Felix

Abstract

Two of the editors of the volume Aesthetics of the Commons (Diaphenes 2021) Cornelia Sollfrank and Felix Stalder discuss with WPCC journal the potential and meanings of the digital commons in creating new subjectivities and new imaginaries on and off the internet. Within this they question whether the focus on the aesthetics of the commons is useful for understanding phenomena such as ‘artistic shadow libraries’, pointing towards the need to build institutions for which ‘practices of commoning are central’. Also considered are the modern art system, copyright, and the corrosive individualism of Western modernity in the artistic sphere. Against these factors they note instead that, ‘the commons are structured through different relations, and care expresses that difference’. New economic approaches are needed in the arts supported by political actors which might include the ‘re-envisioning [of] public institutions, such as public broadcasting, as part of a commons’.

Keywords: commons, aesthetics, copyright, platform capitalism, shadow libraries, care, art system, decolonisation

Editorial Board W., (2021) “Aesthetics, Commons and the Production of the Subject: An Interview with Cornelia Sollfrank and Felix Stalder”, Westminster Papers in Communication and Culture 16(1). p.74-81. doi: https://doi.org/10.16997/wpcc.920

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Kevin Rittberger

Originally published in German, as “Furtherfield: Mit Nachahmung fangen Commonistinnen wenig an” in springerin 4/2019

The connection to a place has a material-productive and a strategic-symbolic function, particularly for a concrete utopia that does not simply paint the image but examines real practices as germ forms. The example of the London project-space Furtherfield can serve to describe an ethics of place, which means networking local activists and hackers with one another and thus interweaving eco-social cooperation with progressiveness, localization with decentralization. The project, initiated by artists in 1996, is a self-proclaimed “(de-)centre for art and technology” in London’s Finsbury Park. Collaborative practices and “DIWO” (Doing It With Others) are just as constitutive here as the development of a digital and local culture of the Commons. Furtherfield can thus be understood as a “commonistic” germ form – commonism understood less as ideology (1) than as an “inclusion society” which is to be permanently further developed. According to Simon Sutterlütti and Stefan Meretz (2), this is based on a different structure of cooperation, as well as on material and social preconditions that allow people to create their own living conditions. Inclusion is thus not merely an ethical-moral attitude, but the condition for action can be shaped collectively by all commonists.

For commonists, helping to shape an ethic of the place means neither unilaterally announcing a re-rooting of those uprooted by modernity – that would be the neo-traditional gesture – nor rejecting the connectivity of digital nomads – that used to be the New Economy spirit – but robbing both entities of their exclusive peaks. It means cultivating “response-ability” (Donna Haraway). The concern for a commonistic place and the maintenance of a platform require the voluntary activity of commonists who, beyond the rules of abstract property, take care of the general availability of goods, resources, digital technologies, codes, etc.

The concern for the place is the concern for all commoners who can assert their needs in that place or on that platform and contribute according to their individual abilities. Exploitation and competition, property and profit, containment and exclusivity can be unlearned here by initiating and prospective commonists together. Commercial providers of the same goods, resources, codes, etc. are “out-cooperated” (Sutterlütti/Meretz) by countering their enclosures with “dis-enclosures”, as I would like to call these forms of collectivization of formerly privately-held resources. Dis-enclosures are dependent on the permanence and resilience of the Commonists if they do not want to be one-off projects. Dis-enclosures can counteract privatizations and employ a community concept that makes it possible to overcome the fetishes of growth and competition. Political state-transformation theories cannot think of this constituting process.

Commonists rarely begin with imitation as a repetition of dichotomies proven in capitalist modernity – such as individuality vs. collectivity, private enterprise vs. nationalization. They are interested in setting their own rules, designing their own stories, rituals, and exercise systems with speculative, dis-enclosing, and pre-mitative activities that contribute to preservation – and expansion! – of the commons are interested. With the concept of pre-mitation, I propose to regard the initiating moment of Furtherfield also as aesthetic moment.

