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e-flux journal 56th Venice Biennale – SUPERCOMMUNITY – Sharing Instinct: An Annotation of the Social Contract Through Shadow Libraries

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Foederis aequas Dicamus leges (Let us make fair terms for the compact.) —Virgil’s Aeneid, XI Man was born free, and everywhere he is in chains.1All excerpts from The Social Contract are from Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract: And, The First and Second Discourses, ed. Susan Dunn and Gita May (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002). June 30, 2015 Dear Sean, I have been asked by Raqs Media Collective to contribute to a special ongoing issue of e-flux journal that is part of the Venice Biennale. Raqs’s section in the issue rethinks Rousseau’s social contract and the possibility of its being rewritten, as a way of imagining social bonds and solidarities that can help instigate and affirm a vision of the world as a space of potential. I was wondering if you would join me in a conversation on shadow libraries and social contracts. The entire universe of the book-sharing communities seems to offer the possibility of rethinking the terms of the social contract and its associated terms (consent, general will, private interest, and so on). While the rise in book sharing is at one level a technological phenomenon (a library of 100,000 books put in PDF format can presently fit on a one-terabyte drive that costs less than seventy-five dollars), it is also about how we think of transformations in social relations mediated by sharing books. If the striking image of books in preprint revolution was of being “in chains,” as Rousseau puts it, I am prompted to wonder about the contemporary conflict between the digital and mechanisms of control. Are books born free but are everywhere in chains, or is it the case that they have been set free? In which case are they writing new social contracts? I was curious about whether you, as the founder of Aaaaarg.org, had the idea of a social contract in mind, or even a community, when you started? Lawrence Book I, Chapter VI : The Social Pact To find a form of association that may defend and protect with the whole force of the community the person and property of every associate, and by means of which each, joining together with all, may nevertheless obey only himself, and remain as free as before.’’ Such is the fundamental problem to which the social contract provides the solution. We can reduce it to the following terms: ‘‘Each of us puts in common his person and all his power under the supreme direction of the general will; and in return each member becomes an indivisible part of the whole.’’ June 30, 2015 Dear Lawrence, I am just listing a few ideas to put things out there and am happy to try other approaches: —To think about the two kinds of structure that digital libraries take: either each library is shared by many user-librarians or there is a library for each person, shared with all the others. It’s a technological design question, yes, but it also suggests different social contracts? —What is subtracted when we subtract your capacity/right to share a book with others, when every one of us must approach the market anew to come into contact with it? But to take a stab at misappropriating the terms you’ve listed, consent, what libraries do I consent to? Usually the consent needs to come from the library, in the form of a card or something, but we don’t ask enough what we want, maybe. Also what about a social contract of books? Does a book consent to being in a library? What rights does it have or expect? I really loved the math equation Rousseau used to arrive at the general will: if you subtract the pluses and minuses of particular wills that cancel each other out, then the general will is the sum of the differences! But why does the general need to be the lowest common denominator—certainly there are more appropriate mathematical concepts that have been developed in the past few hundred years? Sean Book I, Chapter II: Primitive Societies This common liberty is a consequence of man’s nature. His first law is to attend to his own survival, his first concerns are those he owes to himself; and as soon as he reaches the age of rationality, being sole judge of how to survive, he becomes his own master. It is the relation of things and not of men that constitutes war; and since the state of war cannot arise from simple personal relations, but only from real relations, private war—war between man and man—cannot exist either in the state of nature, where there is no settled ownership, or in the social state, where everything is under the authority of the laws. July 1, 2015 Dear Lawrence, Unlike a logic of exchange, or of offer and return with its demands for reciprocity, the logic of sharing doesn’t ask its members for anything in return. There are no guarantees that the one who gives a book will get back anything, whether that is money, an equivalent book, or even a token of gratitude. Similarly, there is nothing to prevent someone from taking without giving. I think a logic of sharing will look positively illogical across the course of its existence. But to me, this is part of the appeal: that it can accommodate behaviors and relationships that might be impossible within the market. But if there is a lack of a contract governing specific exchanges, then there is something at another level that defines and organizes the space of sharing, that governs its boundaries, and that establishes inclusions and exclusions. Is this something ethics? Identity? Already I am appealing to something that itself would be shared, and would this sharing precede the material sharing of, for example, a library? Or would the shared ethics/identity/whatever be a symptom of the practice of sharing? Well, this is perhaps the conclusion that anthropologists might come to when trying to explain the sharing practices of hunter-gatherer societies, but a library? Sean July 1, 2015 Hi Sean, I liked your question of what might account for a sharing instinct when it comes to books, and whether we appeal to something that already exists as a shared ethics or identity, or is sharing the basis of a shared ethics/identity? I have to say that while I have