User:Tancre/Special Issue 9/notes

Archive, Activism & Copyright Notes on the texts of Special Issue 9

Special Issue's texts

A Users Guide to Demanding the Impossible | Gavin Grindon & John Jordan

Art is useless as soon as it affects the world. Maybe because the market put it in an instrumental use. Maybe when it is not used to make a profit. As education has no use outside the world of work and consumption. This guide is to search for other uses in art.
Art is always useful to someone when it becomes a commodity object in the limits of the market and as an aesthetic amplifier for the status quo when its political art is enclosed in a museum as a cool cultural mask over capitalism. But there is another story, outside the prisons of the art world, in the collective movement of creativity applied to the materiality of everyday life. Arts enter other relationships, other kinds of making. Outside the market it remakes the life that lies between us, transforming the way we relate/make, refuse/rebel, love/eat art. When struggle, occupation, social movement, protest, new friendships and way of living are possible, new cultures to bring us together. This is the art that does not show to us in the world but changes it. History of rebellious performances, subtle images, insurrectionary inventions, and seductive sounds. Not only to remember the secret of art but to discover and create tendencies for alternative paths to the crisis.

Right here right now
The greatest medium is the present.

• The art of social movements has often begun with collective bodily performances. Bodies VS the system and authorities.
• 1968 prints to reclaim the power of posters making, lost in France due to laws banning flyposting. Iconic images (it is forbidden to forbid).

Peel your eyes stretch your ears To dismantle and reinvent institutions or systems, we have to start from the roots with the culture that support them. Culture as the material substratum of politics, but not as laws, it can be changed by infiltrating at the molecular level. Know your enemy, your material, the place, and the desires until you can navigate into them with your eyes closed and becomes them. Look around. Our society of certainties changes rapidly. Collective rebellion, courageous imagination and the city as a canvas.

Desert
Once you know those things, it is time to escape, a leap, desertion as engagement. (Rodchenko's 1919 manifesto) Self-abolition, refusing that part of your identity laid claim to by capital, acting differently in ways that don't have a name yet. Without your identity you are free, what you do becomes more important than who you are and you can do everything. Arts without a name can infiltrate unexpected places. Other kinds of making, relating, slipping out of history and institutions. Radical negation of the Dadaists VS war, art, authority, seriousness, rationality merged with the Berlin's antiwar and anticapitalist movements, creative forms of resistance. Communities of refusal, behind a loud NO there is a YES.
Brian Holmes > 'political art' is mostly 'pictures politics', not politics but representations of political action. Slipping outside of the representation in arts put you in trouble.
Labofii > Disobedience makes history, at Tate Modern VS curator's orders and capitalist sponsorship.

Rehearse the future
Mujeres Creando > “Be careful with the present that you create because it should look like the future that you dream.”
Alan Kaprow > Art for future means. For happenings and eradicated the division audience/creator 1960. Reclaim the streets parties 1990 > dancing bodies, music, politic for pleasure and not sacrifice VS traffic. Embodying change not waiting for a revolution. Occupation as refusing and building at the same time.
University of strategic optimism > education of the market VS marketisation of education. Lectures which occupied and redefined spaces of consumption as a place to learn and discuss.
Diggers 1960s > 'The free store' exchange, left/take goods in front of the store. Everything should be free by 'life-acting' + non-commercial house free store in US.

Construct post-capitalist machines
Not info but tasting dreams is what move us into view another world. Being engineers of the imagination. Marx 'general intellect' embodied in the machines.
Guy Debord > if we re-engineered these machines to produce ourselves and not to enslave us.
Saboteur the machine to produce free time, reverse-engineer the world.
Grupo de Arte CAllejero > street signs and public maps pointing the location of the genocidal general homes.

