IN PRAISE OF USELESS BEAUTY
EPIGRAPHS
“Beauty, no doubt, does not make revolutions. But a day will come when revolutions will have need of beauty. The procedure of beauty, which is to contest reality while endowing it with unity, is also the procedure of rebellion. Is it possible eternally to reject injustice without ceasing to acclaim the nature of man and the beauty of the world? Our answer is yes. This ethic, at once unsubmissive and loyal, is in any event the only one that lights the way to a truly realistic revolution. In upholding beauty, we prepare the way for the day of regeneration when civilization will give first place — far ahead of the formal principles and degraded values of history — to this living virtue on which is founded the common dignity of man and the world he lives in, and which we must now define in the face of a world that insults it.”
–Albert Camus
“The image extricates itself from idolatry by constantly destroying the screen of its visibility, in order to become impoverished, as the pure sign of that which marks it; the visible is opened, as an abyss or sky that transpierces the obsession with the world.”
–Jean-Luc Marion
PRIOR ART
In studying works-based agency and forms of literary-artistic scholarship, the long tail of works suggests a past, present, and future history inherent to works that are iterative, generative, and speculative. It is, perhaps, the speculative that gives the iterative and the generative their so-called staying power. And, it is the long tail of the speculative that justifies the elective abolition of intellectual property, given that the speculative opens onto what can only be called multiple event horizons buried in works — i.e., both nominally new works and the past works that nominally new works draw upon. “Every artist is a cannibal, ever poet is a thief.” In terms of an (un)timely critique of intellectual property rights law, and its capitalist-derived creation of authorial privileges and rights, this slippery and aleatory rite of passage for speculative works brings into focus the issue of prior art and all that prior art signals in the creation of nominally new works. Prior art is the “given” of works — i.e., that which is assimilated to works, through works, and that which is often disguised and/or buried within nominally new works — with “buried” often meaning, in this case, repressed and/or denied. The “given,” as prior art, is then “the taken.” And, in the case of copyright and patent law, the “given” is “taken” and then “given back” (“sold”) as commodity.
All of this suggests that the issue of intellectual property rights is the elephant in the room today, as Web 3.0 heads for the New Wild West and authors scramble to find ways to survive. Yet, the now acknowledged and highly problematic issue of precarity for authors and for artists (a.k.a. as “creators” in the gig economy associated with our generally debauched knowledge commons) requires the proverbial something else. That something else is resistance to misappropriation of works by Capital and by AI — with AI being Capital’s latest game for attempting to “own” and commodify everything. Thus far, in most all battles between AI and government, AI has been granted access to anything in The Cloud under the rules of Fair Use given to copyright law. Thus far, as well, AI has been mostly blocked from commodifying the outputs of AI, due to the presence of prior art, which is probably not quite a problem since the main event with AI is to sell the apparatus versus the output.
We thus find all manner of opportunities to give our work away, rarely asking works where they wish to go. In fact, we not only give our works away, but we also tailor our works such that they may be given away. To what end, then, is “giving” works away valid? Might one reason be to upend the entire apple cart?
Toward that end, presented here are two classic “rabbit holes.” The first is a summary of a homesteading operation on Web 1.0, beginning in the late 1990s and ending in the late 2000s. The second is a summary of activities associated with “games of chance” played in the name of transmedia through an artists’ collective founded in India in 2017. Both bracket Web 2.0, which was effectively the arrival of social media without the dynamism of the de-centered model now on offer. How to use the de-centered model is now the operative question, since, in engaging with Web 3.0, authors and artists (and artist-scholars) will have to be oh so very clever not to be eaten alive by the apparatuses associated with the latest capitalist endeavor to “own everything.”
For the origin of copyright in fifteen-century Venice, see PRIVILEGIO IN THE VENETIAN RENAISSANCE.
A Brief Sketch Of Privilegio In The Venetian Renaissance - Intellectual Property Watch
Gavin Keeney writes: As a type of historical morality tale, especially given arguments currently before the European…www.ip-watch.org
VAPID SELF-PROMOTION
The problem of Web 3.0, for authors, will be to find ways to escape the perception of vapid self-promotion associated with Web 2.0. Web 1.0 was, for authors, a way to enter a type of digital Republic of Letters without the attendant careerism underwriting writing itself. There was not that much vainglory at play in “being there” in the early years of homesteading on the Web. Web 2.0 amplified the self-promotional side of writing, if blogs and early forms of social media might be called “writing.” In terms of academia, the games of self-promotion or careerism have always been present, with leveraging one’s symbolic capital the main event. This, too, was amplified across the years when academia was neo-liberalized and external (industry) forces began to colonize the Ivory Tower looking for leverage and seeking opportunities to financialize and extract value from education. This was also the time when MBAs took over the higher echelons of administration at universities and duly marginalized faculties while turning students into consumers.