Furtherfield interweaves digital communities with non-digital ones in a way that corridors emerge; corridors that connect places and between which decentralization prevails.

Furtherfield is also experimenting with blockchains with which the gathering groups of people can make life and business more democratic, more transparent and less hierarchical. In this way, blockchains can help to design trustworthy paths or corridors in the midst of the total exploitation desert called Big Data, but they are neither immune to (e.g. company-internal) hierarchies, nor do they represent applications far removed from the market. The question also remains as to who programs the so-called consensus algorithm and organizes trust in complex, knotted relationship networks. But commonists who have renounced cultural pessimism can live with the fundamental susceptibility of technology (here: blockchain) or cultural technology (here: self-organisation) to abuse of power. The possible self-organization of networked communities as basic units that reject bureaucratic centralism seems important to them. Corridors are important when left-liberal zeitgeist prefers the nomadic to the identitarian, but right-wing populist reaction time turns the need for rootedness into an absolute. Here, Furtherfield works with two strategies in one and the same place: Finsbury Park as an important public recreation site for its residents, which includes migrants from a great many countries, has its own cultural practices; these encounter the dis-enclosing strategies of the digital commonists – in the Community Media Lab Furtherfield Commons, in an exhibition space in the middle of the park, in an online magazine, and on a mailing list – and continue to develop cooperatively. The communities are permeable and enrich each other. The germ form of the other society becomes noticeable precisely in the penetration of the various practices that take place in one place. Each format creates an assemblage of people, technology and environment that benefits commoning as a whole. What is decisive is sustainable practice.

Furtherfield, as can be asserted with Eduardo Viveiros de Castro and Deborah Danowski (3) thus constructs a “locally functioning folk machine” that slowly but effectively undermines established forms of rule and replaces them with a better practice in the sense of a network of peers. These (pre-)figurations of the future are recognizable and applicable from the outside as pre-mitative practices. For an aesthetic of commoning, this means the following: The mimetic capacity leaves imitation; the emulation of the old becomes obsolete, de-learning and re-learning intertwine, pre-mitation is created and makes transformational processes visible, so that from now on imitation would also be possible again: as imitation of the new. And so commoning does not only mean the self-administration of the resource or the platform, which, whether “rival” or “not rival”, is open for use by as many people as possible and does not exclude anyone through an abstract concept of property (or license). What is also decisive is the symbolic, performative and aesthetic quality of the gathering bodies in one place, including those that are not (yet) present, those that are still excluded, but for which corridors are created: Access authorization, residence permit, work that secures their livelihood and, last but not least, care community.

The initiators of Furtherfield, Ruth Catlow and Marc Garrett, refer historically to Marx’s concept of “original accumulation” and the enclosures it entails. Their reference back to the “levellers” is decidedly directed against these enclosures, which to this day take place worldwide and are constantly imitated by neoliberal governments and transnational corporations, whether shock-like or reformist. Furtherfield creates here a place of counter-movement. The practice of permaculture, for example, is no less relevant here than the insight into global value-labour chains and areas of use of drones, the cultivation of corresponding peer-to-peer practices, and the self-understanding of peers beyond discipline or field of activity. For Furtherfield, digital commons help to hack social reality, while the regularity of the commons (à la Elinor Ostrom) can also help to protect open access through reciprocity from being commercially enclosed. Uncompensated cultural practices can thus be made usable again, and digital practices do not disappear somewhere in cyberspace, but link as relevant empirical values back to social practices and the possibility of resistance against hegemonic exploitation systems. The site and the platform Furtherfield succeeds through stability and resonance in outgrowing the utopian precondition and in manifesting itself as embodied or within the assemblies of physical bodies.