The Pirate Book | Nicolas Maigret & Maria Roszkowska

Echoes Over Time

• music > Stephen Adams - The Holy City / Drake - Nothing was the same
• definition > Peter Kennedy 1730
• computer programming > Bill Gates - An open letter to hobbyists 1976
• bus > private pirate bus on public spaces 1851 / google bus protest in 2013
• recording > Lionel Mapleson 1890-1937 / Mike The Mike 70s-80s
• trials > The pirate king trial 1904 / The Pirate Bay Trial 2008
• advertisement > 1906/ anti-piracy warning 1980--
• statutes > The statute of Anne 1710 / Digital Millenium Copyright Act 1998

The Warez Scene / Geeks VS authority
Release procedure:

• suppliers > obtain a legitimate copy (copying, hacking, corporate network, videotaping, retail purchasing, stealing)
• crackers > removes copyright protection
• packers > release coordinator, pack the product into scene-compliant volumes. Informs when packed and uploaded.
• pre-ing > Group-affiliated sites release for the first upload
• top sites > ftp servers for distribution, storage and archiving, with a high-bandwidth connection and a high storage capacity.
• couriers > distribute the pirated content from site to site to spread in the smaller scene
• sites > secure data warehouses for piracy. each release group has several sites.
• seeders > client with a certain copy of the data of a certain torrent. seed or seeding.
• >> street merchants

Suppliers Methods:
Physical Insiders / Credit Card Fraud / FTP Snooping / Social Engineering (fake magazines) / Demo CDS / Legitimate Retail

Supplying Guidelines:
Final Release / Virus- and Spyware-free / Complete / Not Free / Useable / Latest Version / Not a Minor Upgrade (MU)

Piracy Sub-Scenes:
Games / Applications / E-books / Videos / TV / Music / Porn / Everything Else

1337 language >> Pwn/0wn - n00b/newb - Omfg - Stfu - w00t - h4x0r - pr0n

Anti-Piracy Technologies (65)

Interface, Access, Loss | Sean Dockray

End of property > for the cyber-utopian account of things, when digital file sharing and online communication liberate culture from corporations and their drive for profit. Share digitized versions of their objects, producing a different common form of ownership. This produces a crisis (ex. Napster). But anyway subsequent undoing of the property of both the private and common kind. Here a story of the cloud, post-dot-com bubble techno-super-entity, which suck up the property, labor and free time.

Object, Interface
Debated if automation leads to unemployment (Marx analyzing 19th-century gas-works, telegraph, photography, steam, railways..), but promise that if the robots do the work, humans are free to be creative. Kautsky > growth of clerks, bookkeepers, banking system, credit system, insurance, and advertising.

In Marx's days, industries were incredibly important, but a small number of employed VS today raise of internet + deindustrialization, increased migrant and mobile labor and jobs made obsolete by computation.
Computation on the workplace > robots can replace worker or algorithm determining when to hire, for how long according to fluctuating conditions.
In computation:

• reuse > reusability and OOP with private and public/social parts 'concatenated'.
• 'Encapsulation' > which spread outwards than the software object, encapsulating and abstracting things as external computers and programs, banking institutions, people... as objects with input and output. Reduction of the complexity of reality but partial, because of relationships with one another as networked computation where objects are integrated.
  

Ex decentralized file-sharing object/person - info/book >> public library
but need to talk to each other (form Californian Ideology's vocabulary) >> platform which enables without directly producing it. Tools and resources so you don't need your owns. A way to externalize and reuse labor but the necessity of conformity to the platform. Not only interface object-object but also object-platform, defining what kind of interactions are possible. It maps the public face of the object in a way that is legible and accessible to the others. Every coupling between objects requires an interface that obscures as much as it reveals, establishing the boundaries between what is public and private, visible and not. The dominant aesthetic of interface design as 'good design' based on simplicity, cleanliness, and clarity.

(garbage collection ??)

Cloud, Access
Results, there can be a restructuration or revolution of the system but the interface remains the same. No difference in back from a change in front.
In the books industry behind the interface, there is Amazon who selects and monitors the market and users VS file-sharing networks. >> 2 regimes of digital property: the swarm (multiple sources and property held by the peers, the property is out of reach) and the cloud, only accessible through an interface that has absorbed legal and business requirements.
Not only cloud associated with data-centers but also external devices (e-readers, Kindles, iPads..) + 'terms of service' which doesn't give ownership(American's legal system 1908 separates the right of reproduction from distribution). In software 'shrink wrap' licenses but ubiquitous because now are sell as digital copies.
Jeremy Rifkin - 'the age of access' > “property continues to exist but is far less likely to be exchanged in markets. Instead, suppliers hold on to property in the new economy and lease, rent, or charge an admission fee, subscription, or membership dues for its short-term use.”

