Opening up possibilities for critique

What I want to shortly explore here in my presentation for this workshop, is the

potential of Open Access or of the concept of openness more in specific, to strengthen

and inform our notion of critique and politics, related to a variety of experiments with

radical open access. And I am kind of revisiting some older work I did on this already,

juxtaposing it with some new ideas. So, how can openness be used to both critique

established systems, institutions and political-economies, but more importantly, how

can it be used to potentially offer affirmative alternatives through and as a form of

critique. And in which way can, as I mentioned before, radical open access aid here,

both as a form of politics, as well as a form of open experimenting with foundational

notions in scholarship and publishing. And I will get back to the concept of radical

open access in a bit.

The concept of Open Access can be seen as a floating signifier, open to

redefinition and new forms of articulation and meaning-giving in different contexts.

Open Access publishing is thus not inherently progressive, leftwing or necessary a

critique of the neoliberal market economy. Increasingly, Open Access publishing is

featuring in neoliberal discourses in Higher Education and government as a system to

promote innovation and transparency of research in an audit culture context. As Gary

Hall argued in Digitize this book!, there is in this sense nothing intrinsically or

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inherently democratic or even political about Open Access. Open Access supports the

knowledge economy by making the flow of information more flexible, efficient and

cost-effective, and by making knowledge and research more accessible to more

people. This makes it easy for knowledge, as a form of capital, to be taken up by

businesses for commercial re-use, stimulating economic competition and innovation.

Next to that the research process, its results and their dissemination can be efficiently

monitored and measured and can be better made accountable as measurable outputs.

How this ‘openness’ of the Open Access concept and discourse has made it

easy to incorporate in a neoliberal context becomes clear if we look for example at the

Finch Report, an independent study commissioned by the UK government science

minister David Willetts, drawing on the advise and support of a group of

representatives of the research, library and publishing communities. The report offers

amongst others recommendations to ensure sustainable and efficient models for future

scholarly communication, defining amongst others success criteria of how to reach

this goal by focussing on the intensification of market competition. By recommending

the further implementation of ‘author-side’ fees for the open access publishing of

journals, it can be seen to favor the system of communication as it is currently set up,

protecting the interests of the established stakeholders, mainly commercial publishers.

But their neoliberal vision comes to the fore even more directly when we look at

the motivations underlying the wider dissemination of research that the Finch report

identifies and supports, where improving the flows of information and knowledge will

promote the list you can see here (see slide).

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In short, according to the vision of the Finch Report, ‘these are the motivations behind

the growth of the world-wide open access movement’: promoting greater

transparency, accountability, innovation, economic growth, efficiency and return on

investment, next to also promoting public engagements with research.’

Evidenced by the amount of critique the Finch report received, from a variety of

actors from diverse political standings, it becomes hard to maintain, as Nate Tkacz

has stated, that as a concept, open ‘appears seemingly without tension, without need

of clarification or qualification’ in its general functioning in network cultures. Tkacz

also connects the idea of openness to capitalism and the idea of the open society to

neo-liberal economic thought, whilst at the same time being surprised by it being

‘championed by all walks of political life’, including left-wing politics, where he

states that its ‘meaning is so overwhelming positive it seems impossible even to

question, let alone critique,’.

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In this respect I want to start questioning the argument that Tckacz makes here,

concerning the idea of openness as a floating signifier, where for Tkacz this implies

that ‘the concept [open] contains a poverty that has existed in all its uses throughout

history and that makes it unsuitable for political description.’ This is for Tkacz

evidenced by the fact that according to him, as a concept, the open is reactionary,

gaining meaning largely through a consideration of what it is not, where there is a

‘reluctance to build a lasting affirmative dimension’. The logic of openness in his

vision is actually dogmatic where it gives rise to and is perfectly compatible with new

forms of closure. Closure here remains an inherent part of the open.

What I want to start exploring here now are examples of experiments with openness

in digital publishing, that do offer affirmative, practical dimensions, through their

uptake, critique and experimentations with openness, and that work with their own,

affirmative value systems that cannot easily be classified as the negative side of a

dialectic. These experiments endorse and promote an alternative set of values, based

on a different underlying ethics, distinct from the motivations for Open Access as

defined by the Finch report. Here the openness of their politics lies amongst others in

their will to experiment, where experimentation is understood as a heterogeneous,

unpredictable, singular and uncontained process or experience, where they argue for a

more inclusive vision of experimentation, open for ambivalence, open for failure.

Mostly academic-led and centered, these experiments with making research available

in Open Access, with new formats such as liquid monographs, wiki-publications and

remixed books, and with the establishment of new, alternative institutions and

practices, try to challenge and reconceptualise scholarly communication. This

approach towards openness, exploring new formats and stimulating sharing and re-use

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of content, can be seen as a radical alternative to and a critique of the business ethics

underlying innovations in the knowledge economy whilst at the same time creating

strong alternatives.

