territorial in Thylstrup 2019
l of
the universal library, and in particular the mythic library of Alexandria.30
As with other Google endeavors, it seemed that Page was intent on realizing a
utopian ideal that scholars (and others) had long dreamed of: a library
containing everything ever written. It would be realized, however, not with
traditional human-centered means drawn from the world of libraries, but rather
with an AI approach. Google Books would exceed human constraints, taking the
seemingly impossible vision of digitizing all the books in the world as a
starting point for constructing an omniscient Artificial Intelligence that
would know the entire human symbol system and allow flexible and intuitive
recollection. These constraints were physical (how to digitize and organize
all this knowledge in physical form); legal (how to do it in a way that
suspends existing regulation); and political (how to transgress territorial
systems). The invocation of the notion of the universal library was not a
neutral action. Rather, the image of Google Books as a library worked as a
symbolic form in a cultural scheme that situated Google as a utopian, and even
ethical, idealist project. Google Books seemingly existed by virtue of
Goethe’s famous maxim that “To live in the ideal world is to treat the
impossible as if it were possible.”31 At the time, the industry magazine
_Bookseller_ wrote in response to Google’s digitization plans: “The prospect
is both thrilling and frightening for the book industry, raising a host of
technical and theoretical issues.” 32 And indeed, while some reacted with
enthusiasm and relief to the prospect of an organization being willing to
suffer the cost of mass digitization, others expressed economic and ethical
concerns. The Authors Guild, a New York–based association, promptly filed a
copyright infringement suit against Google. And librarians were forced to
revisit core ethical principles such as privacy and public access.
The controversies of Google Books initially played out only in US territory.
However, another set of concerns of a more territorial and political nature
soon came to light. The French President at the time, Jacques Chirac, called
France to cultural-political arms, urging his culture minister, Renaud
Donnedieu de Vabres, and Jean-Noël Jeanneney, then-head of France’s
Bibliothèque nationale, to do the same with French texts as Google planned to
do with their partner libraries, but by means of a French search engine.33
Jeanneney initially framed this French cultural-political endeavor as a
European “contre-attaque” against Google Books, which, according to Jeanneney,
could pose “une domination écrasante de l'Amérique dans la définition de
l'idée que les prochaines générations se feront du monde.” (“a crushing
American domination of the formation of future generations’ ideas about the
world”)34 Other French officials insisted that the French digitization project
should be seen not primarily as a c
d: who would
determine the archival limits, the relations between the secret and the non-
secret or the private and the public, and whether these might involve property
or access rights, publication or reproduction rights, classification, and
putting into order? France soon managed to rally other EU countries (Spain,
Poland, Hungary, Italy, and Germany) to back its recommendation to the
European Commission (EC) to construct a European alternative to Google’s
search engine and archive and to set this out in writing. Occasioned by the
French recommendation, the EC promptly adopted the idea of Europeana—the name
of the proposed alternative—as a “flagship project” for the budding EU
cultural policy.38 Soon after, in 2008, the EC launched Europeana, giving
access to some 4.5 million digital objects from more than 1,000 institutions.
Europeana’s Europeanizing discourse presents a territorializing approach to
mass digitization that stands in contrast to the more universalizing tone of
Mundaneum, Gutenberg, Google Books, and the Universal Digital Library. As
such, it ties in with our final examples, namely the sovereign mass
digitization projects that have in fact always been one of the primary drivers
in mass digitization efforts. To this day, the map of mass digitization is
populated with sovereign mass digitization efforts from Holland and Norway to
France and the United States. One of the most impressive projects is the
Norwegian mass digitization project at the National Library of Norway, which
since 2004 has worked systematically to develop a digital National Library
that encompasses text, audio, video, image, and websites. Impressively, the
National Library of Norway offers digital library services that provide online
access (to all with a Norwegian IP address) to full-
e the DPLA is building infrastructures to support this claim,43 the
discussion nevertheless highlights the difficulties with determining when
something is “public,” and even national.
While the highly publicized and institutionalized projects I have just
recounted have taken center stage in the early and later years of mass
digitization, they neither constitute the full cast, nor the whole machinery,
of mass digitization assemblages. Indeed, as chapter 4 in this book charts, at
the margins of mass digitization another set of actors have been at work
building new digital cultural memory assemblages, including projects such as
Monoskop and Lib.ru. These actors, referred to in this book as shadow library
projects (see chapter 4), at once both challenge and confirm the broader
infrapolitical dimensions of mass digitization, including its logics of
digital capitalism, network power, and territorial reconfigurations of
cultural memory between universalizing and glocalizing discourses. Within this
new “ecosystem of access,” unauthorized archives as Libgen, Gigapedia, and
Sci-Hub have successfully built “shadow libraries” with global reach,
containing massive aggregations of downloadable text material of both
scholarly and fictional character.44 As chapter 4 shows, these initiatives
further challenge our notions of public good, licit and illicit mass
digitization, and the territorial borders of mass digitization, just as they
add another layer of complexity to the question of the politics of mass
digitization.