>> paid library emerging as a synthesis of the public library(cut of operations, being closed...) and the market(dematerialization). In the screen of the device, there is both the book and the library. (as in FB) E-reader as an individualizing device which establishes trusted access.
There is no library. New enclosure, common in the digital world > material object - digitalized object - migration to a remote location or service.

Capture, Loss

Book Bloc's Genealogy

2010 Rome, mock books as banners and shields vs police Wu Ming > it is culture itself that’s resisting the cuts; books themselves are fighting the police + Q novel

new strategies of art activism and guerrilla

Interviews with E-Book-Pirates

The book publishing industry is repeating the same mistakes of the music industry

MP3, Napster and portable audio players in music industry, as EPUB e-books readers in the book publishing.

• TorBoox - 40000/buy and post on their own/payment-based model/ problem of amount of traffic
• Imperial Library of Trantor - 11000/tor/users can post/donation
• Reading Club - 450/tor/buy and post on their own/donation

The book publishers fail to understand and adapt to the digital world. 'is missing and attractive digital offer', publishers insist on old ideas of copyright ignoring digital realities. Critique of Digital Rights Management (DRM).

Dispossession: The Performative in the political | Judith Butler and Athena Athanasiou

20: The university, the humanities, and the book bloc
Corporization of higher education from the conception of knowledge as property, commodity, and measurable commercial asset. The University became a corporate government through regimes of knowledge commercialization, quantitative assessment, auditability, benchmarking, and the critical thinking in humanities and social science represent an economical and political risk, surplus to the entrepreneurial university. Humanities are rendered redundant. How can we imagine a future in these anti-intellectual times? What kind of critique to claim for alternative humanities (high culture and what counts for human)?
Reclaim the uncommodifiable unconditionality of the university although have been always places of power, hierarchy, inequality...so what exactly to reclaim? Which kind of critical scholarship of humanities and post-humanities?
Protests as 'book bloc', fight for our books, with our books.

Butler > Before the problem of effectivity of Derrida's books in politic. Now the problem of which institution to have that kind of debate? It may be that knowledge will go outside of the university, displacement of the university as the center of knowledge. A loss for the university to become a privatized industry to trains its students for marketable pursuit. Where and when to engage a criticism of market and neoliberalism?
Conundrum where to prove the importance of critical theory and thinking we have to prove their marketability. We are waging a fight over values in a field in which the market seeks to be the only measure of value. Not only critical thinking but also basic rights and entitlements. refashioned as 'investments' and 'disposable goods'.
Non-tenured academic workers as a bridge between institutional crisis of knowledge and the production of disposable populations. Humanities, languages, or critical thinking as classes of workers that are substitutable. Universities are actively participating in deciding which population of workers will be disposable, and which will not. Students are recognizing that their lives and educations are being sacrificed for a set of market calculations. University reproduces and hardens rigid class stratifications.
>> students and workers alliances into the street and university buildings are being sized or occupied to draw attention to the media. Who can afford university and to teach there when knowledge is becoming a market standard? Result rage but a question on how to make sense to occupations and gatherings?

