Highlights:

“1:1 practices are both what they are, and propositions of what they are.” (p. 3)

“Scaling up operations in this way breaks with modernist conceptions of scale.” (p. 3)

“maps (embodiments of the will to make-visible)” (p. 3)

“Every light-shedding device will also inevitably cast shadow” (p. 3)

“And this is precisely the pitfall of so many politically motivated art initiatives today: they remain squarely within the paradigm of spectatorship.” (p. 4)

“positively ‘redundant,’” (p. 4)

“‘double ontology.’” (p. 4)

“institutional capture, and the kind of defanged representation to which it leads” (p. 5)

“It is certainly possible to describe them as having a double ontology; but it may be more closely in keeping with their self-understanding to argue that this is not an ontological issue at all, but rather a question of the extent to which they are informed by a certain coefficient of art.” (p. 5)

“1:1 scale” (p. 6)

“Occasionally, though, we hear someone proclaim, upon discovering that some usual activity or service was grounded in artistic self-understanding, that they ‘didn’t even know it was art,’ and find ourselves wondering whether that discovery came as an epiphany or as a let down...” (p. 6)

“The ‘labour of allure,’ writes Harman, involves separating an object from its traits, even as these traits remain physically inseparable from the object.” (Morals, 2013, p. 7)

“The thing changes not one bit, yet once the trapdoor springs open and the ‘dark agents’ are on the loose, nothing could be more different.” (p. 7)

+ allure is a perceptual tranfroamtion and escape of subjectivity from objecthood

“I was aware at that time, that for the spectator even more than for the artist, art is a habit-forming drug.” (p. 9)

“deeds and contrivances modestly tweaked by artistic subjectivity” (p. 9)

“While the assisted readymade has become the addiction of the autonomous artworld, apparently intent on pursuing its logic exhaustively until such time as every commodity on earth has an identical counterpart in the realm of art” (p. 9)

“artworld-assisted prototype” (p. 9)

“it insists upon its experimental uniqueness” (p. 9)

“meaning that these skills (and those of others) are commodities to be bought and sold at the marketplace” (p. 10)

“it hadn’t occurred to anyone that users of words, melodies and colours could somehow lay claim in any meaningful way to some particular arrangement that they had come up with; that they could claim authorship of some particular configuration of otherwise freely circulating marks and noises, and as such regulate other people’s use of them” (p. 10)

+ interesting angle on regulation

“containing semiotic dispersion around an arbitrary signifier (a proper name)” (p. 10)

+ proper name and nyms / semiotic dispersion

“But these critiques, though they deconstructed the notion, paradoxically only strengthened the market value of authorship” (p. 10)

“Indeed, from an investment perspective, authorship has now overtaken objecthood as a monetisable commodity” (p. 10)

“As users contribute content, knowledge, knowhow and value, the question as to how they be acknowledged becomes pressing. With the rise of collectively organised artsustaining environments, single-signature authorship tends to lose its purchase – like possessive individualism in reverse” (p. 11)

+ see rise of splits/fractionlization of value in the market

“Literally, auto / nomos means to determine one’s own laws” (p. 12)

“Its ‘conquest of space,’ as Pierre Bourdieu calls it, was about wresting art from the overarching control and hindrance of religious and political authorities, carving out a separate sphere for itself where it could develop in keeping with its own internal logic” (p. 12)

+ different from automatically producing art. auto means the production of laws and rules outside of spheres of control

“Incursions from other fields were repulsed vigorously” (p. 12)

+ epistemic tresspassing

“its own, utterly unregulated market notwithstanding” (p. 12)

“The price to pay for autonomy are the invisible parentheses that bracket art off from being taken seriously as a proposition having consequences beyond the aesthetic realm” (p. 12)

“To gain use value, to find a usership, requires that art quit the autonomous sphere of purposeless purpose and disinterested spectatorship” (p. 12)

“a sphere where one must conform to the law of permanent ontological exception, which has left the autonomous artworld rife with cynicism” (p. 12)

“arithmetical relation between the unexpressed but intended and the unintentionally expressed” (p. 13)

“It is a radically deontological conception of art – as socialised competence, rather than performed works” (p. 13)

“Yet even as users pursue self-interest, they mutualise uses and produce a kind of usership surplus, building upon and expanding prior uses” (p. 14)

“Call it a utility surplus” (p. 14)

“Gabriel Tarde” (p. 14)

“intercerebral collaboration” (p. 14)

“upward spiral” (p. 14)

“Wikipedia, for instance, an extraordinary user-made initiative by any account, has been built out of roughly 1% of the man-hours that Americans spend watching television each year.” (p. 14)

