EX LIBRIS: Commonplace Books

Page 1

“COMMONPLACE BOOKS”

EX LIBRIS GRR.AAAAARG.ORG

“COMMONPLACE BOOKS”

h!p://grr.aaaaarg.org/txt/collection/detail.php?id=52333d4d307888cb75000006

15 September 2013 and ongoing A curatorial- editorial experiment by Anna-Sophie Springer Dating back to antiquity and with particular popularity in the Renaissance period, commonplace books are a type of scholarly notebook containing a collection of excerpted and copied passages that a person compiled and stored for future purposes such as reference and quotation. How to actually keep and organize a commonplace book was a small science in itself. John Locke’s text A New Method of Making Common-Place-Books (1706) suggested some techniques—one of which is a system of classifying and coding entries into a growing subject index, one’s personal potential encyclopedia. While physical notebooks remain a treasure to keep and even if we do not yet live in a truly paperless age, our commonplace of today is that we access and store a huge amount of information digitally. By engaging an online pirate library, specifically the Arg library, “Commonplace Books” seeks to address shi"s in how we approach notions such as the “common” or the “public” more openly and actively than ever. The imaginary is not formed in opposition to reality as its denial or compensation; it grows among signs, from book to book, in the interstice of repetitions and commentaries; it is born and takes shape in the interval between books. It is a phenomenon of the library. ~ Michel Foucault

A PDF has been created from excerpted and copied passages of thematically relevant publications available in digital form in the Arg library. It has been uploaded back onto the platform and a link will appear in the “New Texts” section on h!p://grr.aaaaarg.org making it available to all network users.

This book made available by the Internet Archive.

Is it not possible to reexamine, as a legitimate extension of this kind of analysis, the privileges of the subject? Clearly, in undertaking an internal and architectonic analysis of a work (whether it be a literary text, a philosophical system, or a scientific work) and in delimiting psychological and biographical references, suspicions arise concerning the absolute nature and creative role of the subject. But the subject should not be entirely abandoned. It should be reconsidered, not to restore the theme of an originating subject, but to seize its functions, its intervention in discourse, and its system of dependencies. We should suspend the typical questions: how does a free subject penetrate the density of things and endow them with meaning; how does it accomplish its design by animating the rules of discourse from within? Rather, we should ask: under what conditions and through what forms can an entity like the subject appear in the order of discourse; what position does it occupy; what functions does it exhibit; and what rules does it follow in each type of discourse? In short, the subject (and its substitutes) must be stripped of its creative role and analysed as a complex and variable function of discourse. The author—or what I have called the 'author-function'—is undoubtedly only one of the possible specifications of the subject and, considering past historical transformations, it appears that the form, the complexity, and even the existence of this function are far from immutable. We can easily imagine a culture where discourse would circulate without any need for an author. Discourses, whatever their status, form, or value, and regardless of our manner of handling them, would unfold in a pervasive anonymity. No longer the tiresome repetitions: ' W h o is the real author?' 'Have we proof of his authenticity and originality?' 'What has he revealed of his most profound self in his language?' New questions will be heard: 'What are the modes of existence of this discourse?' 'Where does it come from; how is it circulated; who controls it?' 'What placements are determined for possible subjects?' ' W h o can fulfill these diverse functions of the subject?' Behind all these questions we would hear little more than the murmur of indifference: 'What matter who's speaking?'

314 MODERNITY AND ITS DISCONTENTS

There are many that I know and they know it. They are all of them repeating and I hear it. I love it and I tell it. I love it and now I will write it. This is now a history of my love of it. I hear it and I love it and I write it. They repeat it. They live it and I see it and I hear it. They live it and I hear it and I see it and I love it and now and always I will write it. There are many kinds of men and women and I know it. They repeat it and I hear it and I love it. This is now a history of the way they do it. This is now a history of the way I love it. Gertrude Stein, The Making of Americans, 1934

GEORGES DIDI-HUBERMAN

IMAGES

Image not available

Translated from the French by John Goodman The Pennsylvania State University Press University Park, Pennsylvania

Computer-Generated Text

In 1990, Roy Ascott, one of the early and influential visionaries of digital art, stated in his essay "Is There Love in the Telematic Embrace?" that computer-mediated communication networking "makes explicit in its technology and protocols what is implicit in all aesthetic experiences, where that experience is seen as being as much creative in the act of their viewer's perception as it is in the artist's production" (2003, 233). In the context of this statement, Ascott refers to Roland Barthes's "From Work to Text" (1971) and to Derrida when he speaks of"electronic difference," reiterating a connection that also has been made by other theoreticians of digital art. George P. Landow referred to this connection in the title of his book Hypertext: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology, explaining, "Contemporary theory proposes and hypertext disposes; or, to be less theologically aphoristic, hypertext embodies many of the ideas and attitudes proposed by Barthes, Derrida, Foucault, and others" (1997, 91). The alternatively navigable hypertext seemed to be the bringing into focused realization of principles that had otherwise seemed abstract and difficult. Hypertext was considered "a vindication of postmodern literary theory" (Bolter 1992, 24). However, this association was based on simplification and misinterpretation. When Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault were proposing the author's death or dismissal, they meant the ownership of text in terms of creativity and originality, not in terms of composition. In his 1968 essay "The Death of the Author," Barthes declared "it is language which speaks, not the author" (1977, 143). Foucault, in his 1969 essay"Qu'est-ce qu'un auteur?," argued in a similar vein that the author is not the producer or owner of her text. Jay David Bolter's notion, that "the text is not simply an expression of the author's emotions, for the reader helps to make the text," seems to confirm this idea (1991, 153). Just as the author is determined by the discourses to which she is subject, so her reader is determined by his discourses and will consequently read the text in his own way. However, when Bolter relates this perspective on text to the technology of electronic writing, he conceptualizes the reader as "the author's adversary, seeking to make the text over in a direction that the author did not anticipate" -not, therefore, because of his own discourse history, but because of the option he may exercise to navigate the hypertext according to his own desires (154). ln the same vein, Landow declares with reference to the linking in electronic text the "reallocation of power from author to reader" (1999, 156). 92