Today, then, the landscape of mass digitization has evolved considerably, and
we can now begin to make out the political contours that have shaped, and
continue to shape, the emergent contemporary knowledge infrastructures of mass
digitization, ripe as they are with contestation, cooperation, and
competition. From this perspective, mass digitization appears as a preeminent
example of how knowledge politics are configured in today’s world of
“assemblages” as “multisited, transboundary networks” that connect
subnational, national, supranational, and global infrastructures and actors,
without, however, necessarily doing so through formal interstate systems.45 We
can also see that mass digitization projects did not arise as a result of a
sovereign decisi
lex material and social infrastructure performed by a diverse
constellation of cultural memory professionals, computer scientists,
information specialists, policy personnel, politicians, scanners, and
scholars. Hence, this volume approaches mass digitization projects as
“assemblages,” that is, as contingent arrangements consisting of humans,
machines, objects, subjects, spaces and places, habits, norms, laws, politics,
and so on. These arrangements cross national-global and public-private lines,
producing what this volume calls “late-sovereign,” “posthuman,” and “late-
capitalist” assemblages.
To give an example, we can look at how the national and global aspects of
cultural memory institutions change with mass digitization. The national
museums and libraries we frequent today were largely erected during eras of
high nationalism, as supreme acts of cultural and national territoriality.
“The early establishment of a national collection,” as Belinda Tiffen notes,
“was an important step in the birth of the new nation,” since it signified
“the legitimacy of the nation as a political and cultural entity with its own
heritage and culture worthy of being recorded and preserved.”52 Today, as the
initial French incentive to build Europeana shows, we find similar
nationalization processes in mass digitization projects. However,
nationalizing a digital collection often remains a performative gesture than a
practical feat, partly because the information environment in the digital
sphere differs significantly from that of the analog world in terms of
territory and materiality, and partly because the dichotomy between national
and global, an agreed-upon construction for centuries, is becoming more and
more difficult to uphold in theory and practice.53 Thus, both Goog
was a great admirer of the
corporate ideal, and was eager to apply it to the library system.56 Indeed,
library development in the United States was greatly advanced by the
philanthropy of capitalism, most notably by Andrew Carnegie.57 The question,
then, is not so much whether mass digitization has brought cultural memory
institutions, and their collections and users, into a capitalist system, but
_what kind_ of capitalist system mass digitization has introduced cultural
memory to: digital capitalism.
Today, elements of the politics of cultural memory are being reassembled into
novel knowledge configurations. As a consequence, their connections and
conjugations are being transformed, as are their institutional embeddings.
Indeed, mass digitization assemblages are a product of our time. They are new
forms of knowledge institutions arising from a sociopolitical environment
where vertical territorial hierarchies and horizontal networks entwine in a
new political mesh: where solid things melt into air, and clouds materialize
as material infrastructures, where boundaries between experts and laypeople
disintegrate, and where machine cognition operates on a par with human
cognition on an increasingly large scale. These assemblages enable new types
of political actors—networked assemblages—which hold particular forms of power
despite their informality vis-à-vis the formal political system; and in turn,
through their practices, these actors partly build and shape those
assemblages.
Since concepts always respond to “a specific social and historical situation
of which an intellectual occasion is part,”58 it is instructive to revisit the
1980s, when the theoretical notion of assemblage emerged and slowly gained
cross-disciplinary purchase.59 Around this time, the stable structures o
isk of piracy. At a deeper level, the case also emphasized
authors’ and publishers’ desire to retain control over their copyrighted works
in the face of the threat that the Library Project (unlike the Partner
Program) was posing: Google was digitizing without the copyright holder’s
permission. Thus, to them, the Library Project fundamentally threatened their
copyrights and, on a more fundamental level, existing copyright systems. Both
factors, they argued, would make book buying a superfluous activity.20 The
harsher criticisms framed Google Books as a book thief rather than as a global
philanthropist.21 Google, on its behalf, launched a defense of their actions
based on the notion of “fair use,” which as the following section shows,
eventually became the fundamental legal question.
## Infrastructural Transformations
Google Books became the symbol of the painful confusion and territorial
battles that marred the publishing world as it underwent a transformation from
analog to digital. The mounting and diverse opposition to Google Books was
thus not an isolated affair, but rather a persistent symptom—increasingly loud
stress signals emitting from the infrastructural joints of the analog realm of
books as it buckled under the strain of digital logic. As media theorist John
Durham Peters (drawing on media theorist Harold Innis) notes, the history of
media is also an “occupational history” that tells the tales of craftspeople
mastering medium-specific skills tactically battling for monopolies of
knowledge and guarding their access.22 And 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 bo
ltural heritage to economic actors in the EU internal market, controlled by
the framework of competition law, time-limited contracts, and rules on state
aid.57 Moreover, mastering the rules of these new infrastructures is not
necessarily an easy feat for public institutions.58 Thus, while Google claims
to hold a core commitment regarding free digital access to information, and
while its financial apparatus could be construed as making Google an eligible
partner in accordance with the EU’s policy objectives toward furthering
public-private partnerships in Europe,59 it is nevertheless, as legal scholar
Maurizio Borghi notes, relevant to take into account Google’s previous
monopoly-building history.60
## The Politics of Google Books
A final aspect of Google Books relates to the universal aspiration of Google
Books’s collection, its infrapolitics, and what it empirically produces in
territorial terms. As this chapter’s previous sections have outlined, it was
an aspiration of Google Books to transcend the cultural and political
limitations of physical cultural memory collections by gathering the written
material of cultural memory institutions into one massive digitized
collection. Yet, while the collection spans millions of works in hundreds of
languages from hundreds of countries,61 it is also clear that even large-scale
mass digitization processes still entail procedures of selection on multiple
levels from libraries to works. These decisions produce a political reality
that in some respects reproduces and accentuates the existing politics of
cultural memory institutions in terms of territorial and class-based
representations, and in other respects give rise to new forms of cultural
memory politics that part ways with the political regimes of traditional
curatorial apparatuses.