21: Spaces of appearance, politics of exposure
Question of critical agency in multiple forms: in doing, undoing, being undone and becoming + multiple forms of giving and giving up.
Seeking to map a differential, multi-sited topology of radical transformational action. How present regimes of dispossession are displaced into trying to create an alternative to the present. In dispossession, a commonality of political resistance and transformative action. The main concern is the process of erasure of the embodied subject through the violence of neo-colonial, capitalist, racial, gendered, and sexualized regulatory schemas. Taking into account the politics of precarious and dispossessed subjectivity to claim right and desire to apolitical otherwise.
Multi-sited aggregations, not as nostalgic communitarian politics, but to displace conventional conceptions of the 'public sphere' (polis) as the particular spatial location of the political life. Affective politics of the performative resonating with Arendt's 'space of appearance' through political action. But from space of appearance to spacing appearance, not fixed space but a performative place of 'taking place'. 'Appearance' not as a surface phenomenality but it opens up to concern what is performed in ways that avow the unperformable. How 'appearance' relate to 'spacing', 'taking place' when bodies in the street? How appearance is related to exposure(the violence of the polis, others, other places, other politics)?
If no appearance apart from social normativity and imposed invisibleness, the challenge is to mobilize 'appearance' without taking for guaranteed its naturalized epistemological premises (visibility, transparency) used to reify political subjectivity. Through stabilizing norms the subjects fulfill their appearance to be recognized as human. Can anybody appear? How certain forms of corporeal engagement become available to normative cultures? The problem of appearing when face to face to strangers, dissonance. Openness to possibility as crucial to the radical, agonistic democracy.

Butler > There are all kinds of assemblies. When people take to the streets, they form a body politic that even if it doesn't speak, is still forms asserting its presence as plural and obdurate bodily life. What is the political significance of assembling as bodies, not individuals but social movement? No need to be organized (Leninist assumption) or have a single message (logocentric conceit) to exercise a certain performative force in the public domain. 'we are here' of the collective body as 'we are still here', 'we have not yet been disposed of'. Collective assembly of bodies is an exercise of the popular will, a way of asserting in bodily form, a presupposition of democracy, that political and public institutions are bound to represent the people, in ways that establish equality as a presupposition of social and political existence.
When dispossession of commons for a population, the assemblies fulfill not only rage but the very social organization of principles of equality. Bodies on the street are precarious, but also obdurate and persisting, insisting on their continuing and collective 'thereness' and recently without hierarchy exemplifying the principles of equal treatment that they are demanding if public institutions. Those bodies enact a message performatively. If there is a crowd there is also a media event across time and space, some set of global connections, a global different from the 'global market' + some set of values in the form of a collective resistance: defense of collective precarity and persistence in making equality and refusing to become disposable.

Why Science Is Better with Communism? | Alexandra Elbakyan

not only poor but also schools don't have access >> knowledge for all + donations problem of the business model of publishers but for first dissemination of knowledge
Piracy because violate copyright but the rights of intellectual property (publishers), turning them for free is like theft according to the law
debate because some are trying to forbid the free distribution on the web but focus on the debate on censorship and privacy. Defense of intellectual property in the web requires censorship so is a violation of freedom of speech + interference in private life by the government which monitors users who violate copyright.
The very concept of copyright, intellectual property, is never questioned. Knowledge can be someone property?

In history, this discourse can appear in the idea of communism (struggle against inequality, the revolt of the suppressed classes, whose members don’t have any power against those who have concentrated basic resources and power in their hands, with the goal of redistributing these resources). Today there is still an informational inequality (access for students and employees but not for institutions and the general public).
The idea of communism works in the world of scholarship, however, revolution is different from the mass redistribution of property in society but VS theft. This is not a revolution but small protest against property right and unequal distribution of wealth

Theft as protest (robin hood, noble bandits, aldar kose.. ). If the state doesn't work well, people have to solve the problem themselves. Sci-Hub VS inequality of access to information.
Hermes as the god of boundaries and transitions, raise of the lower class in ancient Greece > property related to keep something within boundaries. Theft as boundary-crossing and trade.

Then Hermes becomes the god of knowledge and begin of science. Science begins from theft in its openness. (Adam and Eva and the tree of knowledge + Myth of Prometheus)

Scholarly journals as means of communication so paradox of closed access VS essence of communication
Science as the knowledge of secrets. Secrets as something private, the essence of private property. Disclosure of the secret as ceases of property. Communism as knowledge is shared. (Plato's caste of intellectuals)

>>Science, as a part of the culture, is in conflict with private property. Accordingly, scholarly communication is a dual conflict. What open access is doing is returning science to its essential roots.
+
Proudhon - 'property is theft' > anarchy and science as inseparable