TEXT MACHINES

The author's loss of sovereignty over her text is mitigated by the loss of control over the text's combinatorics; the issues of ownership and power are reconnected to interpersonal opposition, which Foucault dismissed in favor of more complex structures. Hypertext theorists did not support discourse theory but rather betrayed it. The "authorization" of the reader carried out by this shift of power was part of a general rhetoric of liberation of the audience, which can also be found-and reveals its historic tradition-in the discourse ofinteractivity and the degradation of the artist as heralded by John Cage and Roy Ascott in the 1960s. This valuation of the audience-and devaluation of the artistis supported by the theory of interpretation promoted by Wolfgang Iser and Stanley Fish in the 1960s, giving the reader a much larger role in the author-text-reader triad. Both were seen as having anticipated hypertext-"When Wolfgang lser and Stanley Fish argue that the reader constitutes the text in the act of reading they are describing hypertext" (Bolter 1992, 24)-while in fact, by giving the reader more power in establishing the meaning of a text, they did not claim her influence in shaping the physical body of the text, as did the debate on hypertext. However, even if Barthes's and Foucault's notion of the death or disappearance of the author is misunderstood, the author writing a hypertext is not dead or powerless; nor does the reader who configures the text bear the same relation to writing as the author. It is the author who sets up the hyperlinks from which the reader can choose. It is the author, not the reader, who usually has access to the files that define the online content and thus controls the text after it has been published. In addition, one can argue that the hyperlinks allow the author to control the reader's associations: while in traditional text the reader encountering an abstract or ambiguous word uses her own concepts of that word based on her experience, in hypertext, the reader will usually follow the link if one is provided, to see what content the author relates to that word. Hence one can even say the author's annotations overwrite the reader's connotations (Matussek 1998). Apart from hypertext, there is another genre of digital literature that addresses authorship and suggests the death of the author. In text machines and story generators, the text is automatically created by a computer program. Although in the discussion of hypertext today the role of the author is understood in a way that is much more complex than was the case in the early 1990s, with respect to computer-generated text, the question of authorship still requires a thorough critical exploration. Ironically, in TEXT MACHINES

93

Introduction: The Resonances of Loss 3

Figure 1.1 The burning of the Vijecnica, the National and University Library of Bosnia, Sarajevo, August 1992. Photograph taken by Kemal Hadzic.

Against Expression

Abbreviations

Dates are abbreviated by the convention s. (saeculum) and a r o m a n numeral for the century, followed by in., med., or ex. in superscript, indicating the beginning, middle or the end of a century, or by superscript n u m b e rs 1 or 2 for the first or second half, transition between two centuries is indicated by an oblique stroke; for example, s. xiii'\ s. xii , s.xi/xii. Statistical symbols used are r (correlation coefficient), s.d. (standard deviation), % refers to the chi-square test for independence (Harnett 1982 pp. 708 ff); values of x above 3.84 were considered significant at a - 0.05. Institutions are abbreviated as follows: 2

AB BA BG BL BLB BM BN BNF Bodley Bodmer BR BSB CL GA GHB GNM HAB HLB HLHB KB KM LB Libr. MCC MMW ÔNB OSzK

Athenaeumbibliotheek, Deventer Biblioteca Ambrosiana, Milan Bibliothěque generále British Library, L o n d o n Badische Landesbibliothek, Karlsruhe Bibliothěque municipale Biblioteca Nacionál, Bibliothěque nationale, Biblioteca Nazionale Bibliothěque nationale de France, Paris Bodleian Library, Oxford Bibliotheca Bodmeriana, Geneva Bibliothěque Royale, Brussels Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, M u n i c h Cathedral Library G e m e e n t e Archief Gesamthochschulbibliothek, Kassel Germanisches N a t i o n a l m u s e u m , N u r e m b e r g Herzog August Břbliothek, Wolfenbuttel Hessische Landesbibliothek, Fulda Hessische Landes- u n d Hochschulbibliothek, D a r m s t a d t Kongelige Biblioték, Koninklijke Bibliotheek Kunstmuseum Landesbibliothek Librije St Walburgskerk, Z u t p h e n M u s e u m H e t Catharijneconvent, Utrecht M u s e u m M e e r m a n n o - W e s t r e e n i a n u m , T h e Hague Ôsterreichische Nationalbibliothek, Vienna Országos Széchényi Kônyvtár, Budapest

PML PRO RMO SB SBB SBPK StB StfB UB UL ULB V&A Vat. WAB WAG ZB

Pierpont Morgan Library, N e w York Public Record Office, L o n d o n Rijksmuseum voor O u d h e d e n , Leiden Stadtbibliothek Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin Staatsbibliothek Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Berlin Staatsbibliothek Stiftsbibliothek Universit채tsbibliothek, Universiteitsbibliodieek University Library Universit채ts- u n d Landesbibliothek Victoria and Albert M u s e u m Library, L o n d o n Bibliotheca Apostolica Vaticana, Vatican City Wissenschaftliche Allgemeinbibliothek, Erfurt Walters Art Gallery, Baltimore Zentralbibliothek, Zurich

An Archival Impulse

9

Hirschhorn. Deleuze Monument. 2000. Courtesy Barbara Gladstone Gallery, New York.

