Some thoughts on aaaarg and agonism

May 29th, 2010
By: Paris Ionescu
Topics: Art in General, Events, Featured Article, JPEG

I was surprised, yet found myself nodding knowingly with a slight grin, to find a.aaaarg.org down this afternoon, having been replaced with a splash page reading “AAAARG.ORG DOESN’T EXIST.” My first thought: cheeky bastards, they’re hinting at exactly what we should have been doing all along: keeping our mouths shut. Perhaps the first rule of aaaarg should have always been: you do not talk about aaaarg! How could we not, though? It’s been the simplest, easiest to navigate, free, no bullshit, no allegiances, and impressively generous library of theoretically oriented texts on the public web. It also had the cool appeal of a successful relational art project (I’ll defend that contextualization if anyone disagrees), while being basically anonymous, and a clean white-cube gallery like interface. JSTOR and Academic Search Premier look baroque in comparison. I used it gluttonously and not in a very eco-friendly manner: rather than bringing a book on the train, I’d scroll aaaarg for a few tantalizing titles in the morning and print a chapter or two of each out; I was hardly ever without an ADD, informavoric selection of paper-clipped continental philosophy or art theory essays folded inside my jacket pocket. Yet you and I had to acknowledge that although there maybe is something genuinely lofty (read: noble, important, beyond capitalist economics to use that term in its vulgate, synecdochal (a vulgate and synecdoche into which we funnel lots of unrelated problems) sense) about the material which aaaarg has specialized in providing that made you want think of it as set apart from similar platforms in other industries like music, film, and non-academic publishing, above a certain key threshold of popularity, it begins to look the same, at very least to the companies whose margins are at risk.

I’m not up on the legal or ethical nuances of the now mature debate about copyright/left, piracy, etc, but I think I know two things: I want to see the continuation excellent thought to be written and published and that requires money one way or another; and I think it’s right that my favorite authors, and even the ones I don’t like, get paid so that they can live. But I also believe that the impulse towards piracy will not go away; the virtually irreversible way the Internet has been designed and then emergently developed, makes piracy, even ultimately ethical piracy, too easy too resist for mortals, perhaps especially when we say “oh, it’s just Foucault, Lacan, Althusser, they’re dead, they won’t mind!” As it also clear, there are many living (and much less famous than the aforementioned) authors, breathing normal modern people who drive cars and have mortgages, on aaaarg, who, whether they are for or against, are not getting paid where they could (I didn’t say should) be getting paid. One inchoate suggestion to mitigate comes to mind: the open-source software techie community has been leading the way for many years towards a highly permissive, tip jar model (definitely influenced by communist thought, though they call it common sense)… again, this usually operates under the threshold at which individuals become consumers in a knowledge economy, and points on a parabola, but is something like this model an option for philosophy with a niche audience? Should every writer, tenured or not, make a website with a little donation button; I bet many would be pleasantly surprised if they did. This is sort of reducible to the argument I hear a lot regarding copyright; make it really easy for us to pay you, to which I’ll add: also pay you whenever we spontaneously feel generous or have some dosh in our pockets to. That’s to a degree the reality we’re working with.

But onto my more theoretical suggestion: I knew from critic Claire Bishop (via Artforum then via Academic Search Premier via Bard College wifi), to read up on Mouffe and Laclau (via aaaarg) who wrote at some length about an agonistic model of democracy. This is one of the notions on which good relational aesthetics, of which I am a supporter even when I often cringe or get hypercritical about it, seems to be consistently grounded in… Things will probably never be perfect — until we are all uploaded to harddrives and allowed the Vanilla Sky life we all deserve, where we can meet our long lost lovers afresh, again and again, each balmy Jamaican evening or whatever your hetero/homo fantasy, forever, now, never bored, no existential void at the middle of things – especially in this concatenous, multiplicitous, fragmented present in which we vascillate between advanced civility and brilliance, hopeless endless catastrophic barbarism, and not metaphysically knowing which way up is, what morality is, whether objective reality exists, whether we’re better off than our million year old early hominoid ancestors, whether it’s wrong to eat animals, whether men are all created equally, what historical actors can be legitimately considered in a materalist ontological framework, etcetera, but we can TRY GOD DAMMIT, we can strive (god meant in the secular sense of hetero ego love narratives of course). We can create microtopias! Out of recyclable, upcycleable materials. We can read Bruce Sterling, E.O. Wilson, Stewart Brand, be kind when we can, and start free, ad hoc pedagogical interfaces. I think the same can be said for the situation with publishing; war is peace in a sense it has been argued if provocatively, so I say let’s keep the agonistic relationship going… there’s more writing out there with more eyeballs getting to it, with more initiatives being orchestrated as a result, than ever before (even if this is partially a function of population increase) and somehow it’s working, agonistically. There will be casualties! Frivolous lawsuits against deceased Oklahomans, legitimate lawsuits against brat hipsters who know they’re pushing their luck and milking the radical political associations of p2p spuriously, authors struggling financially who could be struggling less or even well-off, career changes, but there will be more eyes on the prize: truth. Publishers are going to invent more built-in self-destruct mechanisms, hackers are going to continue cracking DRM. Non-activists will mostly keep reaping the benefits of using their ex-girlfriends’ Netflix accounts.

The goal is thinking and writing and acting our way out of the catastrophic car-wreck of history, out of technological determinsm (which the self-awarely agonistic model puts a wrench in), and of the fundamentally hostile conditions of the universe (disclosure: I’m a misotheistic agnostic currently, there have been many of us). Even allowing for singularity and permanent virtual reality vacations, we eventually we need to be getting off this rock in large numbers within the next several hundred years (‘the eventual choice of ours is spaceflight or extinction’ to paraphrase Carl Sagan) and/or, probably both, majorly downsize world population. Or we give up on the human project and turn to antinatalism, nihilism, a very very very grave form of Lewboski-ism. I am suggesting the much less drastic but seemingly irrational plan of action that we actually draw out, protract the checkers-like, Tom and Jerry-esque, war over intellectual property, and more provocatively that we occasionally switch sides (we all feel like Dostoevsky’s Underground Man sometimes anyway), batting for the Lessigs, the slashdotters, the Estonian hackers, the spam-kings, and the Mark Taylors and even RIAA on ocassion; it’s a kind of dither that will confuse the hell out of them, and in the process we’ll get to keep our precious content, our precious celebrities and lionized heroes, and not pay that much for it unless we’re hardcore fans, patrons. We’ll also continue to deal with invasions of privacy, mainstream media and news that panders to what I believe is honestly a mostly imaginary audience of dimwits, stupid ads, and occasional wrongful imprisonment: the secular sacrificing of a life; but you know what, 250,000 people died in Haiti a couple of months ago, and that was the universe’s fault; our ethical perplexedness is not completely unwarranted.

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