. Thus, Mike Featherstone drew parallels
between the nineteenth-century flaneur and the virtual flaneur, exploring the
similarities and differences between navigational strategies, affects, and
agencies in the early urban metropolis and the emergent digital realm of the
1990s.30

Although the discourse on the digital flaneur was most prevalent in the 1990s,
it still lingers on in contemporary writings about digitized cultural heritage
collections and their design. A much-cited article by computer scientists
Marian Dörk, Sheelagh Carpendale, and Carey Williamson, for instance, notes
the striking similarity between the “growing cities of the 19th century and
today’s information spaces” and the relationship between “the individual and
the whole.”31 Dörk, Carpendale, and Williamson use the figure of the flaneur
to emphasize the importance of supporting not only utilit

er. As Penelope Doob reminds
us, the center of the labyrinth historically played a central moral and
epistemological role in the labyrinthine topos, as the site that held the
epiphanous key to unravel whatever evils or secrets the labyrinth contained.
With no center, there is no key, no epiphany.61 From this perspective, then,
it is not only a job that is lost. It is also the meaning of knowledge
itself.62

What, then, can we take from these labyrinthine wanderings as we pursue a
greater understanding of the infrapolitics of mass digitization? Certainly, as
this section shows, the politics of mass digitization is entangled in
spatialized imaginaries that have a long and complex cultural and affective
trajectory interlinked with ontological and epistemological questions about
the very nature of knowledge. Cladding the walls of these trajectories are, of
course, the ever-present political questions of authority and territory, but
also deeper cultural and affective questions about the nature and meaning of
knowledge as it bandies about in our cultural imaginaries, between discoveries
and dead-ends, between freedom and control.

As the next section will show, one concept has in particular come to
encapsulate these concerns: the notion of serendipity. While the notion of
serendipity has a long history, it has gained new relevance with mass
digitization, where it is used to express the realm of possibilities opened up
by the new digital infrastructures of knowledge production. As such, it has
come to play a role, not only as a playful cultural imaginary, but also as an
architectural ideal in software developments for mass digitization. In the
following

y’s
obsession with networks, process, and connectivity.88 Think only of the
increasing importance of Google and Facebook to mass digitization projects:
most of these projects have a Facebook page on which they showcase their
material, just as they take pains to make themselves “algorithmically
recognizable”89 to Google and other search engines in the hope of reaching an
audience beyond the echo chamber of archives and to distribute their archival
material on leisurely tidbit platforms such as Pinterest and Twitter.90 If
serendipity is increasingly thought of as a platform problem, the final
question we might pose is what kind of infrapolitics this platform economy
generates and how it affects mass digitization projects.

## The Infrapolitics of Platform Power

As the previous sections show, mass digitization projects rely upon spatial
metaphors to convey ideas about, and ideals of, cultural memory
infrastructures, their knowledge production, and their serendipitous
potential. Thus, for mass digitization projects, the ideal scenario is that
the labyrinthine errings of the user result in serendipitous finds that in
turn bring about new forms of cultural value. From the point of the user,
however, being caught up in the labyrinth might just as easily give rise to an
experience of being confronted with a sense of lack of oversight and
alienation in the alleyways of commodified infra

estion seems relevant not least in cases where institutions consider
digitization as a form of preservation that allows them to discard analog
artifacts once digitized. In digital form, we further have to contend with a
new temporal horizon of cultural memory itself, based not on only on
remembrance but on anticipation in the manner of “If you liked this, you might
also like. ….” Thus, while cultural memory objects link to objects of the
past, mass digitized cultural memory also gives rise to new methods of
prediction and preemption, for instance in the form of personalization. In
this anticipatory regime, cultural memory becomes subject to perpetual
calculatory activities, processing affects, and activities in terms of
likelihoods and probabilistic outcomes.