appeared in Amsterdam, but in the red-light district; the Deleuze monument in Avignon, but in a mostly North African quarter; and the Bataille monument in Kassel (during Documenta XI), but in a largely Turkish neighborhood. These (dis)placements are fitting: the radical status of the guest philosopher is matched by the minor status of the host community, and the encounter suggests a temporary refunctioning of the monument from a univocal structure that obscures antagonisms (philosophical and political, social and economic) to a counterhegemonic archive that might be used to articulate such differences.18 The consistency of these artists, writers, and philosophers is not obvious: although most are modern Europeans, they vary from obscure to canonical and from esoteric to engagé. Among the artists of the altars, the reflexive abstractions 18. I mean “minor” in the sense given the term by Deleuze and Guattari in Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, trans. Dana Polan (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986). The minor is an intensive, often vernacular use of a language or form, which disrupts its official or institutional functions. Opposed to the major but not content with the marginal, it invites “collective arrangements of utterance.”

bricolage, 62, 85, 88–90, 131–32 Brin, David, 105–8, 164 broadband, 80 Brown, John Seely, 62, 131 Bush, Vannevar, 51 Cambridge University, 37 Carruthers, Mary, 28 Catholic Church, 37–39, 98 Compact Disc (CD), 57, 64–65 China: printing in, 40 clay tablets, 33 Codd, Ted, 75 codex, 35–36 Cole, Simon, 78 connection fees, 83 consent, 137, 170 cookies, 7, 169–71, 178 copying, 53, 56; digital, 60–62 copyright, 98 credit bureaus, 8 Cronkite, Walter, 44 Cuil, 177 cuneiform, 31–33 Curry, Michael, 78 databases, 82–83; for marketing, 8; relational, 75–76 digital copy, 56, 60–62 digital format. Seedigitization digital image, 55 Digital Millennium Copyright Act, 145, 185 Digital Privacy Rights Infrastructure (DPR), 144–54 Digital Rights Management (DRM), 144–54, 173–74, 184–85, 189–90; meta-information for, 149, 173; as surveillance infrastructure, 148–49 digitization, 52–62, 87, 92, 100 DNA information, 158, 160 dossiers. Seeinformation dossiers Dutch citizen registry, 141, 157–58 DVD, 64–65, 145 eBay, 93, 95 Ecommerce, 131 Egypt, 32 Eisenstein, Elizabeth, 37, 38

READING MACHINES

lO-II After the passage through the

most of the sheets of Greek Psalter it was noticed that a line of Psalm 72 ('He shall have dominion also from sea to sea') had been inadvertently omitted. In most copies the verse was written in by hand in the press of

the

printing house.

The

remaining sheets of the run

had the

first

few

lines reset in

a smaller type so as to

squeeze in the omitted matter.

The

plates

show

of c. 9. a. 2 with manuscript addition and G. 12028 with reset type.

sig. II

Original page-size

200x131 204x144

mm (c.9.a.2) and mm (g. 12028).

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30

Ka(llY Mulvihill running LNS's offse( press, December 9, 1970. Andy Marx, Dockery.

Slotin selling oHicers scrlltinize

Gmlt Spe(k!ec! Bil'c! in Atlan(a, Geurgia, At rigl1t, police "Everyone \VI1O met loved said pllOtogrJ-

pher Carter Tomassi, "1n 11is photo, 1'm tl1e Bil'C!."

Carter Tomassi,

charmecl tl1e

cops into reacling

6.2 Bookblock, endleaves and sewing stations

(35

A [a]

B fdl

[e] i

r—

M

100 mm

.

1

1

r

F i g u r e 6.1 T w o palterns of disposition (A and ])) of the sewing stations of 94 byzantine bindings in the Vatican Library) as derived from the data of Federici and Houlis ( 1 9 8 8 ). Broken lines indicate change-over stations. T h e distances are m e a n values based on the following n u m b e r s : [a] 2 5 , [b] 2 8 , |c] 13, |d] 10, [e] 13, |f| 5,

7.4 Sewing

113

[a]

[b]

[c]

[d]

[e]

[]_ i •

[f]

[g]

4I

i m

i

j

[M 100 mm

i

1

1

r—i

1

1

F i g u r e 7.13 Main patterns of the disposition of sewing stations on 112 carolingian bindings. T h e continuous vertical lines show the main sewing stations, the broken lines represent the next theoretical equidistant spacing; the dotted lines indicate the change-over stations. T h e numerals give the number of bindings in each group: |a| 8, [b] 2 0 , [cj 3 5 , [dl 36, all from St Gall; |e] nine from Salzburg and Reichenau; single cases are [f] (BLB Reich. 7 4 , from St Denis) and (g) (SG Cod. 2 9 6 , probably from Fulda).

9.3 Textblock and endleaves

179

Figure 9.2 Endleaf constructions tin gothic bindings: fa) to [If], modified outer quires of the textblock; [i] to separate endleaf quires. A few other [ypes are: [q|, endleaves in London bindings (after Middlelon 1963 fig. |r| to It), endleaves in Oxford bindings (after Kcr 1954 pp. 226IT.). Tlie flange shown in | b | . |f|, | g | , | m | , |ÂŤJ [qj usually reaches to o n e third of the width of the board; types | a ] , | b j , [i] and [I] occur on both parchment paper textblocks.

[p], 21); and and

F i g u r e 9.32 D i a g r a ms of various outer profiles of tlie boards of gothic bindings, listed in T a b l e 9.12. R o u n d i n g is shown as stippled areas, flat bevels are blank, sharp ending of the bevel is m a r k e d with solid line; inner bevel shown with dotted line.

Appendix

Print vs. electrons 100 differences and similarities between paper and pixel.

