Defunding, Activating, and the Afterlives of Culture: Roger Malina On Defund Culture and Activating Fluxus

Roger Malina, Defunding, Activating, and the Afterlives of Culture: On Gary Hall’s Defund Culture and Activating Fluxus, Expanding Conservation, eds Hanna Hölling, Aga Wielocha, and Josephine Ellis

Recent open-access publications by Gary Hall and by editors Hanna Hölling, Aga Wielocha, and Josephine Ellis offer two distinct yet complementary interventions into contemporary debates about culture, institutions, and inequality. Read together, Defund Culture: A Radical Proposal and Activating Fluxus, Expanding Conservation help articulate a broader narrative about how culture is funded, transmitted, neutralized, and—potentially—reanimated.

While Hall advances an abolitionist critique of cultural funding regimes, Activating Fluxus explores how historically anti-institutional practices can persist, mutate, and remain alive within and against institutional frameworks. The tension between these positions is not a weakness; it is precisely where the most productive questions emerge.

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Defund Culture: Withdrawal as Structural Critique

At the heart of Defund Culture is a refusal to accept the existing cultural landscape as neutral or inevitable. Hall challenges calls to “support the arts” that fail to interrogate which cultures are supported, through which institutions, and for whose benefit.

The book argues that the persistent dominance of white, male, and middle-class voices in the arts, media, and academy is not an accident of representation but the outcome of longstanding funding arrangements, institutional hierarchies, and prestige economies. Within this framework, diversity initiatives and access programs often function as legitimation mechanisms rather than engines of transformation.

Hall’s provocation is abolitionist in spirit. Rather than reforming institutions from within, he asks what it would mean to disinvest from cultural systems as they currently operate, redistributing resources away from elite organizations and toward commons-oriented, collective, and radically relational alternatives. Importantly, this is not a call for “less culture,” but for a reconfiguration of cultural value, authority, and care.

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Fluxus as a Counter-History of Cultural Survival

Activating Fluxus, Expanding Conservation enters the conversation from a different angle. Rather than beginning with funding structures, it takes Fluxus—a movement defined by ephemerality, participation, and resistance to commodification—as a stress test for cultural institutions.

Fluxus challenged the idea that artworks should endure as stable objects. Scores, events, instructions, and collective actions replaced singular artifacts. The central problem addressed by Activating Fluxus is therefore not how to preserve objects, but how to care for practices that were never meant to be fixed.

The book proposes “activation” as an expanded model of conservation: conservation as interpretation, reenactment, transmission, and care. In this view, meaning is not stabilized but continually renegotiated among artists, conservators, curators, and participants. Conservation becomes a generative, decolonial, and epistemically distributed practice, rather than a technical or custodial one.

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Redistribution of Authority, Not Just Resources

One of the most significant contributions of Activating Fluxus is its implicit argument that conservation redistributes epistemic authority. Expertise is no longer centralized in institutions alone; it is shared across communities, performers, scholars, and caretakers. This move closely parallels Hall’s call for epistemic pluriversality, even as it operates within existing institutional contexts.

Where Defund Culture focuses on withdrawing legitimacy and funding from elite systems, Activating Fluxus demonstrates how authority can be redistributed through practices of care, interpretation, and participation. These are different levers acting on the same structural problem.

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A Productive Tension: Abolition and Transformation

The two books diverge most clearly on the question of institutional possibility.

Hall is skeptical that dominant cultural institutions can truly surrender their hierarchies, prestige mechanisms, and extractive logics. From this perspective, reform risks becoming a way of prolonging institutional life without altering its foundations.

By contrast, Activating Fluxus suggests that some institutions can be forced to mutate—to accept instability, incompleteness, and shared authority—if they wish to engage meaningfully with practices like Fluxus. The book does not deny institutional power, but it explores how that power might be destabilized through new models of care and transmission.

Rather than choosing between these positions, it may be more productive to see them as addressing different phases of the same problem: dismantling cultural accumulation on the one hand, and inventing non-extractive afterlives for fragile practices on the other.

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Open Access as Infrastructure, Not Afterthought

It is not incidental that both books appear as open-access publications. Hall’s work is released under the CC4r (Collective Conditions for Re-Use) framework via mediastudies.press, while Activating Fluxus is made freely available by Routledge.

In narrative terms, this matters. Defund Culture critiques the political economy of cultural accumulation, while Activating Fluxus demonstrates alternative circulatory logics already operating within legacy systems. Publishing models here are not neutral vessels; they are part of the argument.

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Toward a Shared Narrative

Taken together, these two books suggest a broader trajectory:

1. Critique – Naming how cultural institutions reproduce inequality and exclusion.
2. Exemplars – Recognizing practices (like Fluxus) that resist objectification and commodification.
3. Transmission – Inventing ways to care for and relay such practices without domesticating them.