Thus, cultural memory has today become embedded in new glocalized
infrastructures. On the one hand, these infrastructures present novel
opportunities. Cultural optimists have suggested that mass digitization has
the potential to give rise to new cosmopolitan public spheres tethered from
the straitjackets of national territorializing forces. On the other hand,
critics argue that there is little evidence that cosmopolitan dynamics are in
fact at work. Instead, new colonial and neoliberal platforms arise from a
complex infrastructural apparatus of private and public institutions and
become shaped by political, financial, and

affect in Weinmayr 2019

d 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 commoditi

affect in WHW 2016

protests in Southern Europe against austerity
measures – and the failure of these movements to bring about structural
changes. As we witnessed in the dramatic events that unfolded through the
spring and summer of 2015, even in Greece, where Syriza was brought to
power, the people’s will behind newly elected governments proved insufficient to change the course of austerity politics in Europe. Simultaneously,
a series of conditional gains and effective defeats gave rise to the alarming
ascent of radical right-wing populism, against which the left has failed to
provide any real vision or driving force.
Both the practice of political articulation and the political practices of
art have been affected by the hollowing and disabling of democracy related
to the ascendant hegemony of the neoliberal rationale that shapes every
domain of our lives in accordance with a specific image of economics,1
as well as the problematic “embrace of localism and autonomy by much
of the left as the pure strategy”2 and the left’s inability to destabilize the
dominant world-view and reclaim the future.3 Consequently, art practices
increasingly venture into novel modes of operation that seek to “expand
our collective imagination beyond what capitalism allows”.4 They not only
point to the problems but address them head on. By negotiating art’s autonomy and impact on the social, and by conceptualizi

is this speculative futural moment that definitively separates the concept
of history from memory.”20 For Public Library, the future that participates
in the construction of history does not yet exist, but it is defined as more
than just a project against the present as reflected in the exclusionary, parochially nationalistic, revisionist and increasingly fascist discursive practices of the Croatian political elites. Rather, the future comes into being as
an active and collective construction based on the emancipatory aspects of
historical experiences as future possibilities.
Although defined as an action, the project is not exultantly enthusiastic
about collectivity or the immediacy and affective affinities of its participants, but rather it transcends its local and transient character by taking
up the broader counter-hegemonic struggle for the mutual management
of joint resources. Its endeavour is not limited to the realm of the political
and ideological but is rooted in the repurposing of technological potentials
from the restrictive capitalist game and the reutilization of the existing infrastructure to build a qualitatively different one. While the culture industry adapts itself to the limited success of measures that are geared toward
preventing the free circulation of information by creating new strategies
for pushing information into a form of property and expropriating val

ernet hotspot that routes internet
traffic over TOR, a volunteer-run global network of servers, relays, and services, which provides anonymous and unsurveilled communication. The
importance of the privacy of the anonymized information that Autonomy
Cube enables and protects is that it prevents so-called traffic analysis – the
tracking, analysis, and theft of metadata for the purpose of anticipating
people’s behaviour and relationships. In the hands of the surveillance
state this data becomes not only a means of steering our tastes, modes of
consumption, and behaviours for the sake of making profit but also, and
more crucially, an effective method and weapon of political control that
can affect political organizing in often still-unforeseeable ways that offer
few reasons for optimism. Visually, Autonomy Cube references minimalist
sculpture (fig. 5) (specifically, Hans Haacke’s seminal piece Condensation
Cube, 1963–1965), but its main creative drive lies in the affirmative salvaging of technologies, infrastructures, and networks that form both the leading organizing principle and the pervasive condition of complex societies,
with the aim of supporting the potentially liberated accumulation of collective knowledge and action. Aesthetic and art-historical references serve
as camouflage or tools for a strategic infiltration that enables expansion of
the movement’s field of influe

operation but as conflicting fields that create further information and experiences. By doing so, they question the traditional edifice of art in a way
that supports Peter Osborne’s claim that art is defined not by its aesthetic
or medium-based status, but by its poetics: “Postconceptual art articulates a post-aesthetic poetics.”22 This means going beyond criticality and
bringing into the world something defined not by its opposition to the real,
but by its creation of the fiction of a shared present, which, for Osborne,
is what makes art truly contemporary. And if projects like these become a
kind of political trophy for art institutions, the side the institutions choose
nevertheless affects the common sense of our future.

22

Osborne, Anywhere or Not at All, p. 33.

306

What, How & for Whom / WHW

“There is something political in the city air”

307



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