One obvious area in which to examine the politics produced by the Google Books
assemblage is in the selection of libraries that Google chooses to partner
with.62 While the full list of Google Books partners is not disclosed on
Google’s own webpage, it is clear from the available list that, up to now,
Google Books has mainly partnered with “great libraries,” such as elite
university libraries and national libraries. The rationale for choosing these
libraries has no doubt been to partner up with cultural memory institutions
that preside over as much material as possible, and which are therefore able
to provide more pieces of the puzzle than, say, a small-town public library
that only presides over a
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 of cultural memory, shifting the stakes from sovereign
territorial possessions to more functional, complex, and effective means of
control.
## Notes
1. Chartier 2004. 2. As philosopher Jacques Derrida noted anecdotally on his
colleagues’ way of reading, “some of my American colleagues come along to
seminars or to lecture theaters with their little laptops. They don’t print
out; they read out directly, in public, from the screen. I saw it being done
as well at the Pompidou Center [in Paris] a few days ago. A friend was giving
a talk there on American photography. He had this little Macintosh laptop
there where he could see it, like a prompter: he pressed a button to scroll
down his text. This assumed a high degree of confidence in this strange
whisperer. I’m not yet at that point, but it does happen.” (Derrida 2005, 27).
3. As Ken Auletta recounts, Eric Schmidt remembers when Page surprised him in
the early 2000s by showing off a book scanner he had built which was inspired
by the great library of Alexandria, claiming that “We’re going to scan all the
books in the world,” and explaining that for search to be truly comprehensive
“it must include every book ever published.” Page literally wanted Google to
be a “super librarian” (Auletta 2009, __ 96). 4. Constraints of a physical
character (how to digitize and organize all this knowledge in physical form);
legal character (how to do it in a way that suspends existing regulation); and
political character (how to transgress territorial systems). 5. Take, for
instance, project Bibliotheca Universalis, comprising American, Japanese,
German, and British libraries among others, whose professed aim was “to
exploit existing digitization programs in order to … make the major works of
the world’s scientific and cultural heritage accessible to a vast public via
multimedia technologies, thus fostering … exchange of knowledge and dialogue
over national and international borders.” It was a joint project of the French
Ministry of Culture, the National Library of France, the Japanese National
Diet Library, the Library of Congress, the National Library of Canada,
Discoteca di Stato, Deutsche Bibliothek, and the British Library:
from the groundbreaking Medieval publication _Bibliotecha Universalis_
(1545–1549), a four-volume alphabetical bibliogra
ies 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 public response to Google’s privatization of cultural memory,
and that Europeana was a territorial response to American colonization of
European information and culture. This chapter suggests that while both of
these sentiments were present in Europeana’s early years, the politics of what
Europeana was—and is—paints a more complicated picture. A closer glance at
Europeana’s social, economic, and legal infrastructures thus shows that the
European mass digitization project is neither an attempt to replicate Google’s
glocal model, nor is it a continuation of traditional European cultural
policies. Rather, Europeana produces a new form of cultural memory politics
that converge national and supranational imaginaries with global information
infrastructures.
If global information infrastructures and national politics today seemingly go
hand in hand in Europeana, it wasn’t always so. In fact, in the 1990s,
networked technologies and national imaginaries appeared to be mutually
ex
as Tim Wu and Jack Goldsmith noted in 2006, an illusion;3 geography had
revenged itself, not least in the digital environment.4
Today, no one doubts the cultural-political import of the national imaginary.
The national imaginary has fueled antirefugee movements, the surge of
nationalist parties, the EU’s intensified crisis, and the election of Donald
Trump, to name just a few critical political events in the 2010s. Yet, while
the nationalist imaginary is becoming ever stronger, paradoxically its
communicative infrastructures are simultaneously becoming ever more
globalized. Thus, globally networked digital infrastructures are quickly
supplementing, and in many cases even substituting, those national
communicative infrastructures that were instrumental in establishing a
national imagined community in the first place—infrastructures such as novels
and newspapers.5 The convergence of territorially bounded imaginaries and
global networks creates new cultural-political constellations of cultural
memory where the centripetal forces of nationalism operate alongside,
sometimes with and sometimes against, the centrifugal forces of digital
infrastructures. Europeana is a preeminent example of these complex
infrastructural and imaginary dynamics.