never thought of my own book-collecting through the analogy of hunter-gatherers, the more I think about it, the more sense it makes to me. Linguistically we always speak of going on book hunts and my daily trawling through the various shadow libraries online does seem to function by way of a hunting-gathering mentality. Often I download books I know that I will never personally read because I know that it may either be of interest to someone else, or that the place of a library is the cave where one gathers what one has hunted down, not just for oneself but for others. I also like that we are using so-called primitive metaphors to account for twenty-first-century digital practices, because it allows us the possibility of linking these practices to a primal instinct of sharing, which precedes our encounter with the social norms that classify and partition that instinct (legal, illegal, authorized, and so on). I don’t know if you remember the meeting that we had in Mumbai a few years ago—among the other participants, we had an academic from Delhi as an interlocutor. He expressed an absolute terror at what he saw as the “tyranny of availability” in online libraries. In light of the immense number of books available in electronic copies and on our computers or hard discs, he felt overwhelmed and compared his discomfort with that of being inside a large library and not knowing what to do. Interestingly, he regularly writes asking me to supply him with books that he can’t find or does not have access to. This got me thinking about the idea of a library and what it may mean, in its classical sense and its digital sense. An encounter with any library, especially when it manifests itself physically, is one where you encounter your own finitude in the face of what seems like the infinity of knowledge. But personally this sense of awe has also been tinged with an immense excitement and possibility. The head rush of wanting to jump from a book on forgotten swear words to an intellectual biography of Benjamin, and the tingling anticipation as you walk out of the library with ten books, captures for me more than any other experience the essence of the word potential. I have a modest personal library of around four thousand books, which I know will be kind of difficult for me to finish in my lifetime even if I stop adding any new books, and yet the impulse to add books to our unending list never fades. And if you think about this in terms of the number of books that reside on our computers, then the idea of using numbers becomes a little pointless, and we need some other way or measure to make sense of our experience. Lawrence Book I, Chapter VII: The Sovereign Every individual can, as a man, have a particular will contrary to, or divergent from, the general will which he has as a citizen; his private interest may appear to him quite different from the common interest; his absolute and naturally independent existence may make him envisage what he owes to the common cause as a gratuitous contribution, the loss of which would be less harmful to others than the payment of it would be onerous to him. July 12, 2015 Hi Sean, There is no symbol that to my mind captures the regulated nature of the library more than that of the board that hushes you with its capitalized SILENCE. Marianne Constable says, “One can acknowledge the figure of silence in the library and its persistence, even as one may wonder what a silent library would be, whether libraries ever are silent, and what the various silences—if any—in a library could be.” If I had to think about the nature of the social contract and the possibilities of its rewriting from the site of the library one encounters another set of silent rules and norms. If social contracts are narrative compacts that establish a political community under the sign of a sovereign collective called the people, libraries also aspire to establish an authority in the name of the readers and to that extent they share a common constitutive character. But just as there is a foundational scandal of absence at the heart of the social contract that presumes our collective consent (what Derrida describes as the absence of the people and the presence of their signature) there seems to be a similar silence in the world of libraries where readers rarely determine the architecture, the logic, or the rules of the library. So libraries have often mirrored, rather than inverted, power relations that underlie the social contracts that they almost underwrite. In contrast I am wondering if the various shadow libraries that have burgeoned online, the portable personal libraries that are shared offline: Whether all of them reimagine the social contract of libraries, and try to create a more insurgent imagination of the library? Lawrence July 13, 2015 Hi Lawrence, As you know, I’m very interested in structures that allow the people within ways to meaningfully reconfigure them. This is distinct from participation or interaction, where the structures are inquisitive or responsive, but not fundamentally changeable. I appreciate the idea that a library might have, not just a collection of books or a system of organizing, but its own social contract. In the case of Aaaaarg, as you noticed, it is not explicit. Not only is there no statement as such, there was never a process prior to the library in which something like a social contract was designed. I did ask users to write out a short statement of their reason for joining Aaaaarg and have around fifty thousand of these expressions of intention. I think it’s more interesting to think of the social contract, or at least a

–Share Facebook Twitter –Pdf –Add to PDF –Remove from PDF –Generate PDF Abdel Kader Haïdara, a librarian who smuggled hundreds of thousands of manuscripts from jihadist - occupied Timbuktu to safety in Bamako, stands with ancient volumes from Timbuktu packed into metal trunks. Photo: Brent Stirton/Getty Images. Foederis aequas Dicamus leges (Let us make fair terms for the compact.) —Virgil’s Aeneid , XI Man was born free, and everywhere he is in chains. 1 All excerpts from The Social Contract are from Jean - Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract: And, The First and Second Discourses , ed. Susa

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