“cognitive-surplus potential that aggregated usership embodies” (p. 15)

“accomplished as the by-product of a primary task” (p. 15)

“For now usership has precious little say over the use of its community-generated surplus, and rarely accrues its share of the benefits it produces” (p. 15)

“When we say someone is a better speaker than someone else, we are referring to performance, not competence” (p. 16)

“What performativity overlooks is what exactly is being performed - and with respect to art practices leaving the sandbox of art for the social, that can best be called ‘competence.” (p. 16)

+ relationship between trust sandboxes and social competence

“In fact it is to be understood as virtually synonymous with incompetence, for usership-generated practice is founded on mutualising incompetence” (p. 16)

“And in effect, it is only because a given incompetence is somehow competence-deficient that it calls a competence to the fore” (p. 16)

“This gives art particular potency in its contemporary moment of trans-social migration: it can deploy its (in)competences and self-understanding in social settings far removed from art, without ever performing them as art” (p. 17)

“competence can also be construed itself as something dynamic, constantly being informed through a kind of feedback loop by developments in performance” (p. 17)

“an escape route from, an event-centered conception of art” (p. 17)

“one might associate event with performance and competence with everyday usership” (p. 17)

“It is certainly fair to say that there is an extraordinary amount of art-related competence at work and at play that is simply not being performed - that is, not being captured institutionally and performed as event” (p. 17)

“Mabel Tapia” (p. 19)

“But they do not necessarily have an aesthetic function” (p. 19)

“he did not believe art was functionless, only that it should not be seen as having a purposive or a goal-oriented function, but one which endlessly unfolds in disinterested aesthetic contemplation. As long as that function remains active, art remains outside the realm of usership and can have no operative use value.” (p. 19)

“Deactivating art’s aesthetic function, rendering it inoperative, opens art up – by Agamben’s account to other functions. To a heuristic function, for instance; or an epistemic function. Or the more operative functions of 1:1 scale practices.” (p. 19)

“For Kant, an actor in any given situation – or, worse still, a user – is not ‘autonomous,’ and is incapable of theoretical onlooking” (p. 20)

“illicit use of language” (p. 20)

“issues of preference” (p. 20)

“precluded from aesthetic judgement that required disinterested spectatorship” (p. 20)

“In many respects, The Emancipated Spectator reads much better if one replaces ‘spectator’ with ‘user’...” (p. 21)

“reciprocal readymades” (p. 22)

“To that degree, at least, they do indeed break with the basic tenets of autonomous art” (p. 22)

“to describe practices in these terms is to make them inherently reliant on performative capture to repatriate them into the art frame” (p. 22)

“lost to posterity” (p. 22)

“in order to gain traction somewhere else” (p. 22)

“forms of capture in contemporary society that hobble action, desire and thought by cloaking them in often invisible overcodes” (p. 23)

“This form of capture relies on that most perversely neoliberal form of capture – operative or performative capture, whereby things are put to work, made to perform” (p. 23)

“Whereas (left-leaning) art historians and social theorists have conditioned us to think of emancipation, and indeed of art itself, in terms of events – whether past or yet to come – escapology rejects this masculinist perspective as one premised on the luxury of being able to wait for the coming event or to look back on the one which took place.” (p. 24)

“construing art as an irruptive event, penetrating stable appearance with novelty and all the attendant fireworks” (p. 25)

“It can only be designated as an event in retrospect or anticipated as a future possibility” (p. 25)

“To pin our hopes on events is a nominalist move which draws on the masculinist luxury of having the power both to name things and to wait about for salvation” (p. 25)

“In our society of the event, the event itself disappears from view. It becomes the horizon line itself” (p. 25)

“a way of rethinking the dialectics of collective and individual agency” (p. 26)

“usership at once designates the site where individuals and their comportments and needs are expected, where a space is available for their agency, both defining and circumscribing it; and it refers to the way in which these same users surge up and barge into a universe” (p. 26)

“Governance, control, disciplining devices of all kinds, necessarily generate users whose agency is either exclusively rebellious nor purely submissive toward an exterior norm” (p. 27)

“they do not envisage that the solution to their problem could lie in any sort of future to which the present might or ought to be subordinated” (p. 27)

“They have neither the time to be revolutionary – because things have to change nor the patience to be reformists, because things have to stop” (p. 27)

“radical pragmatism of usership” (p. 27)

“Externalities are the by-products of usership” (p. 28)

“indirect benefits or costs” (p. 28)

“activity or transaction” (p. 28)