If Defund Culture asks what must be dismantled, Activating Fluxus asks how vulnerable, collective, anti-elite practices can persist once the mansion is refused. One pushes toward rupture; the other toward experimental continuity.

Together, they sharpen a central question for contemporary cultural work: not simply how to fund culture, but how culture lives on—who carries it, who cares for it, and under what conditions it remains alive rather than merely preserved.

Roger F. Malina

Defund Culture - new open access book from Gary Hall

My new book, Defund Culture: A Radical Proposal, is now out:

https://www.mediastudies.press/defund-culture-a-radical-proposal

It's of course open access, published by mediastudies.press under the CC4r: Collective Conditions for Re-Use commitment. 

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Gary Hall, Defund Culture: A Radical Proposal - Why the Arts Are So White, Male and Middle-Class and What We Can Do About It

https://www.mediastudies.press/defund-culture-a-radical-proposal

Calls to expand public investment in the arts often treat the existing cultural and institutional landscape as a given. Defund Culture challenges this assumption, asking instead what kinds of culture are being supported, through which institutions, and to whose benefit.

In pursuing these questions, the book turns attention to the structural inequalities that shape Britain’s creative and intellectual life. Drawing on critical theory, political philosophy, and cultural policy, Hall shows how the dominance of white, male, middle- and upper-class voices in the arts, media, and academy is sustained through longstanding funding arrangements and institutional hierarchies. Expanding access within this system (e.g. through social mobility initiatives)—however well intentioned—will not, on its own, produce structural change.

Rather than offering a programme of reform, Defund Culture explores what it might mean to disinvest from cultural institutions as they currently operate. Taking cues from abolitionist calls to defund the police, Hall proposes redistributing resources away from elite institutions and toward more collective, commons-oriented, and radically relational alternatives grounded in redistribution, institutional transformation, and epistemic pluriversality.

Defund Culture is available online and as a free download in PDF and ePub, on a CC4r: Collective Conditions for Re-Use basis. A paperback version is also available.

https://www.mediastudies.press/defund-culture-a-radical-proposal

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About mediastudies.press

mediastudies.press is a scholar-led, nonprofit, diamond open access publisher in the media, film, and communication studies fields.

You can learn more about mediastudies.press, including their operations and OA principles, on their site:

https://www.mediastudies.press/about

The press is a member of the Open Book Collective and the ScholarLed consortium, and also publishes the History of Media Studies journal. Please contact them at press@mediastudies.press.

The Independent Intellectual vs Posting Zero and the Dead Internet

Below is my short, ten minute introduction to SCREENSHOT BABEL, a workshop I ran with Ester Freider as part of The Cyberbaroque: A Neologism-Based Symposium. Organised by Everyone is a Girl (EIAG), and held at Anomalous in London on November 20, 2025, the symposium explored the idea of the cyberbaroque allegory through presentations, a reading, a workshop, and a film screening.

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My name’s Gary Hall. I’m a media philosopher. In my current work I'm exploring whether we need a different way of doing internet theory and of being creative – something beyond both capitalist and liberal humanist logics. In other words, beyond the rules of the traditional university system and the newer influencer-driven creator economy, neither of which feels quite right. 

In academia, we still work within a hyper-competitive institutional culture stuck in McLuhan’s Gutenberg Galaxy: legacy theorists writing long-form books and articles about radical politics, collectivity and community yet being marketed – and marketing and promoting themselves – as individual intellectual ‘stars’. How appropriate is it to keep operating like this?  To what extent can we fully understand art, writing and media in the post-Gutenberg age while behaving as though we still live in that of Gutenberg? It's an inherited template for being an author and thinker – and for how they are produced – that feels increasingly outdated and unappealing to many.

So I understand why many of the ‘post-naïve generation’ of internet artists and theorists – people like Joshua Citarella of Doomscroll and Do Not Research (the latter being an influence on Everyone is a Girl) – want to by-pass the ‘liberal’ gatekeepers of the ‘old elite’ – galleries, museums, universities, academic presses, peer-reviewed journals. Instead, they’ve turned to YouTube, Substack, Instagram and podcasting, to present themselves as independent, self-organised writers and researchers. Yet this counter-elite model has problems of its own.

For one thing, operating outside the traditional institutional structures for any length of time as a more intellectual, leftist version of the content-creator-come-influencer requires privilege – not to mention brand name recognition and profile.  Too often, it’s white, middle-class, well-resourced, well-educated men who can afford – financially and socially – to function as a self-focused freelance business like this.The possibility of succeeding is therefore limited to a privileged few: it’s not a pathway that can be widely replicated. 

For another, this counter-elite model has also produced a wave of right-wing ‘edge lords’: cyberbaroque sophists such as Jordan Peterson, Naomi Wolf and Candice Owens who, as Ester puts it, use ‘clever but false arguments to trick you into believing them, or believing they are smart’.