PRODUCTION 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29

Screen colour consistency 300 dpi A(x), (e.g. A4) Snap to grid Postscript I/O error Ethernet Glowing ink Image not found Magnifying glass MoirĂŠ nth colour Pantone Stock photography Proofreading Test print Higher resolution Page layout software Spines Optimising for print Cutting Recycled paper Hollow punch PDF logo Advertising space Paid promotional flyer Ink Full-colour insert Imposition Binding

159

Cross-browser consistency 72 dpi (x)GA (e.g. XVGA) CSS constraints Error 404 Wi-Fi Flash (Adobe) Can’t connect to server Magnifying icon Excessive JPEG compression Custom programming Optimised palette Google images Debugging Draft version Anti-aliasing Content management system Partial browser incompatibility Optimising for search Screen format White text on black screen Layers JPEG logo Banner Pop-up window Brilliance Picture gallery Sorting with tags Website structure

STRUCTURE (INTERNAL) 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51

Colour addition Centerfold Contrast Dot TIFF PDF (fixed layout) vector graphics front cover externally illuminated local link paper weight Plastification RAM Best viewed in bright light Fire damage Fibres Turns yellow Consumed in local time Slow replication Hardcover Paperback Static

Colour subtraction Background image Brightness Pixel JPEG EPUB (reflowability) Bitmap Home page Backlit Remote link Download time Use of 3D/shadows kbps Best viewed in dim light File corruption Waves Reveals its pixel matrix Consumed in global time Instant replication Paid access Free access Cinematic

STRUCTURE (EXTERNAL) 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61

Printer Barcode ISSN Local storage backup Back catalogue Optimised distribution Stocks Second (nth) edition Headquarters Shipping strike

Sysadmin WHOIS Online ISSN Remote server backup Internal search engines/archive.org Optimised server configuration Link on the home page Database rebuilt Hosting No connection

EVALUATION 62 63 64 65 66 67

Readership Certified distribution Distributor list Referenced by other media Low copy/user ratio Promotional copies

160

Unique visits Guaranteed bandwidth Access logs Incoming links High copy/user ratio RSS

REAL AND VIRTUAL SPACE 68 69

Bookshelf Shelf space

Database Web host storage space

CONVENTIONS 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82

Table of contents Promotional T-shirt Handwritten font Captions News department Page format Print Bibliography Name Paper bookmark Page numbering Clippings Import dialogue window

Menu Textual link Pixel font Alt text tag Blog Scrolling Save Hyperlinks Domain name Browser bookmark Posting date Cache Online form

CONSUMPTION 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91

Reader Subscriber Subscription Reproduction prohibited Syndication Freebie Shipping Cover price Dust

User Registered user Push technology Digital rights management Creative commons Free download Spamming Password-protected access Dust

GESTURES 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100

Flipping through Smell of ink Photocopying Annotating Underlining Fingerprint on coating Folding Locally read Handing over

Clicking Sound of mouse clicks Copy/paste Comments Underlining Fingerprint on screen Scaling Remotely read Forwarding

161

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TOMAS SCHMIT

90 Degree Angles, Street or Field Version 8 performers (4 male, 4 female) sweatsuits and tennis shoes; each carrying one sports object (a basketball, a football, tennis racket, etc.) begin walking or running at any desired speed from one location, turning left or right at right angles when hearing “left” or “right” instructions given by alternated male or female voice over loudspeaker or megaphone. Female performers respond only to female voice, male performers only to male voice. Event ends either when performers return to original location or move beyond reach of instructions. Score for gym version. 1966

Fluxus Performance Workbook, ed. Ken Friedman, Owen Smith & Lauren Sawchyn, Performance Research e-Publications, 2002

PA U L S H A R I T S

Piano Piece No.1 Performer places various objects — toys, chess pieces, concrete blocks, wood blocks, bricks, glass vases, rubber balls, etc. — on the closed lid of a grand piano. He may arrange these objects very carefully and with deliberation. He may construct a building out of the blocks, or arrange the chess pieces, or arrange the various toys, etc. When he has completed his arrangement, he lifts the great lid suddenly. The piano must be placed so that when the lid opens, the objects slide toward the audience. 1962

Zyklus Water pails or bottles are placed around the perimeter of a circle. Only one is filled with water. Performer inside the circle picks the filled vessel and pours it into the one on the right, then picks the one on the right and pours it into the next one on the right, etc., till all the water is spilled or evaporated. D AT E U N K N O W N

Sanitas No.2 Auditorium or theater should be dark. Performers throw small objects, coins, toys, etc., into the audience and then try to find these objects using flashlights. D AT E U N K N O W N

Sanitas No.151 250 nails are hammered. D AT E U N K N O W N

Sanitas No.13 Telephone time service is relayed to the audience for an hour. D AT E U N K N O W N

Sanitas No.22 Performer reads aloud an entire newspaper, advertisements and all. D AT E U N K N O W N

Sanitas No.35 Blank sheets are handed to the audience without any explanations. 5 minutes waiting. D AT E U N K N O W N

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CONFRONTING QUESTIONING THE ENDS OF A CERTAIN HISTORY OF ART

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permissible and infringing expression twists elusively with the vagaries of copyright law and enforcement.