1 Vgl. Nico Dockx/Pascal Gielen (Hg.), Commonism. A New Aesthetics of the Real. Amsterdam 2018.
2 Vgl. Simon Sutterlütti/Stefan Meretz, Kapitalismus aufheben. Eine Einladung, über Utopie und Transformation neu nachzudenken. Hamburg 2018.
3 Vgl. Eduardo Viveiros de Castro/Deborah Danowski, In welcher Welt leben? Ein Versuch über die Angst vor dem Ende. Berlin 2019.

Felix Stalder

Originally published in German as “Von der Teilnahme zur Aneignung. Ein Horizont künstlerischer Praxis?” in springerin 4/2019

Putting the focus on the manifold forms of appropriation of a shared resource opens up a horizon on artistic practice beyond functionalization and heteronomy, which so often characterize the practice of participatory projects.

Since the 1960s, when the cultural order of modernity – McLuhan’s “Gutenberg Galaxy” – began to slip, the concept of “participation” has played an important role in expanding the practices of art and redefining the roles and relationships of artists and audiences. Fluxus artists opened up the execution of the artwork with the help of instructions for action (“scores”), socially and politically oriented “post-studio” practices involved the audience or other non-artistic actors in the production of artistic “situations”, interactive art made the active participation of the viewer a condition of reception. Under the banner of “relational art”, participation, reduced to an unspecific shared “time to be lived through”, became the actual focus of artistic action.

This development was neither accidental nor isolated, but embedded in major social changes. On the one hand, the emergence of a media infrastructure, that focused on mass self-communication and favored modes of subjectivation beyond the silent recipient. On the other hand, the rise of the communicative and informational dimensions of work and the associated increasing valorization of social and cultural everyday activities that had previously been far removed from the market.

Critique of participation

Along with the utopias and disillusionments that accompanied these processes over the last 50 years, the idea of participation in art also underwent a revaluation. While at the beginning, and to some extent still today, it was used for the breaking up of traditional cultural configurations and power relations, participation was also taken into service by new, flexible relations of exploitation and power. At the latest, the empty idea of participation in Nicolas Bourriaud’s approach to “relational aesthetics” (1998) sparked a fundamental critique of the idea of participation as an artistic strategy. For example, Claire Bishop (2012) emphasized the compatibility of participatory approaches with neo-liberal forms of control through activation and the if not direct economization, then al least functionalization of art in line with the changing agendas of exhibition venues and funding institutions. On the recipient side, Bishop noted that the willingness to participate testifies to a problematic tendency toward “voluntary subordination to the artists’ will, and of the commodification of human bodies in a service economy.” The mode of subordination comes from the fact that it is usually the artist who determines the conditions of participation in advance, and confronts the counterpart with an already predetermined situation, leaving him/her only the possibility of either complying with the conditions set or of refusing to participate. This is not real freedom. For what at first glance looks like a relinquishment of power – after all, certain elements are left to third parties – turns out, on closer inspection, to be the exercise of another form of power: to define the conditions of interaction, the social and technical protocols, and thus to align them from the outset with one’s own interests, without ever having to tell the participants what they have to do. Commodification comes from the fact that unpaid voluntary activities are also a form of work whose added value can be organized elsewhere. The social mass media have institutionalized these two principles very successfully, with all the problems that we can clearly see today.

Against this use of art by curators and funding agencies, Bishop calls for a renewed autonomy of art, which as a symbolic activity should always be a step away from society. However, she remains vague as to what such an autonomy of artistic action might look like. Many interpret this as a return to a rather conventional conception of artists and artwork, perhaps also because it fits very well into the conservative zeitgeist.

The horizon of appropriation

However, this does not have to be the only conclusion that can be drawn from the not unwarranted criticism of participation. A number of ambitious artistic projects examined by the Creating Commons research project are also abandoning the idea of participation. They focus on the idea of the “free resource” and the practice of appropriation, either explicitly or implicitly. Whereby here it is not the appropriation by a privileged artist subject that is central as in the classical “appropriation art”, but the process of appropriation itself is opened.