Much water has passed under the bridge, and what remains is an utterly disfigured commons that has only partly been salvaged by the arrival of Open Access publishing. Dutiful academics and scholars do, however, still feed the machinery of the neo-liberalized knowledge commons. They have little choice — if they wish to play the games of brinkmanship associated with the Ivory Tower.
USELESS BEAUTY
“Rebellion, in fact, says — and will say more and more explicitly — that revolution must try to act, not in order to come into existence at some future date in the eyes of a world reduced to acquiescence, but in terms of the obscure existence that is already made manifest in the act of insurrection. This rule is neither formal nor subject to history, it is what can be best described by examining it in its pure state — in artistic creation.”
–Albert Camus
Ultimately, authors and artists (and artist-scholars) will have to find ways to make their works formally useless to Capital. This involves creating works that are inassimilable to the machine, and/or monkey wrenches to the machine. Effectively useless works then become highly useful, in the antithetical manner of a “new exception.” The irony here is that the creation of the artistic exception in the Enlightenment was one of those moments when authors and philosophes pushed back against power — i.e., pushed back against outright or de facto censorship by state or regime. Today censorship hides in the shadows of the apparatuses of power. Works are assimilable if they fit the model on offer. Works that are inassimilable are blocked by the gatekeepers or rendered fashion statements (and thus rendered harmless). Academia is full of such fashion statements, as is the art world. And, fashion statements are useful. They can be marketed. Being fashionable, then, is the last temptation for Albert Camus’ rebel. For Camus, the artist is the last rebel.
[…]
For more on the use of the term the given in the theological turn associated with late-twentieth-century post-phenomenology, see THE GIVEN, THE TAKEN, AND THE GIVEN-BACK.
The Given
Keynote Address: International Federation of Landscape Architects Regional Conference, CVUT, Prague, Czech Republic…medium.com
For more regarding symbolic capital, see READING SYMBOLIC CAPITAL.
Reading Symbolic Capital
I. SYMBOLIC CAPITALmedium.com
TWO RABBIT HOLES
1. RAPPORT LANY
Rapport LANY is retrospective summary on the “literary archive” of Landscape Agency New York (1996–2007), inclusive of the labyrinthine LANY Archive-Grotto, a Web 1.0 homestead or outpost created on Geocities c.2001 and subsequently shut down in 2009. The Archive-Grotto served as an experimental platform and repository for research and working papers leading to the production of long-form works (monographs) in the early 2010s and time- and performance-based transmedia works in the late 2010s. The Situationist-inspired report (rapport) concerns the non-commercial and anti-careerist merits of iterative, generative, and aleatory processes in ad hoc, independent artistic and reflexive scholarship and the compilation, re-compilation, and re-presentation of a body of work in digital and print form over roughly ten years. The then-experimental and conventional modalities and editioning strategies embraced included: website (Web 1.0); web journal (various); print journal (various); Peer-to-Peer (P2P) exchange (global); and editioned folio (P2P and library-based special collections). The physical dossiers (editioned folios) of key works were ceded to academic archives in the US and Australia. Written works shift, across the time frame noted, from architectural journalism, to architectural criticism, to art criticism, to transdisciplinary “literary production,” and concern the disciplines of Landscape Architecture, Architecture, Art, and Philosophy. In October 2007, LANY was supplanted by Agence ‘X’, with P2P dissemination of “October Revolution.” Another ten-year cycle of works was thus initiated, inclusive of PhD and post-doctoral studies.
Rapport LANY
Rapport LANY is a retrospective summary on the “literary archive” of Landscape Agency New York (1996–2007), inclusive…medium.com
2. OOI-MTA+++
OOI-MTA+++ is a perpetually curated archive of past, present, and future projects, with the OOI-MTA collective originating in Ahmedabad, India, in 2017. The archive is intended to illustrate and privilege works-based agency in literary-artistic scholarship versus bespoke or singular projects. The focus of the event-based records is the non-necessity of Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) and the limitations imposed by adhering to out-of-date methodologies for the production and dissemination of works.
OOI-MTA+++
OOI-MTA+++ is a perpetually curated archive of past, present, and future projects, with the OOI-MTA collective…medium.com