## A European Response
When Google announced their digitization program at the Frankfurt Book Fair in
2004, it instantly created ripples in the European cultural-political
landscape, in France in particular. Upon hearing the news about Google’s
plans, Jacques Chirac, president of France at the time, promptly urged the
then-culture minister, Renaud Donnedieu de Vabres, and Jean-Noël Jeanneney,
head of France’s Bibliothèque nationale, to commence a similar digitization
project and to persuade other European countries to join them.6 The se
not simply a
socioeconomic vision loosely inspired by market liberalism and
multiculturalism” but also (and sometimes primarily) “an image of
individualism, enterprise, and atomization.”11 All these dimensions were at
play in Jeanneney’s anti-Google Books rhetoric. Indeed, Jeanneney suggested,
Google’s mass digitization project was not only Anglo-Saxon in its collecting
practices and organizational principles, but also in its regulatory framework:
“We know how Anglo-Saxon law competes with Latin law in international
jurisdictions and in those of new nations. I don’t want to see Anglo-Saxon law
unduly favored by Google as a result of the hierarchy that will be
spontaneously established on its lists.”12
What did Jeanneney suggest as infrastructural protection against the network
power of the Anglo-Saxon mass digitization project? According to Jeanneney,
the answer lay in territorial digitization programs: rather than simply
accepting the colonizing forces of the Anglo-Saxon matrix, Jeanneney argued, a
national digitization effort was needed. Such a national digitization project
would be a “ _contre-attaque_ ” against Google Books that should protect three
dimensions of French cultural sovereignty: its language, the role of the state
in cultural policy, and the cultural/intellectual order of knowledge in the
cultural collections.13 Thus Jeanneney suggested that any Anglo-Saxon mass
digitization project should be competed against and complemented by mass
digitization projects from other nations and cultures to ensure that cultural
works are embedded in meaningful cultural contexts and languages. While the
nation was the central base of mass digitization programs, Jeanenney noted,
such digitization programs necessarily needed to be embedded in a European, or
Contin
atic
politics, between discursive claims to sovereignty and economic global
cooperation. And as the next section shows, the intertwinement of these
discursive, ideological, and economic infrastructures produced a memory
politics in Europeana that was neither sovereign nor post-sovereign, but
rather late-sovereign.
## The Infrastructural Reality of Late-Sovereignty
Politically speaking, Europeana was always more than just an empty
countergesture or emulating response to Google. Rather, as soon as the EU
adopted Europeana as a prestige project, Europeana became embedded in the
political project of Europeanization and began to produce a political logic of
its own. Latching on to (rather than countering) a sovereign logic, Europeana
strategically deployed the European imaginary as a symbolic demarcation of its
territory. But the means by which Europeana was constructed and distributed
its territorial imaginaries nevertheless took place by means of globalized
networked infrastructures. The circumscribed cultural imaginary of Europeana
was thus made interoperable with the networked logic of globalization. This
combination of a European imaginary and neoliberal infrastructure in Europeana
produced an uneasy balance between national and supranational infrastructural
imaginaries on the one hand and globalized infrastructures on the other.
If France saw Europeana primarily through the prism of sovereign competition,
the European Commission emphasized a different dispositive: economic
competition. In his 2005 response to Jaques Chirac, José Manuel Barroso
acknowledged that the digitization of European cultural heritage was an
important task not only for nation-states but also for the EU as a whole.
Instead of the defiant tone of Jeanneney and De Vabres, Barraso and the EU
institutions opt
Both German and French representatives emphasized the rift
between copyright legislation in the US and in EU member states. The German
government proposed that the EC examine whether Google Books conformed to
Europe’s copyright laws. In France, President Nicolas Sarkozy stated in more
flamboyant terms that he would not permit France to be “stripped of our
heritage to the benefit of a big company, no matter how friendly, big, or
American it is.”20 Both countries moreover submitted _amicus curia_ briefs 21
to judge Denny Chin (who was in charge of the ongoing Google Books settlement
lawsuit in the US22), in which they argued against the inclusion of foreign
authors in the lawsuit.23 They further brought separate suits against Google
Books for their scanning activities and sought to exercise diplomatic pressure
against the advancement of Google Books.24
On an EU level, however, the territorial concerns were sidestepped in favor of
another matrix of concern: the question of public-private governance. Thus,
despite pressure from some member states, the EC decided not to write a
similar “amicus brief” on behalf of the EU.25 Instead, EC Commissioners
McCreevy and Reding emphasized the need for more infrastructures connecting
the public and private sectors in the field of mass digitization.26 Such PPPs
could range from relatively conservative forms of cooperation (e.g., private
sponsoring, or payments from the private sector for links provided by
Europeana) to more far-reaching involvement, such as turning the management of
Europeana over to the private sector.27 In a similar vein, a report authored
by a high-level reflection group (Comité des Sages) set down by the European
Commission opened the door for public-private partnerships and also set a time
frame for commercial exp
Neil Walker’s theoretical corrective to theories on post-
sovereignty, the notion of late sovereignty seems to have only gained in
relevance as nationalist imaginaries increase in strength and power through
increasingly globalized networks.
As the following section shows, Europeana is a product of political processes
that are concerned with both the construction of bounded spheres and canons
_and_ networked infrastructures of connectivity, competition, and potentiality
operating beyond, below, and between national societal structures. Europeana’s
late-sovereign framework produces an infrapolitics in which the discursive
political juxtaposition between Europeana and Google Books exists alongside
increased cooperation between Google Books and Europeana, making it necessary
to qualify the comparative distinctions in mass digitization projects on a
much more detailed level than merely territorial delineations, without,
however, disposing of the notion of sovereignty. The simultaneous
contestations and connections between Europeana and Google Books thus make
visible the complex economic, intellectual, and technological infrastructures
at play in mass digitization.