Google Google, a multibillion-dollar Internet search engine company, will no doubt strike some readers as an unlikely hero for illustrating the conflict between copyright and free speech. But First Amendment protagonists are not limited to individuals and media entities that produce new speech. Our First Amendment–inspired commitment to the ‘‘widest possible dissemination of information from diverse and antagonistic sources’’ also embraces institutions that make the existing store of knowledge and culture, ranging from ancient Greek plays to vintage sound recordings, widely available in useful form. Such speech disseminators have traditionally included libraries, schools, universities, and even the postal service, through its preferential rates for printed material. Together, these institutions collect vast inventories of recorded expression, organize the store of knowledge so that patrons can actually make use of it, and make information widely available to the public. That collection, organization, and diffusion of knowledge plays a vital role in our system of free expression. Yet important as these traditional institutions have been, their capacity as repositories, catalogers, and disseminators of information has been limited by storage space, transport capability, geography, and, indeed, the relative imperviousness of the physical media of print. As a result, they are now increasingly supplanted by the Internet, which puts information from diverse sources at our fingertips to an extent exceeding the wildest dreams of previous generations. Digital communication and storage hold the promise of making virtually the entire store of the world’s recorded knowledge and expression available online. Digitized collections can also be organized in ways that dramatically improve our ability to find and use the information we need. Indeed, the technologies of search engines, hyperlinking, and bookmarks can transform library collections—which traditionally have been composed of vast numbers of distinct books—into an integral part of the World Wide Web. It can enable us seamlessly to discover information within books and follow connections among books and other materials. As Wired magazine cofounder Kevin Kelly graphically puts it, ‘‘Once text is digital, books seep out of their bindings and weave themselves together.’’28 Enter Google. Google’s search engine provides Internet users access to billions of Web pages, responding to users’ keyword search requests with a from mein kampf to google

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high degree of precision and recall in a fraction of a second.29 The company earns several billion dollars per year selling twelve-word ‘‘sponsored links,’’ unobtrusive yet highly effective advertising snippets targeted to users’ search queries. That vehicle has made it financially feasible—indeed presumably highly profitable—for the company to advance the Internet’s speechenhancing promise, first, by scanning into searchable, digital format vast amounts of information and expression that have thus far not been available on the Internet and, second, by applying its search engine algorithm to text, pictures, music, and video. Google has incurred copyright holders’ wrath on a number of fronts. I focus here on two particularly noteworthy Google initiatives, the Google Book Search Project and Google News. The Google Book Search Project aspires to make all of the world’s printed books available for digital search, without charge, for anyone with access to the Internet.30 To that end, Google has thus far contracted to scan, at its cost, significant portions of the print collections of the libraries of several elite universities (as of this writing: Harvard, Stanford, Oxford, Michigan, Wisconsin, all campuses of the University of California, and the Universidad Complutense Madrid), as well as the New York Public Library. Those libraries contain some 15 million unique titles, which represent about one-half of all titles contained in the collections of the world’s libraries.31 Google’s costs for scanning the books have been estimated at between $10 and $25 per book.32 Its investment in this initial stage of its project would thus amount to between $150 million and $375 million (and possibly more if Google finds it necessary to scan some titles from more than one source). Because of copyright, the Google Book Search Project will be something far less than a universal, fully accessible and searchable digital library of the world’s printed books. Google will maintain a digital copy of each book on its searchable database and will give a copy to the library from whose collection the book was scanned. And by entering a search query in the Google search engine, users will be able to browse the full text of public domain materials. But for books that were first published after 1922 and thus might still be under U.S. copyright, users will be able to see only a three-sentence ‘‘snippet,’’ comprising the sentence that contains the search term and the sentence before and after that sentence, together with the book’s bibliographic information.33 When a search term appears more than three times in a book, only the first three snippets will appear. Hence, Google will display no more than nine sentences of a potentially in-copyright book in response to a book search query. (Under Google’s Partner Program, a publisher or author controlling the applicable copyrights can license Google to scan books and 24

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copyright’s paradox

display a couple pages or more of a book’s text in response to a user search query. But I focus here only on unlicensed scanning and displays, which, as we will see, would necessarily make up the lion’s share of Google’s project.) Even with those significant constraints for displaying unlicensed post1922 books, Google’s Book Search is a highly useful research tool. Its users will be able to identify which books are likely most germane to a specific inquiry, to locate the pages on which the search term appears, and to get a limited sense of what the book might say with regard to the subject of the user’s search. Google will also list local libraries where the book might be found and post links to third-party sites, like Amazon.com, where users may purchase the book or view or download portions of it for a price. For the Internet user, then, Google’s Book Search Project is roughly akin to having ready access to a virtual card catalog for a significant portion of the world’s books, with the huge added value of being able to apply search engine queries to the entire text of every book, view the full text of public domain materials, and receive information about where to locate or buy copyright-protected materials. Google’s Book Search Project comes on the heels of a number of nascent nonprofit efforts to digitize portions of university and public library archives. Yet the Google project dwarfs these nonprofit efforts in commitment of resources and scope. The nonprofit campaigns generally scan books published prior to 1923 only, but Google plans to scan and display millions of post1922 books (at least those in collections in the United States), including those that are still in copyright. That will make a significant difference in the scope and comprehensiveness of Google’s database. More than 80 percent of the research libraries’ collections that Google has already agreed to scan are potentially in copyright. Google plans to include millions of potentially in-copyright books in its database for two reasons. First, it believes that there is significant consumer demand for being able to search post-1922 books despite the constraint of viewing only a few lines of text for a given search query. Consequently, advertisers will pay good money for sponsored links targeted at such queries. Second, Google believes that because it displays only a few lines of text, the project avoids copyright infringement. A number of publishers and authors vehemently disagree with Google’s reading of copyright law. In response to those objections, Google announced that it would honor all copyright holders’ requests to exclude books from the project. Upon receipt of a copyright holder’s request, Google will refrain from scanning the identified book or, if it has already scanned the book, will delete it from the Book Search database. Yet a number of copyright holders from mein kampf to google