Kenneth Goldsmith, who has been running UbuWeb, an online archive of the audiovisual “avant-garde”, since 1997, does not offer any possibilities for the users of the archive to contribute themselves. He alone makes all the decisions from the technical to the curatorial, as he explained in an interview with Cornelia Sollfrank (2013). Here, the “wisdom of the crowds” is not the focus, nor is a multi-perspective selection to be made. No, in the age of exuberant chaos, Goldsmith stresses, it is the artist’s task to go in and create order, that is, to develop a context in which things are put back into a specific context of meaning. At the same time, however, it is not simply a definitive, timeless selection based on the authority of the expert, but a highly situated one. Goldsmith never tires of emphasizing that as an artist he is actually the wrong person to operate an art-historical archive and that strictly speaking it is not an archive at all (with the claim to long-term preservation). Rather, this “personal project” could be over from one day to the next and UbuWeb could disappear from the net again, for whatever reason. The suggestion is that everyone should download what is important to them personally to protect their own choices from disappearing. To make this practicable, a download link is added to each work. However, the possibility of downloading is not only relevant because of the ephemeral structure of the archive, but because it allows anyone to step out of the role of the recipient and transfer the work into a completely different context of use.

In fact, in order to use UbuWeb one neither has to share Goldsmith’s theory of uncreativity (2011) as context displacement nor in any other way subscribe to the framework he sets. One can also simply appropriate the resource(s) and do whatever one wants with it, in one’s own context. Nevertheless, UbuWeb is not only a functional platform, a normal file hoster, but symbolically as well as practically an investigation of what artistic practice can mean today, under the conditions of a chaotic, exuberant and commercialized information sphere. Accordingly, the figure of the artist does not disappear. On the contrary, Goldsmith himself has meanwhile become a star, teaching at elite universities and being invited to the White House. But he, and this is new, no longer alone defines the framework within which a user can move.

The idea of free resources plays a central role in this shift. It provides the common ground from which anyone can create their own highly context-specific realities. It is, therefore, a question of a new articulation of the relationship between the singular and the collective. While many participatory projects are based on the utopia of the (temporary) community, the role of the artist as the author of this one community remains untouched. Accordingly, the added value of participation usually does not accumulate with the participants, but with the artists. The possibilities of appropriation create a different relationship. The role of the artist as the author of the resource remains strong, but the users have the possibility to transfer it into their own context, which can exist with or without a reference to the “source”, or to function as the author themselves and thus clearly gain freedom of action.

Basically, the practice of appropriation could be described as a kind of “personalization”. Things are brought into a form in which they correspond to the situatedness of the user. In contrast to personalization as practiced by the “social mass media”, control over this process does not lie with the central provider but with the periphery, with each individual. Even if this does not automatically eliminate the problems of subjugation and value creation so clearly visible in participatory projects today, the shift towards appropriation creates a new dimension of freedom whose possibilities are neither artistically nor politically exhausted.

References

Bishop, Claire, Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship. London: Verso 2012.

Bourriaud, Nicolas, Esthétique relationnelle. Dijon: Les Presses du reel 1998.

Creating Commons; https://creatingcommons.zhdk.ch/.

Goldsmith, Kenneth, Uncreative Writing. Managing Language in the Digital Age. New York: Columbia University Press 2011; https://monoskop.org/media/text/goldsmith_2011_uncreative_writing/.

Sollfrank, Cornelia, The Poetry of Archiving, Interview with Kenneth Goldsmith, 2013; https://creatingcommons.zhdk.ch/?p=365.