What form did these 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 ha
imately volume-based approach of mass digitization. hem are smaller in size, more selective, and less industrial. driven neither by pure globalized dissent nor by pure globalized and Monoskop and likeminded operations highlight the ways in which the Slovakia, and the Czech Republic, relating it not cease and desist llowing us instead to ctions that today establish a monument to past alence, curiosity and risk-taking—is under opeana aims at an open-linked-data rchitectural and social understandings of the term roducing r have to contend with a ll be a valued cultural connection instead of a frowned-upon Display 200
300
400
500
600
700
800
900 1000
ALL
characters around the word.
According to the scholar, this volume-based approach finds a political support
in the EC system, for whom “the object will always be quantitative” since
volume is “the only thing the commission can measure in terms of funding and
result.”85 In a way then, the statistics tell more than one story: in
political terms, they recount not only the classic tale of a fragmented Europe
but also how Europe is increasingly perceived, represented, and managed by
calculative technologies. In technical terms, they reveal the gray areas of
how to delineate and calculate data: what makes a data object? And in cultural
policy terms, they reflect the highly divergent prioritization of mass
digitization in European countries.
The final question is, then: how is this fragmented European collection
distributed? This is the point where Europeana’s territorial matrix reveals
its ultimately networked infrastructure. Europeana may be entered through
Google, Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest, and vice versa. Therefore a click on
the aforementioned cake exhibition, for example, takes one straight to Google
Arts and Culture. The 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 territorial sentiments will
reproduce sovereign spheres in practice. To the extent that reterritorializing
sentiments are circulated in globalizing networks, this chapter has sought to
counter both ideas about post sovereignty and pure nationalization, viewing
mass digitization instead through the lens of late-sovereignty. As this
chapter shows, the notion of late-sovereignty allows us to conceptualize mass
digitization programs, such as Europeana, as globalized phenomena couched
within the language of (supra)national sovereignty. In the age where rampant
nationalist movements sweep through globalized communication networks, this
approach feels all the more urgent and applicable not only to mass
digitization programs, but also to reterritorializing communication phenomena
more broadly. Only if we take the ways in which the nationalist imaginary
works in the infrastructural reality of late capitalism, can we begin to
account for the infrapolitics of the highly mediated new territorial
imaginaries.
## Notes
1. Lefler 2007; Henry W., “Europe’s Digital Library versus Google,” Café
Babel, September 22, 2008,
digitization did not stand apart from the political and economic developments
in the rapidly globalizing world, digital theorists and activists soon gave
rise to the Internet as an inherent metaphor for this integrative development,
a sign of the inevitability of an ultimately borderless world, where as
Negroponte notes, time zones would “probably play a bigger role in our digital
future than trade zones” (Negroponte 1995, 228). 3. Goldsmith and Wu 2006. 4.
Rogers 2012. 5. Anderson 1991. 6. “Jacques Chirac donne l’impulsion à la
création d’une bibliothèque numérique,” _Le Monde_ , March 16, 2005,
Nevertheless, I include them because their open access strategies allow for
unlimited downloads. Thus, shadow libraries, while perhaps selective in size
themselves, offer the opportunity to reproduce works at a massive and
distributed scale. As such, they are the perfect example of a mass
digitization assemblage.
The first case centers on lib.ru, an early Russia-based file-sharing platform
for exchanging books that today has grown into a massive and distributed file-
sharing project. It is primarily run by individuals, but it has also received
public funding, which shows that what at first glance appears as a simple case
of piracy simultaneously serves as a much more complex infrapolitical
structure. The second case, Monoskop, distinguishes itself by its boutique
approach to digitization. Monoskop too is characterized by its territorial
trajectory, rooted in Bratislava’s digital scene as an attempt to establish an
intellectual platform for the study of avant-garde (digital) cultures that
could connect its Bratislava-based creators to a global scene. Finally, the
chapter looks at UbuWeb, a shadow library dedicated to avant-garde cultural
works ranging from text and audio to images and film. Founded in 1996 as a US-
based noncommercial file-sharing site by poet Kenneth Goldsmith in response to
the marginal distribution of crucial avant-garde material, UbuWeb today offers
a wealth of avant-garde sound art, video, and textual works.
As the case studies show, shadow libraries have become significant mass
digitization infrastructures that offer the user free access to academic
articles and books, often by means of illegal file-sharing. They are informal
and unstable networks that rely on active user participation across a
commodified infrastructures. Rather, they straddle these binaries as
infrapolitical entities, the political dynamics of which align both with
standardization and dissent. Revisiting once more the theoretical debate, the
case of lib.ru shows that shadow libraries may certainly be global phenomena,
yet one should be careful with disregarding the specific cultural-political
trajectories that shape each individual shadow library. Lib.ru demonstrates
how the infrapolitics of shadow libraries emerge as infrastructural
expressions of the convergence between historical sovereign trajectories,
global information infrastructures, and public-private governance structures.
Shadow libraries are not just globalized projects that exist in parallel to
sovereign state structures and global economic flows. Instead, they are
entangled in territorial public-private governance practices that produce
their own late-sovereign infrapolitics, which, paradoxically, are embedded in
larger mass digitization problematics, both on their own territory and on the
global scene.