For still another, many alternative media communities want to create according to different principles from the mainstream - including a ‘post-individualist’ search for connectivity, cooperation, collaboration and community through mailing lists, message boards, Discord channels and indie presses. But the gravitational pull of the algorithms is strong. All too often, people slide back into – and may actively produce – the neoliberal subjectivity of the commodified cult of personality associated with the attention systems of late capitalist influencer culture – and they do so even as they’re mocking and critiquing and misusing this individualist subjectivity and trying to move beyond it. 

As Morgane Billuart observes, in this environment where one’s critical practice,  whether it concerns post-internet art, politics, activism, resource sharing or community building, is self-consciously conceived as a business model, ‘the use of self – one’s voice, face, and opinions – long rejected by traditional academic standards of rigor, has proven highly effective.’ Here the virtual intellectual knowingly – if reluctantly – becomes the product as a pragmatic means of sustaining their work. They just live the contradiction, because performative self-branding builds audiences and fosters parasocial connections and community engagement.

So, the question is: how much of an alternative is this counter-elite model really? Is sustaining your practice through social media, advertising revenue, micro-payments and subscription-based sites such as Substack and Patreon – turning your ‘authentic’ self – appearance, autobiography, personality, lifestyle – into a marketable, monetizable, attention-grabbing persona, just a means of financial survival in the face of institutional and state funding cuts for artists and academics? Is it the necessary price if you want to do interesting critical and creative work today and have others interact with it? Or is this means of fulfilment through self-production and promotion another form of control? Is this content creator too much of a cyberbaroque sophist and trickster?

Perhaps it’s more ambivalent than that. Perhaps – like the aesthetics of Everyone Is a Girl – it swings both ways. Perhaps, for reasons of tactics and strategy, it’s both at the same time.

But if both have their problems, maybe the issue shouldn’t be set up in terms of liberal thinker vs. neoliberal influencer, legacy theorist vs. libertarian or leftist disruptor, institutional academics vs independent, ‘hyperfeminine “i’m just a girl”’ meme’ makers, at all? Perhaps we need something else, a ‘third way’?

Are we in fact already seeing hints of such a third direction in those who treat a large Instagram following as a sign your work has become overly shaped by algorithms? Post-pandemic – after a period of everyone being being perpetually online – having thousands of followers is no longer particularly difficult or rare. With all the talk of a ‘dead internet’ – where content is increasingly AI-generated and followers may be bots – it might even be a warning sign. Having fewer than 500 followers, by contrast, can suggest that – if you’re posting at all, rather than ‘posting zero’ – you’re posting about what genuinely interests you, not what the internet wants you to find interesting.  

So what might a critical and creative practice look like if it didn’t rely on either:

• the prestige economy of the old institutions, or

• the algorithmic hustle of the platform economy and its influencers and content creators, with their aim, as Ester says – however critical, playful and experimental they may be – of ‘taking up as much time and space in [your scrolling] brain as possible’?

Can we imagine a space where theory and creativity aren’t shaped by the need to either impress a university press or brand ourselves into exhaustion? Is it this kind of space we’re creating and exploring this evening?

The Commons vs Creative Commons Conclusion: Commoner Is Not An Identity

This is the final part of an initial 5,000 word draft of a specially commissioned piece on the commons and Creative Commons. It’s for an open-access online glossary on the contemporary condition and near future that's being produced by the Chinese Academy of Art.

Contents:

I: Introduction * Conceptual Overview * Elinor Ostrom and the Tragedy of the Commons * Liberal Commons * Radical Left Commons * From Capitalism to Postcapitalism – and Back Again

II: The Undercommons * Latent Commons * Uncommons * The Unknown Common * Common Misunderstanding No.1: The Commons is Not Inherently Left-wing

III: Creative Commons * CC and AI * Common Misunderstanding No.2: Creative Commons is Not a Commons * The Commons and Creative Commons: Some Distinctions * Alternatives to Creative Commons

IV: Conclusion: Common Misunderstanding No.3: Commoner is Not an Identity * Common Misunderstanding No.4: There is Not One Commons

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Conclusion 

Two further common misunderstandings about the commons are worth mentioning.

Common Misunderstanding No.3: Commoner is Not an Identity

The Commons, for some, is actually a noun not a verb. The emphasis here is less on understanding the commons in terms of shared assets – or even as a particular kind of community, style of collective life, place or space – and more on conceiving the commons as a practice. This is why they prefer to think in terms of commoning rather than commons: to highlight its processual and performative nature. It is an approach evident in many accounts of the radical commons and the emphasis placed there on commoning: the ongoing generative social practices through which both the commons and the community of commoners are invented, constituted and sustained. Balser and de la Cadena’s description of the uncommons as “a commons that would be a continuous achievement” – not a fixed goal or final endpoint but a permanent becoming – also deserves to be highlighted in this context (2018, 19).