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25

insist that Google’s project infringes their rights nonetheless. In their view, Google’s proffered opt-out procedure turns ‘‘every principle of copyright on its ear’’ by shifting ‘‘responsibility for preventing infringement to the copyright owner rather than the user.’’34 The Authors Guild and the five major members of the Association of American Publishers have accordingly brought copyright infringement lawsuits against Google seeking a court order forbidding Google from scanning their books without the copyright holder’s express prior authorization. Make no mistake. If the authors and publishers succeed in their lawsuits, the dream of creating and making available on the Internet a value-added virtual ‘‘card catalog’’ for the complete collections of the world’s greatest research libraries, let alone all of the world’s printed books, will lie dormant for the foreseeable future. To seek and obtain explicit copyright holder permission for each of millions of titles would render the project excessively expensive and unwieldy, even for Google.35 For millions of titles, indeed, it would simply be impossible to clear rights. Tellingly, Google’s primary cost might not even be the license fees it would have to pay to copyright owners; those fees could well pale in comparison to the overwhelming burden of administering and negotiating permissions, including locating the parties who controls the copyrights needed to grant the permission. Only some 25 percent of all post-1922 books, and less than 2 percent of all in-copyright books published in the United States prior to 1950, remain in print.36 The original publishers of many such books no longer exist. And given that neither copyright assignments nor testamentary dispositions need be recorded with the Copyright Office, the current copyright holders, whether they be successors to the publisher or the author’s heirs, can often be located only with great difficulty if at all. In many cases, moreover, finding the publisher or author’s heirs will not be enough because no one knows who holds the electronic rights that Google needs to license to include the book in its Book Search Project. Book publishing contracts more than a few years old generally leave unclear whether the author or publisher would have the right to license scanning a digital copy of the book into an electronic database and publicly displaying portions of the contents over the Internet. As a result, even when the publisher or the author’s heirs can be found, clearing rights to include a book in Google’s project would require a legal opinion regarding which party has the authority to grant those rights under the original book publishing contract (or, barring that, obtaining a new agreement among all relevant parties). Nonprofit digital archives estimate that the copyright clearance process consumes approximately a dozen man-hours per work even when the copy26

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copyright’s paradox

right owner is easy to find. The cost of locating the copyright owner of the print book and determining whether that party has the authority to license the book to Google’s Book Search Project, let alone negotiating and paying royalties, would be prohibitively expensive for millions of books. The result would be a database of far less comprehensiveness and utility for researchers. Google’s primary legal defense of its Book Search Project is that its scanning of complete copyrighted texts and display of three-sentence snippets surrounding a user’s search term are both fair use. Most observers assume that, under prevailing fair use doctrine, Google’s most difficult legal hurdle will be to defend its scanning of entire books. Google’s display of threesentence snippets responding to a user’s search inquiry would seem to fall more comfortably within traditional fair use. Displaying short excerpts of others’ texts also comports with search engines’ typically accepted practice, at least when the material that the search calls up has already been made available on the Internet by the copyright owner. But a recently settled lawsuit against Google News threatens to make even that practice subject to the copyright owner’s exclusive, proprietary control. The Google News Web site uses Google’s search engine algorithms to gather news stories from some 4,500 English-language sources and arrange them in order of importance. For each leading news story, Google News displays the headline, less than two sentences of the story lead, and a miniature thumbnail version of a photograph from a press Web site (smaller even than the thumbnails displayed on any Google image search). Each headline and photograph is hyperlinked to lead the reader to the newspaper’s or news agency’s own Web site. Google News also displays numerous links—often thousands—to related stories from other sources immediately below each story lead. Readers may conduct word searches within the Google News material and may customize the Google News page to highlight stories on topics of personal interest or from certain regions of the world. As such, Google News is an invaluable tool for anyone wanting to assess and compare how a wide variety of press outlets from around the world cover a given story or to find news coverage of topics of general or personal import without having to go to the multiple Web sites of individual newspapers. In March 2005, Agence France Presse (AFP), which claims to be the world’s oldest news agency, sued Google for including headlines, story leads, and thumbnail versions of photographs from the agency’s stories on Google News. The agency claimed that its headlines and story leads are each ‘‘original copyrightable text and qualitatively one of the most important aspects of AFP’s news stories’’ and that Google’s reproduction and display of that short text, as well as thumbnails of AFP news photos, constituted a from mein kampf to google

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27

willful infringement of AFP’s copyrights, even if readers who sought to read the AFP story or see a full-size photograph had to click on a link leading to either the AFP Web page or the page of the news outlet that posted the material under license with AFP. Google settled the AFP lawsuit in part by agreeing to link AFP material only to the AFP Web site, thus bypassing the news outlets that are AFP customers. But AFP’s legal arguments remain for others to assert, and the World Association of Newspapers has announced on behalf of its 18,000 member newspapers that it, too, intends to challenge the ‘‘exploitation of content’’ by Google and other search engines.37 The Google initiatives and the lawsuits against them raise a difficult question: Should Google be required to share with copyright holders a portion of the revenue that it earns from compiling and organizing (and thus adding substantial value to) copyright-protected material? We will revisit that question later. More important here, the Google cases illustrate the potential conflict between our free speech aspirations and proprietary copyright. In line with traditional rules applicable to tangible property, advocates of a proprietary copyright contend that, at the very least, Google’s projects are subject to a copyright holder’s entitlement to withhold permission and, more broadly, to Google’s obligation to seek out and obtain copyright holder consent. Even honoring copyright holders’ requests to opt-out, the procedure that Google assiduously follows, creates holes in Google’s information repositories, rendering them less valuable for users. To require, beyond that, that Google cannot include any texts unless it has received prior express consent from the appropriate copyright holder, would sound the death knell for Google’s projects (and, if applied to search engines generally, for Google itself). At its core, copyright shares our First Amendment commitment both to increasing the store of knowledge and to making it widely available for learning, inspiration, enjoyment, and further expression. Yet, as the Google cases make clear, today’s proprietary copyright threatens to stand as an obstacle to the Internet’s realization of our First Amendment ideals. As with Alice Randall, copyright does not completely suppress the speakers I have just described. With the exception of Google, all these speakers could present their ideas without copying or incorporating copyrighted expression. Yet in each instance, that speech would be significantly diminished. Alan Cranston, for example, might have merely drafted a critical review of the original Mein Kampf or the official English translation. More broadly, he could have simply spoken out against the Nazi regime and warned of the dangers of appeasement. But Cranston’s translation reached a much wider audience and 28