• problem of the use of passwords to access documents but if in the wrong hands they could access personal info > passwords doesn't allow the use of private info
• problem of researcher labors cut out from earning money > compensation researcher/compensation publisher but system of donations, system for funding
• LibGen =/=SciHub > LibGen is a repository, doesn't download new articles but more to preserve the already downloaded

My texts

Constituting an archive | Stuart Hall | 2001

No archive from thin air, each archive has a pre-history, prior conditions of existence. Tribute to volunteers archiving (African and Asian visual art).
Constitution of an archive as a significant moment in which a collection of works start to be ordered and considered as an object of reflection and debate. End of creative innocence and beginning of self-consciousness, self-reflexivity in an artistic movement. The apparatus of 'a history' takes place. Not a museum of dead works but a 'living archive' as an on-going, never-completed project. The task is to take on the surface what existed, hitherto, only 'in solution 'as within the flow of the work itself.
'The Living archive' as the end of a phase of work and beginning for another. The idea of a living archive of the diaspora:

• living - present, on-going, continuing, unfinished, open-ended.

New work related to that body of book but only as it inflects or departs from it.
Living VS tradition, David Scott > 'tradition' as a discursive concept that performs to connect authoritatively a relation among past, community, and identity. Not neutral but operate in its own constructs. Everything hangs on that moment until a doubt or disagreement offers an agonistic challenge and another interpretation. On-going dispute of the discursive tradition.

• diaspora - it operates under erasure, deconstructive operation. It recognizes the status of an archive situated between the metropolis and periphery (colonizer and colonized).
  

Binary conception of difference and identity in relation to copy/original culture, endlessly doomed to be separated. Founded on the construction of an exclusionary frontier, the 'other', and a fixed opposition inside/outside.
Derrida's notion of 'differance' > not binary differences but boundaries as places de passage, positional and relational meaning in a spectrum without a beginning or end. Difference essntial to meaning but not finally fixed, slippage in the semiosis of culture, dialogically re-appropriated. The final meaning remains a fantasy haunted by lack or excess but never graspable in the plentitude of the presence to itself. Visual signifier whose reverberations are broad and deep, but the power of reference is less precise than the linguistic sign.

Diasporic work as many different style, diasporic attitude (inter-war and post-war modernism, documentary impulse, politicised signifier of the black art movement..).
Kobena Mercer - 'diaspora culture and the Dialogic Imagination'> across range of cultural forms, there is a 'syncretic' dynamic that critically appropriates elements from the master code of the dominant culture and 'creolises' them, disarticulating given signs and rearticulating their symbolic meaning otherwise. Interruption to enter critically in a discourse and reopen the closed structure.

• archive > Foucault, the archive is in between the distinction 'language' and 'the corpus', the inert body of works which is produced and survive. The archive has specific boundaries, not natural but critically specified, not unified as a single collection but neither amorphous as an inert corpus of work. It is a discursive formation but the heterogeneity of materials, subjects, and themes makes the 'formation' not easy to define. The temptation to group only things which are 'the same', perhaps some unity of 'style', constant manner of statements, but rejected. Actually no continuous field but full of gaps intertwined with one another, interplays of differences, distances, substitutions, transformations. Rupture, significant breaks, transformations, and unpredicted departures. Not mythical collective subject but discover it from its very dispersion, discern the regularity in its heterogeneity - 'an order in their successive

appearances, correlations in their simultaneity, assignable positions in a common space, a reciprocal functioning, linked and hierarchized transformations'.

The application of this perspective in the visual archive is hardly begun, but an emphasis on transformations. The heterogeneous practice of collecting and archiving, partly public (conscious policies of collection and selection, display and access, criteria of values in a community) and partly private (individual collections, not exhibited, as a kind of archaeological practice, most buried and inaccessible, end of the archive).