Die traditionelle Ordnung der Kultur – mit klaren Positionen für KünstlerIn/AutorIn, Werk und Publikum, vermittelt durch ProduzentInnen, VerlegerInnen, GaleristInnen etc. – ist durch die Digitalisierung endgültig in eine Krise geraten. Wie die neue Ordnung aussehen wird, ist nach wie vor unklar und höchst umstritten. Die erste Runde der Auseinandersetzung wurde auf dem Gebiet des Urheberrechts und damit über die Kontrolle der Zirkulation ausgetragen. In der aktuellen Runde dreht sich alles um zentrale Plattformen und deren Strukturen von Ordnung, Zugang und Wertschöpfung. Als ProduzentInnen der Kultur stehen KünstlerInnen im Zentrum dieser Umbrüche. Während ein Teil beflissen ist – vermeintlich im Eigeninteresse – die Rechteindustrien bei der Durchsetzung strikterer Gesetze zu unterstützen, verstehen sich andere als Ingenieure einer neuen Ordnung und experimentieren mit der Entwicklung eigener Formen von sozialer Produktion und Zirkulation. Continue reading “Von Creative Commons zu Creating Commons”

In a conversation with Felix Stalder, Cornelia Sollfrank provides background information on her current research project Giving What You Don’t Have – a project that explores ideas of peer-to-peer production and distribution in the art context. (published in springerin, Kritische Netzpraxis, Band XXI – Winter 2015, pp. 35-37, originally in German).

FS: Your current project “Giving What You Don’t Have” (GWYDH) can be read as a continuation of your intensive engagement with copyright in the digital context. At the same time, it also marks a turning point. Whereas earlier works often centered around how inappropriate and frequently obstructive copyright is in terms of current practices, now you are dealing with projects that largely ignore copyright. What was the reason for this change of perspective?

Continue reading “Giving What You Don’t Have (springerin Interview)”

Hintergrundinterview mit  Felix Stalder von Krystian Woznicki,  Berliner Gazette.

1. Commons ist in gesellschaftspolitischen Debatten in aller Munde: Von “collaborative commons” (J.Rifkin) bis hin zu “atmospheric commons” (N.Klein). Wie schätzt Du die aktuelle Konjunktur ein? Worauf führst Du sie zurück? Welche Positionen hältst Du für wegweisend?

Das Interesse an den Commons nährt sich aus zwei Quellen. Zum einen aus der tiefen Krise der kapitalistischen Ordnung, die sich nicht nur in der Finanzkrise, sondern vor allem in der Umweltkrise manifestiert. Hier werden sehr fundamentale Konstruktionsmängel deutlich, etwa, dass die „Umwelt“ als Externalität betrachtet wird, aus der man Rohstoffe entnehmen kann, oder in die man Abfall entsorgen kann, ohne dass dies ins ökonomische Kalkül einbezogen werden muss. Dieses Problem kann auch ein „grüner Kapitalismus“ nicht lösen, denn Kapitalismus braucht solche Externalitäten, ohne diese hört er auf, Kapitalismus, das heiß ein System welches auf das Ziel der Kapitalanhäufung – und eben nicht andere – ausgerichtet ist, zu sein. Das ist kein neuer Gedanke, Karl Polyani hat den bereits in den 1940er Jahren sehr klar formuliert, aber heute sind die Folgen dieses Problem in Gestalt der Umweltkrise mehr als deutlich sichtbar und es ist schwer vorstellbar, wie der Kapitalismus, trotz aller Innovationsfähigkeit, dieses Problem angehen kann. Continue reading “Zum Stand der Commons”

This is an entry which I contributed to the 2nd edition of the “Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Sociology” Georg Ritzer (ed). 2017.

We take it as a sign of the times that, for the first time, a major English language social science reference work contains the term ‘commons’.

Commons, informational

Commons are resources managed by a community for joint use. Commons have existed in different periods of time and in different cultural contexts as a wide variety of concrete institutions (Ostrom 1990). In the West, they have been marginalized by the rise of private property regimes at the outset of industrialization, particularly through the process of land enclosure (Linebaugh 2013). However, even in the West commons have never completely disappeared and, particularly in Alpine regions, traditional institutions of the commons have survived until today. Continue reading “Commons, informational (Dictionary Entry)”