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copyright’s paradox

conveyed Cranston’s message in a far more pointed and accessible manner. As was no doubt Cranston’s aim, his translation also likely reached a portion of the public that would have otherwise been duped by reading the official, expurgated version. Likewise, to one degree or another, with the Philadelphia Church of God, Jon Else, Free Republic, the Air Pirates, and countless other speakers. Some credibility, some understanding, some communicative force is lost when a speaker is deprived of the use of particular words, images, or sounds. Whatever might be its benefits, copyright stifles, muffles, or, at the very least, imposes costs on speech. And today’s bloated copyright does so to a far greater extent than ever before. There are, of course, counternarratives of writers, artists, and musicians devoted to creative endeavor and dependent on copyright for sustenance. I do not mean to be dismissive of that viewpoint; as I will discuss, copyright has traditionally played an important role in underwriting creative work and supporting professional authorship. But stories about ‘‘[s]acrificial days devoted to . . . creative activities’’ have dominated copyright discourse for some three centuries—and have often been used by copyright industries to gain support for new entitlements that only indirectly benefit actual creators, if at all.38 Lost in that discourse is any recognition that speakers who use existing copyrighted works in conveying their message are often no less deserving and, indeed, no less creative than the author of the prior work. Nor does the reward-for-authors rhetoric capture the complexities and tremendous potential for disseminating knowledge embodied in new technological media, of which the Google projects are but two of many examples.

from mein kampf to google

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29

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141

that a certain kind of critical discourse—fundamental to civil society and visibly at work in the classroom—is impossible in a pluralist space that excludes exclusion, celebrates frictionless “access,” and forgets the critical power (intellectual, political, and intimate) of the enclosure, the form of discourse and discipline. It is, of course, crucial that entry into the semiprivate room never be a matter of essential qualities—I am not covertly mounting a campaign for invidious exclusions or “separatism.” But the semiprivate room is one that must be actively entered (or left empty). The semiprivate must manufacture the fiction of a provisional inside, imposing a form of engagement that is set into motion by a mode of address—not by means of a reflection, an echo or a miming, but by a projection, a call, an apostrophe, a seduction: the work of the semiprivate. not in public: feminism and the “intimate sphere” The figure of the semiprivate room, as I have been elaborating thus far, must inevitably engage the animated debates on democracy and the decline of civil society, critical theory, and participation, where the meanings of privacy and of “publicity” in all of its senses have been so carefully examined. Perhaps most salient to my discussion is the argument about what exactly ought to count as the “public” in the phrase “public sphere.” This question is unavoidable insofar as I hope to extend the figure of the semiprivate and to resist the suggestion that this trope is in essence merely another turn on the form of publicity. There is of course no consensus on the meanings of the couple public/private. From some perspectives, which we might gingerly call classic, the public sphere is the site of citizenship and free debate, as opposed to the state; in Habermas’s words, the public sphere is “the sphere of private people come together to form a public.” This view has been subject to intense scrutiny—celebrated, dismissed, extended, critiqued, recuperated. In Feminists Read Habermas, a range of feminist thinkers concede the limits of what even the late Habermas offers in the way of a discussion of gender, yet conclude, in the editor’s words, that “his discourse theory is one of the most persuasive current reflections on politics and moral and social norms” (2).18 Nonetheless, for many speaking in quite common feminist idioms, the public is precisely the world of labor and the state, while the private is the domestic or the family, only in living memory genuinely subject to the rule of law.

et sua fata habent libelli

Figure 1.2(a) A human chain rescuing books at the Biblioteca Nazionale, November 1966

Figure 1.2(b) A ruined stack at the Biblioteca Nazionale, following the Florence flood of November 1966

Date:
Fri,
05
Feb
2010
15:52:03
‐0500
 From:
Katherine
Balkoski
<ktb2108@columbia.edu>
 Organization:
Columbia
University
Press
 To:
someone@aaaarg.org
 Subject:
Cease
and
Desist
 
 NOTICE
OF
COPYRIGHT
INFRINGEMENT
 
 To
Whom
It
May
Concern:
 
 I,
the
undersigned,
CERTIFY
UNDER
PENALTY
OF
PERJURY,
that
I
am
an
agent
 authorized
to
act
on
behalf
of
the
owner
of
certain
intellectual
property
rights,
said
 owner
being
named
Columbia
University
Press
("IP
Owner").
I
have
a
good
faith
 belief
that
the
listing
identified
below
offers
items
or
contains
materials
that
are
not
 authorized
by
the
above
IP
Owner,
its
agent,
or
the
law,
and
therefore
infringe
the
IP
 Owner's
rights
according
to
state,
federal,
or
United
States
law.
 