The activity of archiving involves professional skills and expertise: producers, curators (select and situate the work), critics and historians (informed climate of the context and the discussions and debates which draw a network of meanings and interpretations). The complexity of the interpenetration of the archival practice between artistic practice and historical conditions.
Technological developments have transformed qualitatively those practices of archiving, not only for the preservation but in dissemination, circulation and wider access. >> question of technology and access as fundamental to a 'living archive' as the aesthetic, artistic and interpretative practices.
Foucault > archive is inevitably heterogeneous, but it cannot be simply open-ended. Not simple open to any kind of production in any context, without any ordering or internal regularity of principle. However, is not possible to define it from its rules, because there are active participants in defining the archive, and are defined by the state of affair of the archive at that moment. This kind of archive is a continuous production. The archivist cannot bring a particular aesthetic or principles, a template of universal practices winnowed of criteria of inclusion and exclusion. David Scott > tradition as embodied discourse, which operates in and through the stakes which it creates.
Archiving in this context is a practice that both have limits and disciplines but not a definitive sense of origin, boundary or termination. It is impossible to describe an archive in its totality. The 'living archive' contradicts the fantasy of completeness. Extension of the limits of the contribution at that moment. It cannot be complete because present practice immediately adds to it, and every new interpretation inflects it differently. It can be about the past but always re-read in the light of the present and future. Walter Benjamin > it always flashes up before us as a moment of danger.
Thus it is committed to inclusiveness, impossibility to foretell its future. It insists on heterodoxy, cannot be a prisoner of a single line, principle or style, no matter how powerful or universal it is. Not inert historical collections but active, dialogic, relation to present questions on the past, and each present puts a different question. The archive has to be rich, varied and eclectic to bear the different interpretations and allow them to battle out their difference in relation to the different text and inter-texts which the archive makes available.
>> Heterogeneity, multiplicity of discourses, are the texts which make the archive live.
Critic, artist, historian.. (imperative of interpretation) VS Archivist (disinterestedness). requires attention, humility for the real discontinuities and contingency of history, since the archive is not only continuities, discursive links in time, but also paradigm shifts, the moment of pattern or period breaks when rupture and new paradigms come into place. The most important task of the archive is to allow to interrogate those moments of high creativity and we cannot see from our privileged position where those ruptures occur or lead. It breaks barricades, dismantles or lowered the struggle through the light of the archive.
The practice of 'archiving' is thus always a critical on, always historically located, always contestatory, since archives are in part constituted by force of cultural power and authority; always open to the futurity and contingency, the relative autonomy of artistic practice; always an engagement, an interruption in a settled field, which is to enter critically into existing configurations to re-open the closed structures into which they have ossified.

Réponses a forum "Journalisme philosophique" | Wu Ming

Foucault > more journalist than philosopher but interconnected. The problem between event and actuality. Who are we in the actual moment?
What is the 'journalisme philosophhique', both for the journalist and the philosopher?

Wu Ming > also the historical novel face up the same question. Similar to philosophy and journalism.
the place where archive and street coincide:'Investigative report'. As the best contemporary journalism. The connection between walk (to places and interview) and the work on documents. The same for philosophy (Foucault as an example) between investigation in place and work in archives and libraries. Street = Archive.
Different events with their documents and the actual movement to get them, but a single event. Singularity. Repetition reveals the difference.

Foucault, libraries as a place where you get in contact with the 'powers of the impossible' which comes from the big number of words, documents, info, reproductions of reproductions...
Imaginary between the book and the lamp. Today in the same object, the screen, the computer connected to the web.
>> STREET - ARCHIVE - WEB
Web as the place where the archive/library and the street becomes the same thing.
Foucault's books or Saviano's Gomorra or Q and Altai as both historical fiction and philosophy.

Which is the role of the truth in philosophical journalism?

Foucault in 1983 Berkeley's conference, dichotomy between retoric/parresia, talk to persuade independently from the personal opinion of the speaker and talk to say the best as possible what you really think (Discorso e verità nella Grecia Antica).
A different way of say, so a different truth in journalism/philosophy/fiction:

• fiction as truth(parresia)+persuasion to suspension of disbelief. In literature, Foucault's discourse doesn't exist because of the multiplicity of points of view. But sometimes it expresses a truth of an epoch
• journalism, from 1950 American 'new journalism', use of fiction's technique as 'indirect free speech'. Sometimes the reporter disappears and multiplicity of voices. AìIt seems against the parresia but actually is an amplification of it.
• philosophy > Walter Benjamin's 'Passages', eliminate personal comments to let his materials to talk and create the structure.