So, too, does the process-oriented account of the commons provided by Stavros Stavrides. When community formation is directed toward generating shared space and purpose – the common – it must be understood as open-ended and constantly evolving, Stavrides insists. This is because the commons does not exist as a stable, pre-existing reality to be seized and held on to. Nor are commoners defined by fixed identities that exist prior to their taking part in the living process that is commoning. On the contrary, both emerge through – and are only born in – the act of commoning. This orientation carries important implications. For one thing, it displaces the idea that community membership depends on a shared, pre-given identity held in common. Instead, the identities of the commoners are formed in and through the practices of sharing and participation in the commons. For another, belonging is understood as a matter of action rather than origin. Those who take part in commoning become members of a community that itself comes into existence through those very acts (Stavrides 2022, 26–27).

Common Misunderstanding No.4: There is Not One Commons

Although many people refer to “the commons” as if its meaning were self-evident, without need of further clarification or explanation, there is no single, universally-agreed upon idea of the commons. Nor is there a one-size-fits-all model for how commons are organised or function. “Every instance of collaboration makes room for some and leaves out others,” Tsing says of the latent commons (255). Meanwhile, David Harvey notes how “good solutions at one scale (the ‘local,’ say) do not necessarily … make for good solutions at another scale (the global, for example).” As a result, issues concerning the commons are “contradictory and therefore always contested” (2012, 69-71). Even among advocates there is no shared understanding of the commons. Ironically, this is not something they have in common.

Moreover, commons themselves are not inherently harmonious or homogeneous. For all their mutual bonds, participants in a commons can differ in important ways. The relationships that connect them may be shaped as much by division and divergence as by solidarity and collective interest. These relationships, too, may be something commoners do not have in common.

Along with the difficulty of managing a participatory and non-hierarchical commons across a variety of scales, not just the small and local, this ultimate lack of cohesion and shared purpose may explain why a commons-based movement or collective political subject large enough to meaningfully challenge, let alone replace, capitalism and its methods of organising resources and labour has yet to emerge. At the same time, this may be just what the commons and commoning is. Rather than being a single, self-identical concept, “the commons” is better understood as a dynamic site where a rich diversity of individuals, groups, communities, movements, organizations, initiatives and practices – each with distinct needs and interests regarding the use, management, reproduction, exchange and distribution of natural and cultural resources – intersect, but remain in tension.

Realist Magic: Objects, Ontology, Causality (2nd edition, with a new Preface) by Timothy Morton: New Open Access Book

Open Humanities Press is pleased to announce the publication of Realist Magic: Objects, Ontology, Causality (2nd edition, with a new Preface) by Timothy Morton.

Like all Open Humanities Press books, Realist Magic is available open access (= it can be downloaded for free): 

https://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/titles/realist-magic-2nd-ed/

Book description

Object-oriented ontology offers a startlingly fresh way to think about causality that takes into account developments in physics since 1900. Causality, argues Object Oriented Ontology (OOO), is aesthetic. In this book, Timothy Morton explores what it means to say that a thing has come into being, that it is persisting, and that it has ended. Drawing from examples in physics, biology, ecology, art, literature and music, Morton demonstrates the counterintuitive yet elegant explanatory power of OOO for thinking causality. 

With a new Preface by Timothy Morton.

Author Bio

Morton is the author of the libretto Time, Time, Time (opera by Jennifer Walshe, 2019), and of numerous artworks including We Are the Asteroid (with Justin Guariglia, 2019); Come Fast from the Dark (with Andrew Melchior, 2024); and This Huge Sunlit Abyss From The Future Right There Next To You (with Björk, 2015). In 2018 Morton co-wrote and appeared with Jeff Bridges in Living in the Future’s Past, directed by Susan Kucera. Morton is Rita Shea Guffey Chair of English at Rice University.

Morton has written Hell: in Search of a Christian Ecology (Columbia, 2024); All Art Is Ecological (Penguin, 2021); Spacecraft (Bloomsbury, 2021); Being Ecological (Penguin, 2018); Humankind: Solidarity with Nonhuman People (Verso, 2017); Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence (Columbia, 2016); Nothing: Three Inquiries in Buddhism (Chicago, 2015); Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World (Minnesota, 2013); Realist Magic: Objects, Ontology, Causality (Open Humanities Press, 2013); The Ecological Thought (Harvard, 2010); Ecology without Nature (Harvard, 2007); 8 other books and 300+ essays on philosophy, ecology, literature, music, art, architecture, design and food. 
 
Series

The book is published as part of the New Metaphysics series: https://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/series/new-metaphysics/

Series Design

The New Metaphysics series design is by Katherine Gillieson with cover illustrations by Tammy Lu.