 /Writings
on
Psychoanalysis/

 Louis
Althusser

 231101694

 http://aaaaarg.org/files/textz/4779‐writings_on_psychoanalysis.pdf
 /On
Suicide
Bombing/

 Talal
Asad

 231–14152–9

 http://aaaaarg.org/files/textz/5213‐on_suicide_bombing.pdf
 /The
Last
Man/

 Maurice
Blanchot

 231‐06244‐2

 http://aaaaarg.org/files/textz/3758‐the_last_man.pdf
 The
field
of
cultural
production

 Pierre
Bourdieu

 231‐08287‐7

 http://aaaaarg.org/files/textz/6090‐the_field_of_cultural.pdf
 /The
Field
of
Cultural
Production/

Pierre
Bourdieu

 231‐08287‐7

 http://aaaaarg.org/files/textz/3463‐the_field_of_cultural.pdf
 /Wars
of
Position
‐
The
Cultural
Politics
of
Left
and
Right/

 Timothy

 Brennan

 231‐13730‐0

 http://aaaaarg.org/files/textz/4950‐wars_of_position_the.pdf
 /Spectral
Nationality:
Passages
of
Freedom
from
Kant
to
Postcolonial

 Literatures
of
Liberation/

 Pheng
Cheah

231‐13018‐9

 http://aaaaarg.org/files/textz/5435‐spectral_nationality_passages_of.pdf
 /Audio
‐
Vision/

 Michel
Chion

231‐07898‐6

 http://aaaaarg.org/files/textz/3102‐audio_vision.pdf
 
 
 Please
act
expeditiously
to
remove
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 Sincerely,
 
 Clare
Wellnitz
 Publishing
Director
 Columbia
University
Press
 
 ‐‐

Katherine
Trevitt
Balkoski
 SubRights
Intern
 
 Columbia
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Press
 61
West
62nd
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NY
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 Tel:1‐212‐853‐9064
 ktb2108@columbia.edu

From: Rowan Wilson <rowan@verso.co.uk> To: "someone@aaaarg.org" <someone@aaaarg.org> Date: Fri, 11 Dec 2009 12:10:25 +0000 Subject: ATTENTION AAAARG.ORG ADMINISTRATOR -Attn AAAARG.ORG Dear Sirs It has come to our attention that you are hosting a website from which people can download illegally many of our copyrighted works: We refer you to the url: http://a.aaaarg.org/library/ The books listed on this url include many of our titles by Slavoj Zizek, Jacques Ranciere, Alain Badiou, etc. Rights to these works have been reserved by the publishers, Verso. The publishers have registered copyright in many of the books found on your website, which represent also the result of considerable labour on the part of the authors. The purpose of this letter is to advise you of our clients' rights and to insist that you immediately disable or remove ALL LINKS from all websites associated with AAAARG.ORG or related sites on which the Works have been made available for download. We request immediate receipt of your organization's intention to comply with these demands, and your confirmation in writing that appropriate action as detailed above has been effected no later then SEVEN (7) days from the date of this letter. Please be advised that if you do not immediately cease and desist, we will seek all appropriate legal remedies, without prior notification. We look forward to your immediate response and cooperation. Sincerely

-------------------------------------------Rowan Wilson Sales and Marketing Director Verso 6 Meard Street London W1F 0EG Phone: +44 (0)20 7437 3546 Fax: +44 (0)20 7734 0059 email: rowan@verso.co.uk www.versobooks.com http://versouk.wordpress.com http://twitter.com/VersoBooksUK See Wu Ming's website for their new novel: http://www.manituana.com/ 

delete

Anonymous Eroticism A mash-up of the nineteenth-century sign-language alphabet popularized by Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet and entries from what would constitute a slang thesaurus of synonyms for copulation, this collision of text and image was in all likelihood produced by Georges Bataille. It was published in Le Da Costa encyclopédique (Paris: Max-Pol Fouchet, 1947), a work of the secretive Acéphale group of renegade surrealists and extreme sociologists (members of which may have actually beheaded a sacrificial victim). The book, carrying the subtitled “Fascicule VII, Volume II,” and hence ostensibly one volume from a larger work, was distributed in the fall of 1947. It appeared unannounced and anonymously in Left Bank bookshops, where copies were surreptitiously tipped into the legitimate displays. Compiled during the Second World War and edited by Isabelle Waldberg and Robert Lebel, the project was aided in large part by Marcel Duchamp. The related entry reads: Whoever has not chosen obscenity, recognized in obscenity the presence and the shock of poetry, and, more intimately, the elusive brightness of a star, is not worthy to die and their death will extend upon earth the industrious anxiety of priests. For further information and documentation, see the superb Encyclopaedia Acephalica, Atlas Arkhive Three: Documents of the Avant-Garde (London: Atlas Press, 1995).



F i g u r e 7.35

M o d e l of a carolingian binding: [a], herringbone sewing only; | b j , sewn b o o k b l o ck with t a b linings

attached; [c], bookblock finished widi leather covering.



AGAINST EXPRESSION

IMPRESSUM A curatorial-editorial experiment by Anna-Sophie Springer Exhibition Book produced for the third iteration of an exhibition series called EX LIBRIS compiled from pdfs archived online at Arg.org: EX LIBRIS: “Commonplace Books” GRR.AAAAARG.ORG 15 September 2013 and ongoing

Design: Charles Stankievech With special thanks to Prof. Dr. Beatrice von Bismarck, Dr. Joachim Brand, Nina Canell, Claudia Darmer, Sean Dockray, Judith Krakowski, Dr. Michael Lailach, Wilma Lukatsch, Dr. Benjamin Meyer-Krahmer, Christian Philipp Müller, Leah Whitman-Salkin, Willy + Monika Springer, Charles Stankievech, Ève K. Tremblay, Robin Watkins, Prof. Thomas Weski, Barbara Wien, Edda Wilde and all the staff of the Leipzig Academy Library. Published by: K. Verlag | Press Karl-Marx-Platz 3 D-12043, Berlin www.k-verlag.com ISBN:978-0-9877949-7-0

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