## Monoskop
In contrast to the broad and distributed infrastructure of lib.ru, other
shadow libraries have emerged as specialized platforms that cater to a
specific community and encourage a specific practice. Monoskop is one such
shadow library. Like lib.ru, Monoskop started as a one-man project and in many
respects still reflects its creator, Dušan Barok, who is an artist, writer,
and cultural activist involved in critical practices in the fields of
software, art, and theory. Prior to Monoskop, his activities were mainly
focused on the Bratislava cultural media scene, and Monoskop was among other
things set up as an infrastructural project, one that would not only off
objects they circulate (including the digital artifacts, their knowledge
management, and their software) can be manipulated and experimented upon to
produce new forms of power dynamics.41 Their ethics lie more in the ways in
which they operate as shadowy infrastructures than in intellectual reflections
upon the infrastructures they counter, without, however, creating an
opposition between thinking and doing. Indeed, as its history shows, Monoskop
grew out of a desire to create a space for critical reflection. The
infrapolitics of Monoskop is thus an infrapolitics of grayness that marks the
breakdown of clearly defined contrasts between legal and illegal, licit and
illicit, desire and control, instead providing a space for activities that are
ethically ambiguous and in which “everyone is sullied.”42
### Monoskop as a Territorializing Assemblage
While Monoskop’s stratagems play on the infrapolitics of the gray zones of
globalized digital networks, the shadow library also emerges as a late-
sovereign infrastructure. As already noted, Monoskop was from the outset
focused on surfacing and connecting art and media objects and theory from
Central and Eastern Europe. Often, this territorial dimension recedes into the
background, with discussions centering more on the site’s specialized catalog
and legal maneuvers. Yet Monoskop was initially launched partly as a response
to criticisms on new media scenes in the Slovak and Czech Republics as
“incomprehensible avant-garde.”43 It began as a simple invite-only instance of
wiki in August 2004, urging participants to collaboratively research the
history of media art. It was from the beginning conceived more as a
collaborative social practice and less as a material collection, and it
targeted noninstitutionalized researchers such as Barok himself.
As the nodes in Monoskop grew, its initial aim to research media art history
also expanded into looking at wider cultural practices. By 2010, it had grown
into a 100-gigabyte collection which was organized as a snowball research
collection, focusing in particular on “the white sp
only to the art histories of the region, but also to its history of
cybernetics and computing.
Another early motivation for Monoskop was to provide a situated nodal point in
the globalized information infrastructures that emphasized the geographical
trajectories that had given rise to it. As Dušan Barok notes in an interview,
“For a Central European it is mind-boggling to realize that when meeting a
person from a neighboring country, what tends to connect us is not only
talking in English, but also referring to things in the far West. Not that the
West should feel foreign, but it is against intuition that an East-East
geographical proximity does not translate into a cultural one.”47 From this
perspective, Monoskop appears not only as an infrapolitical project of global
knowledge, but also one of situated sovereignty. Yet, even this territorial
focus holds a strategic dimension. As Barok notes, Monoskop’s ambition was not
only to gain new knowledge about media art in the region, but also to cash in
on the cultural capital into which this knowledge could potentially be
converted. Thus, its territorial matrix first and foremost translates into
Foucault’s famous dictum that “knowledge is power.” But it is nevertheless
also testament to the importance of including more complex spatial dynamics in
one’s analytical matrix of shadow libraries, if one wishes to understand them
as more than globalized breakers of code and arbiters of what Manuel Castells
once called the “space of flows.”48
## UbuWeb
If Monoskop is one of the most comprehensive shadow libraries to emerge from
critical-artistic practice, UbuWeb is one of the earliest ones and has served
as an inspirational example for Monoskop. UbuWeb is a website that offers an
encyclopedic scope of downloadable audio, video, and plain-text versions of
avant-garde art recordings, films, and books. Most of the books fall in the
category of small-edition artists’ books and are presented on the site with
permission from the artist
order. Instead, we receive glowing emails from artists, publishers, and record
labels finding their work on UbuWeb, thanking us for taking an interest in
what they do; in fact, most times they offer UbuWeb additional materials. We
happily acquiesce and tell them that UbuWeb is an unlimited resource with
unlimited space for them to fill. It is in this way that the site has grown to
encompass hundreds of artists, thousands of files, and several gigabytes of
poetry.49
At the time of its launch, UbuWeb garnered extraordinary attention and divided
communities along lines of access and rights to historical and contemporary
artists’ media. It was in this range of responses to UbuWeb that one could
discern the formations of new infrastructural positions on digital archives,
how they should be made available, and to whom. Yet again, these legal
positions were accompanied by a territorial dynamic, including the impact of
regional differences in cultural policy on UbuWeb. Thus, as artist Jason Simon
notes, there were significant differences between the ways in which European
and North American distributors related to UbuWeb. These differences, Simon
points out, were rooted in “medium-specific questions about infrastructure,”
which differ “from the more interpretive discussion that accompanied video's
wholesale migration into fine art exhibition venues.”50 European pre-recession
public money thus permitted nonprofit distributors to embrace infrastructures
such as UbuWeb, while American distributors were much more hesitant toward
UbuWeb’s free-access model. When recession hit Europe in the late 2000s,
however, the European links to UbuWeb’s infrastructures crumbled while “the
legacy American distributors … have been steadily adapting.”51 The territorial
modulations in UbuWeb’s infrastructural set-up testify not only to how shadow
libraries such as UbuWeb are inherently always linked up to larger political
events in complex ways, but also to latent ephemerality of the entire project.