Radical open access thus refers to a questioning of our institutions, our

practices, our notions of academic authorship, the book, content creation, and

publication as well as a productive engagement with their potential alternatives based

on experimentation. It questions, intervenes in and disturb existing practices and

institutions, whilst offering radical, counter-institutional alternatives. But radical

Open Access also involves the critique of openness as a concept and the practices of

openness themselves. And in this respect its engagement with openness is very similar

to its vision of politics where in this sense politics itself can and needs to be rethought

in an ongoing manner, adapting to new contexts and conditions, functioning as a

floating signifier. According to Etienne Balibar, a more interesting and radical notion

of politics involves focusing on the process of the democratisation of democracy

itself, thus turning democracy into a form of continuous struggle or continuous critical

self-reflection. Democracy is not an established reality, nor is it a mere ideal; it is

rather a permanent struggle for democratisation. And as I and my colleagues have

argued before, open access can and should be understood in similar terms: not as a

thing, an object, or a model with pre-described meaning or ideology, but as a project

with an unknown outcome, as an ongoing series of critical struggles. And this is

exactly why we cannot pin down open as a concept but why we need to leave it open,

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open to otherness and difference and open to adapt to different circumstances.

Living Books about Life and remixthebook are two book-publishing projects

that have explored the potential of openness for an affirmative politics of publishing.

In what sense have they promoted an open-ended politics of the book, enabling

duration and difference? And in what sense can we, in a continued effort to applaud

these forms of affirmative experimentation, critique their implementations of

openness, by asking ongoing questions about the scope of both their experimentation

and their forms of critique with respect to the creation of alternative practices and

institutions?

Remixthebook is a collection of multimedia writings which explore the remix

as a cultural phenomenon by themselves referencing and mashing up curated

selections of earlier theory, avant-garde and art writings on remix. Mark Amerika, the

author/curator of the remixthebook project, states that it is not a traditional form of

(book) scholarship, but a hybrid performance platform. It consists of a printed book

and an accompanying website which functions as a platform for a collaboration

between artists and theorists who explore practice-based research. Amerika tries to

evade the bound nature of the printed book and its fixity and authority, by bringing

together this community of people remixing, performing and discussing the theories

and texts presented in the book via video, audio and text-based remixes published on

the website—opening the book and its source material up for continuous multimedia

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re-cutting. Amerika also challenges dominant ideas of authorship by playing with

personas and by drawing on a variety of remixed source material in his book, as well

as by directly involving his remix community as collaborators on the project.

However a discrepancy remains visible between Amerika’s aim to create a

commons of renewable source material along with a platform for everyone to use, and

the specific choices he has made with respect to the outlets he has chosen to fulfil this

aim. Remixthebook is still published as a traditional printed book which hasn’t been

made available on an open access basis to more fully enable remix and reuse. The

website is also not openly available for everyone to contribute to as the contributors

have been selected or curated by Amerika and co-curator Rick Silva. The remixes on

the website are not available for remixing, as they are licensed under an all rights

reserved copyright. Furthermore, Amerika is also still acting as the ‘traditional’ author

of both his book, and of the (curated) collection of material on the website, by using

his name on the cover of the book and as part of the copyright license, which in the

scholarly and artistic realm still function as signs of attribution and crediting.

Living Books about Life is a series of open access books about life published by Open

Humanities Press, providing a bridge between the humanities and the sciences. All the

books repackage existing open access science-related research and supplement this

with an original essay by the book’s editor to tie the collection together. They also

provide additional multimedia material, from videos to podcasts to whole books. The

books have been published online on an open source wiki platform, which means the

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books are ‘open on a read/write basis for users to help compose, edit, annotate,

translate and remix.’ As Gary Hall, one of the initiators of the project has argued, this

project amongst others wants to challenge the physical and conceptual limitations of

the traditional codex by including multimedia and whole books, but also by

emphasising its duration by publishing in a wiki and thus ‘rethinking ‘the book’ itself

as a living, collaborative endeavour.’ Hall argues that wikis offer a potential to

question and critically engage issues of authorship, work and stability. They can offer

increased accessibility and induce participation from contributors from the periphery.

As he states, ‘wiki-communication can enable us to produce a multiplicitous academic

and publishing network, one with a far more complex, fluid, antagonistic, distributed,

and decentred structure, with a variety of singular and plural, human and non-human

actants and agents. One of the drawbacks of wikis, however, is that they are envisaged

and structured in such a way that authorship and clear attribution/responsibility as

well as version control remain an essential part of their functioning. The structure

behind a wiki is still based on an identifiable author and on a version history, giving

access to changes and modifications. In reality, the authority of the author is thus not

challenged. Furthermore, the books in the series also include a ‘frozen version’, and

are published not as ‘common’ wikis, but as books with covers and clearly defined

authors/editors. Mirroring the physical materiality of the book in such a way also

reproduces ‘the aura’ of the book, including the discourse of scholarship this brings

with it. This might explain why the user interaction with the books in the series has

been extremely limited in comparison to other wikis. Here the choice to assemble, the

collected information as a book, whilst and as part of re-thinking and re-performing

the book as concept and form, might paradoxically have been both the success and the

failure of this project.

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