+ externalities and on-chain art

“But usership is in fact akin to pollination - users are like bees, as it were, producing incalculable externalities” (p. 28)

“‘economy of exchange and production toward an economy of pollination and contribution’ – that is, an economy of usership” (p. 28)

“All too often, we tend to devote attention to what art does when it gets to whatever new territory it invests, rather than thinking about what happens to the place art left behind” (p. 29)

“taunting culture, the way nature abhors a vacuum” (p. 29)

“This space, and all that goes with it, formerly reserved for art but suddenly made available to other forms of endeavor, is often a tremendously desirable and useful resource for practitioners from other fields – the very fields where art may have migrated and who repurpose art’s vacant space their own use” (p. 29)

“shadows of the attention economy” (p. 29)

“Constitutive mobility. Elusive implication” (p. 29)

“In Homo Ludens, Johan Huizinga argues that what he calls the ‘troublesome only feeling’ (i.e., that it’s only a game) is abolished in play. Is that also true for art?” (p. 30)

“Usership is not beyond gaming; indeed, it’s just gaming – but playing for real.” (p. 30)

“Today, immaterial gleaning is widely practiced by a whole host of art-related practitioners; its agricultural antecedents offer it a haven from encroachment by groups lobbying on behalf of increased intellectual property rights and the foreclosure of the epistemic commons.” (p. 31)

“It is a rare thing, and the measure of genuine intellectual creativity, when a writer is able to develop and deploy a full-fledged, conceptual vocabulary and use it in a sustained way: the writing becomes at once the staging ground and the first application of a new way of talking.” (p. 32)

“it refers to someone who hacks into knowledge-production networks of any kind, and liberates that knowledge from an economy of scarcity.” (p. 32)

“Today though, he argues, this conflict is most acute between what he calls the ‘vectoralist’ class (the class that owns the pipelines, the satellites and the servers, which has come to supplant the hegemony of the capitalist class) and the new productive class that Wark describes as hackers, whose purpose it is to free knowledge from illusions of scarcity.” (p. 32)

“readymade documents” (p. 33)

“His argument is that keeping information secret is inefficient; it leads to an absurd, unaesthetic duplication of effort amongst the information’s usership.” (p. 33)

“all the more potent in that it remains unperformed” (p. 34)

“redirect that competence elsewhere” (p. 34)

“it is creatively idle, making do with what is available rather than feeling compelled to add something else” (p. 34)

“Imperformativity is not usership’s horizon, but rather its modus operandi.” (p. 35)

“Rather than seeing art as the lens through which to consider conceptual migration, it might well prefer to see itself as a host to, and guest of, lexical migrants.” (p. 36)

“tantamount to wresting ‘art’ from ‘art,’ sundering art from itself” (p. 36)

“Literally, or least historically, ‘loopholes’ were the narrow vertical windows found in castle walls. The defenders of the castle on the inside referred to them as ‘arrow slits,’ using them to launch arrows against assailants, who, on the other hand, referred to them as loopholes – the only anchor point for the loop on their climbing rope, and hence the only ready means of gaining entry without breaching or destroying the wall or gate.” (p. 37)

“Users have an inherent knack – call it the cognitive privilege of usership – for finding ambiguities in a system which can be used to circumvent its implied or explicitly stated intent.” (p. 37)

“Artists as users are in a way particularly well equipped to exploit such grey zones inasmuch as one of the reflexes of artistic competence is ‘détournement’ – never responding forthrightly to expectations, nor refusing to engage, but rather countering obliquely.” (p. 37)

“Users of such practices know from experience and observation that while it is both fun and possible to outfox the authorities for a while, once the loophole has come to light, their window of opportunity is already closing and it’s time to move on.” (p. 38) + Loopholes exist in loops of progression and retreat

“curatorship determines content which is oriented toward spectatorship.” (p. 39)

“For, simply, users are not owners. Nor are they spectators.” (p. 40)

“Current scenarios predictions about what 3.0 culture might look like invariably focus on the advent of the ‘semantic web’ and insinuate that user engagement will somehow wane in favor of object-oriented content – data talking to data.” (p. 40)

“When in the 1970s Jean-Luc Godard quipped that television viewers ought to be paid to watch, it was assumed he was sarcastically commenting on the quality of broadcasting. Thirty-five years on, the remark appears utterly premonitory: if usership generates value, it should be remunerated.” (p. 40)

“From Capital-Labour to Capital-Life, Maurizio Lazzarato” (p. 41)

“usership, far from being synonymous with consumption (destruction), spills over into production. Usership is creation socialised, and as such engenders a surplus.” (p. 41)