Goldsmith has more than once asserted that UbuWeb’s insistence on
“independent” infrastructures also means a volatile existence: “… by the time
you read this, UbuWeb may be gone. Cobbled together, operating on no money and
an all-volunteer staff, UbuWeb has become the unlikely definitive source for
all things avant-garde on the internet. Never meant to be a permanent archive,
Ubu could vanish for any number of reasons: our ISP pulls the plug, our
university support dries up, or we simply grow tired of it.” Goldsmith’s
emphasis on the ephemerality of UbuWeb is a shared condition of most shadow
libraries, most of which exist only as ghostly re
focus on the social roles infrastructural agents perform. Restoring a sense of
the wider context of parasitism to shadow libraries does not provide a clear-
cut solution as to when and where shadow libraries should be condemned and
when and where they should be tolerated. But it does help us ask questions in
a different way. And it certainly prevents the regarding of shadow libraries
as the “other” in the landscape of mass digitization. Shadow libraries
instigate new creative relations, the dynamics of which are infrastructurally
premised upon the medium they use. Just as typewriters were an important
component of samizdat practices in the Soviet Union, digital infrastructures
are central components of shadow libraries, and in many respects shadow
libraries bring to the fore the same cultural-political questions as other
forms of mass digitization: questions of territorial imaginaries,
infrastructures, regulation, speed, and ethics.
## Notes
1. Serres 1982, 55. 2. Serres 1982, 36. 3. Serres 1982, 36. 4. Samyn 2012. 5.
I stick with “shadow library,” a term that I first found in Lawrence Liang’s
(2012) writings on copyright and have since seen meaningfully unfolded in a
variety of contexts. Part of its strength is its sidestepping of the question
of the pirate and that term’s colonial connotations. 6. Eckstein and Schwarz
2014. 7. Scott 2009, 185–201. 8. See also Maxim Moshkov’s own website hosted
on lib.ru,
2016. “Libraries in the post-scarcity era.” As Balazs Bodó notes, the first
Russian mass-digitized shadow archives in Russia were run by professors from
the hard sciences, but the popularization of computers soon gave rise to much
more varied and w
efforts to gather together knowledge of the world and its treasury of objects
and deeds.”5 The field of statistics, moreover, so vital to the evolution of
modern governance models, is also premised upon the accumulation of ever-more
information.6 And finally, we all recognize the signs of modern
industrialization processes as they appear in the form of globalization,
standardization, and acceleration. Indeed, as French sociologist Henri
Lefebvre once argued (with a nod to Marx), the history of modern society could
plainly and simply be seen as the history of accumulation: of space, of
capital, of property.7
In mass digitization, we hear the political echoes of these histories. From
Jeanneney’s war cry to defend European patrimonies in the face of Google’s
cultural colonization to Google’s megalomaniac numbers game and Europeana’s
territorial maneuverings, scale is used as a point of reference not only to
describe the space of cultural objects in themselves but also to outline a
realm of cultural command.
A central feature in the history of accumulation and scale is the development
of digital technology and the accompanying new modes of information
organization. But even before then, the invention of new technologies offered
not only new modes of producing and gathering information and new
possibilities of organizing information assemblages, but also new questions
about the implications of these leaps in information production. As historians
Ann Blair and Peter Stallybrass show, “infolust,” that is, the cultural
attitude that values expansive collections for long-term storage, emerged in
the early Renaissance period.8 In that period, new print technology gave rise
to a new culture of accumulating and stockpiling notes an
assault.”45 These two death sentences, separated by a century, link the
environment of the flaneur to significant questions about the commodification
of space and its infrapolitical implications.
Exploring the implications of this topography, the following section suggests,
will help us understand the infrapolitics of the spatial imaginaries of mass
digitization, not only in relation to questions of globalization and late
sovereignty, but also to cultural imaginaries of knowledge infrastructures.
Indeed, these two dimensions are far from mutually exclusive, but rather
belong to the same overarching tale of the politics of mass digitization.
Thus, while the material spatial infrastructures of mass digitization projects
may help us appreciate certain important political dynamics of Europeana,
Google Books, and shadow libraries (such as their territorializing features or
copyright contestations in relation to knowledge production), only an
inclusion of the infrastructural imaginaries of knowledge production will help
us understand the complex politics of mass digitization as it metamorphoses
from analog buildings, shelves, and cabinets to the circulatory networks of
digital platforms.