“How is documentation of the project to be shaken from its state of inertia?” (p. 42)

“Today, though, with the deactivation of art’s aesthetic function, it is more precisely the document, the exhibition, the proposition itself that seem to call for a gesture to free their potentiality from its latency; now it is they who lay claim to our speech, not the other way round.” (p. 42)

“impaired their coefficient” (p. 42)

“Narratorship names the vital function of the narrating subject and, as such, opens up a new discursive life for the object (or the document) behind the exhibition’s back.” (p. 42)

“By and large, the tendency has been to integrate talking into the existent conceptual and physical architecture of the artworld; to think of the verbal as a mere enhancement of the visible, rather than perceiving it as a potential alternative to often reifying exhibition structures.” (p. 42)

“it may also reveal that the site of art itself has undergone an historical shift; that art itself is not immediately present, but withdrawn, its coefficient of specific visibility too low for it to be detected and identified as such.” (p. 43)

“Objecthood turned out to be a more flexible category than it had seemed (or than it had been).” (p. 44)

“as did protocols for immaterial conceptual pieces.” (p. 44)

“documentation and performative capture becoming dominant artistic genres.” (p. 44)

“To a large degree, in a kind of zero-sum game, objecthood has now been surpassed by what might be called ‘eventhood’ as a hegemonic conceptual institution.” (p. 44)

“so ownership is now expanding vertically” (p. 45)

“privatising the vertical domain of knowledge requires creating artificial scarcity in the realm of potentially unlimited profusion” (p. 45)

“piggybacking refers to carrying a person on one’s back or shoulders.” (p. 46)

“It is a form of freeloading (another nice term), different from parasitism and more akin to a logic of the epiphyte:” (p. 46)

“epiphyte lives in a negotiated form of symbiosis with the host.” (p. 46)

“piggybacking may be seen as a user-driven form of redistributive symbolic justice” (p. 46)

“rural predecessor to hacking” (p. 47)

“It’s called stealing or piracy, as if sharing a wealth of knowledge were the moral equivalent of plundering a ship and murdering its crew.” (p. 47)

“One of the characteristics of poaching is that it is by definition rigorously imperformative. A poacher who signs his work, or who performs his poach, is no poacher at all – or at least not for long.” (p. 48)

“withdraws from the event horizon” (p. 48)

“The subjectivities we are called upon to perform in our prosumer society, though they may appear subversive, are easily read by power.” (p. 48)

“the returning to common usership what had been separated in the sphere of the sacred.” (p. 50)

“That which is sacred is removed from the realm of usership” (p. 50)

“usership prohibition has found its place of choice in the Museum” (p. 50)

“protected by the stalwart institution of spectatorship” (p. 50)

“usership is synonymous with the act of profanation” (p. 50)

“For in the act of artistic profanation, as he sees it, objects do not so much gain use value as a kind of ludic value..” (p. 50)

“Can 1:1 scale practices not be conceptualized in terms of profanation” (p. 50)

“disinterested spectator as the new heroic figure of aesthetic experience” (p. 51)

“its usefulness is its uselessness, its purpose is to be purposeless” (p. 51)

“general significance” (p. 51)

“potential of recycling art – and more broadly, artistic tools and competences – into other lifeworlds” (p. 52)

“It’s as if the house were bigger when measured on the inside than when measured on the outside!” (p. 57) house of leaves

“History of Sexuality, catchily entitled ‘The Uses of Pleasure,’ Foucault” (p. 57) The Uses of Collapse

“‘use’ names a kind of gap between desire and law” (p. 58)

“Indeed, in both popular and learned parlance, there is a tendency to conflate looking at something, and in some cases simply seeing something, with spectatorship.” (p. 60)

“This rhetoric of ownership in idiomatic speech is a revealing symptom in our era of cross-the-board privatisation.” (p. 63) + interesting in terms of platform discourse on ownership of data. what would a usership of data look like? + also, relevant re owning the means of production. this is a distortion, perhaps of seizing the means of production, which could be closer to a form of usership rather than ownership.

“DIY (do it yourself) culture emerged in industrial societies when the division of labour had atomized people’s relationship to the production process and ratified expert culture” (p. 63)

“ambulant and approximate science” (p. 64)

“tactical polyvalence of discourse” (p. 64)

“the everyday” (p. 65)

“the usual” (p. 65)

“Perhaps part of the reason for the artworld’s discomfort with usership is that it is an eminently unromantic category” (p. 67)

“spectatorship is to the spectacle as usership is to... the usual.” (p. 68)