## Labyrinthine Imaginaries: Infrastructural Perspectives of Power and
Knowledge Production
If the flaneur is a central early figure in the cultural imaginary of the
observer of cultural texts, the labyrinth has long served as a cultural
imaginary of the library, and, in larger terms, the spatialized
infrastructural conditions of knowledge and power. Thus, literature is rife
with works that draw on libraries and labyrinths to convey stories about
knowledge production and the power struggles hereof. Think only of the elderly
monk-librarian in Umberto Eco
model with a number of implications. One implication is that there will be no
control of data usage, which makes it possible, for instance, to link classics
with porn. Libraries do not agree to this loss of control which was at the
base of their self-understanding.”60 The Europeana professional then proceeded
to recount the profound anxiety experienced and expressed by knowledge
professionals as they increasingly came face-to-face with a curatorial reality
that is radically changing what counts as knowledge and context, where a
search for Courbet could, in theory, not only lead the user to other French
masters of painting but also to a copy of a porn magazine (provided it is out
of copyright). The anxiety experienced by knowledge professionals in the new
cultural memory ecosystem can of course be explained by a rationalized fear of
job insecurity and territorial concerns. Yet, the fear of knowledge
infrastructures without a center may also run deeper. 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 knowledg
connote a process in which sites of common ground are created in
contradistinction to other sites. In geology, for instance, platforms emerge
from abrasive processes that elevate and distinguish one area in relation to
others. In religious and political discourse, platforms emerge as
organizational sites of belonging, often in contradistinction to other forms
of organization. Platforms, then, connote both common ground and demarcated
borders that emerge out of abrasive processes. In the nineteenth century, a
third meaning adjoined the notion of platforms, namely trade-related
cooperation. This introduced a dynamic to the word that is less informed by
abrasive processes and more by the capture processes of what we might call
“connective capitalism.” Yet, despite connectivity taking center stage, even
these platforms were described as territorializing constructs that favor some
organizations and corporations over others.104
In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, as Gilles Deleuze and Felix
Guattari successfully urged scholars and architects to replace roots with
rhizomes, the notion of platform began taking on yet another meaning. Deleuze
and Guattari began fervently arguing for the nonexistence of rooted
platforms.105 Their vision soon gave rise to a nonfoundational understanding
of the world as a “limitless multiplicity of positions from which it is
possible only to erect provisional constructions.”106 Deleuze and Guattari’s
ontology became widely influential in theorizing the web _in toto_ ; as Rem
Koolhaas once noted, the “language of architecture—platform, blueprint,
structure—became almost the preferred language for indicating a lot of
phenomenon that we’re facing from Silicon Valley.”107 From the sin
futurity. If serendipity is what is craved, then platforms are the site in
which this is thought to take place.
Despite its inclusion in the entrepreneurial discourse of Silicon Valley, the
notion of the platform is also used to signal an infrapolitics of
collaboration, even subversion. Olga Gurionova, for instance, explores the
subversive dynamics of critical artistic platforms,110 and Trebor Sholtz
promotes the term “platform cooperativism” to advance worker-based
cooperatives that would “design their own apps-based platforms, fostering
truly peer-to-peer ways of providing services and things, and speak truth to
the new platform capitalists.”111 Shadow libraries such as Monoskop appear as
perfect examples of such subversive platforms and evidence of Srnicek’s
reminder that not _all_ social interactions are co-opted into systems of
profit generation. 112 Yet, as the territorial, legal, and social
infrastructures of mass digitization become increasingly labyrinthine, it
takes a lot of critical consciousness to properly interpret and understand its
infrapolitics. Engage with the shadow library Library Genesis on Facebook, for
instance, and you submit to platform capitalism.
A significant trait of platform-based corporations such as Google and Facebook
is that they more often than not present themselves as apolitical, neutral,
and empowering tools of connectivity, passive until picked up by the user.
Yet, as Lisa Nakamura notes, “reading’s economies, cultures of sharing, and
circuits of travel have never been passive.”113 One of digital platforms’ most
important infrapolitical traits is their dependence on network effects and a
winner-takes-all logic, where the platform owner is not only conferred
enormous power vis-à-vis other less successful platforms
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 social struggles over
representation, control, and ownership of knowledge.
In summary, it is obvious that the scale of mass digitization, public and
private, licit and illicit, has transformed how we engage with texts, cultural
works, and cultural memory. People today have instant access to a wealth of
works that would previously have required large amounts of money, as well as
effort, to engage with. Most of us enjoy the new cultural freedoms we have
been given to roam the archives, collecting and exploring oddities along the
way, and making new connections between works that would previousl
transgression in the halls of high culture. Users do not just download books;
they also upload new folksonomies, “ego-documents,” and new cultural
constellations, which are all welcomed in the name of “citizen science.”
Digitization also infuses texts with new life due to its new connective
properties that allow readers and writers to intimately and
exhibitionistically interact around cultural works, and it provides new ways
of engaging with texts as digital reading migrates toward service-based rather
than hardware-based models of consumption. Digitization allows users to
digitally collect works themselves and indulge in alluring archival riches in
new ways.
But mass digitization also gives rise to a range of new ethical, political,
aesthetic, and methodological questions concerning the spatio-temporality,
ownership, territoriality, re-use, and dissemination of cultural memory
artifacts. Some of those dimensions have been discussed in detail in the
present work and include questions about digital labor, platformization,
management of visibility, ownership, copyright, and other new forms of control
and de- and recentralization and privatization processes. Others have only
been alluded to but continue to gain in relevance as processes of mass
digitization excavate and make public sensitive and contested archival
material. Thus, as the cultural memories and artifacts of indigenous
populations, colonized territories and other marginalized groups are brought
online, as well as artifacts that attest to the violent regimes of colonialism
and patriarchy, an attendant need has emerged for an ethics of care that goes
beyond simplistic calls for right to access, to instead attend to the
sensitivity of the digitized materia