Abstract
Coming out of Thurston’s experience with the writers’ collective and independent small press Information As Material, this chapter points toward five things. First, how we might distinguish certain kinds of self-publishing by the way in which they problematise the subject-status of the self at work. Second, how the digital mediatisation of writing technologies outside the context of the language arts is casting some kind of technical foreshadow in front of new writing generally. Third, what might be interesting about recontextualising our experiences of mediatised media as literature or art. Fourth, how those aesthetic possibilities beg the question, ‘but what kind of realism is it?’ And finally, how the critical frameworks with which we attend to acts of publishing need to shift from analysing objects to analysing processes.
This chapter has been developed from a lecture first given at Raven Row, London, in December 2014.
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Notes
- 1.
The conceptualist mode or approach to art-making characterises conceptual movements and scenes, including Conceptual Art and Conceptual Writing, but is not exclusive to them. I have always been more interested in the mode than the movements.
- 2.
For example, see Ulises Carrion. 1985. The New Art of Making Books [1975]. Reproduced in Artists’ Books: A Critical Anthology and Sourcebook. Edited by Joan Lyons. Utah: Gibbs Smith.
- 3.
During the academic year 2006–2007, Kenneth Goldsmith ran a graduate seminar entitled Publishing as Practice at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
- 4.
OED.
- 5.
For a more extensive discussion about the politics and poetics of this project, see Stephen Voyce. 2014. Of the Subcontract: An Interview with Nick Thurston. The Iowa Review. 43/3.
- 6.
The extension of designerly approaches to every aspect of life is a common topic of discussion in fields like genetic engineering or discussions about the Anthropocene. However, here I am referring more directly to the legacies of total design in visual culture, taking a cue from Hal Foster:
The world of total design is an old dream of modernism, but it only comes true, in perverse form, in our pan-capitalist present. With post-Fordist production, commodities can be tweaked and markets niched, so that a product can be mass in quantity yet appear personal in address. Desire is not only registered in products today, but is specified there: a self-interpellation is performed in catalogs and on-line almost automatically. In large part it is this perpetual profiling of the commodity that drives the contemporary inflation of design. Yet what happens when this commodity-machine breaks down, as markets crash, sweatshop workers resist, or environments give out? (192); Hal Foster. 2002. The ABCs of Contemporary Design. October. 100.
- 7.
The term ‘mediascape’ was coined by Arjun Appadurai to describe social environments within which technical mediums have a significant presence. See Arjun Appadurai. 1990. Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy. Public Culture 2.2. The concept has been developed in different directions in different fields by scholars including Michael Cronin (translation studies) and Francesco Casetti (media theory).
- 8.
On the increasing significance of desktop publishing to our histories of writing, see Matthew Kirschenbaum. 2016. Track Changes: A Literary History of Word Processing. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press/Harvard. On the increasing significance of the internet to publishing distribution methods and networks, see Michael Bhaskar. 2013. The Content Machine: Towards A Theory of Publishing from the Printing Press to the Digital Network. London: Anthem Press.
- 9.
Rachel Malik. 2004. Fixing Meaning: Intertextuality, Inference and the Horizons of the Publishable. Radical Philosophy 124: 13–26.
- 10.
See, for example, Peter Osborne. 2013. Anywhere or Not At All: Philosophy of Contemporary Art London: Verso.
- 11.
Jean Luc Nancy. 2000. Of Being Singular Plural [1996]. In Being Singular Plural. Trans. Robert D. Richardson and Anne E. O’Byrne. Redwood: Stamford University Press, 28.
- 12.
That Louis Althusser’s writings about capitalism and reproduction, which began to appear in the early 1970s, were first gathered as an ensemble and published posthumously as Sur la reproduction in the same year as Nancy’s essay, 1995, seems symptomatic of a growing awareness that fundamental changes were afoot in the social conditions of, and relations between, reproduction and power. See Louis Althusser. 2014. On the Reproduction of Capitalism: Ideology and the Ideological State Apparatuses. London: Verso.
- 13.
On these issues, three interventions by N. Katherine Hayles are particularly illuminating: 2003. Writing Machines. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press; 2007. Narrative and Database: Natural Simbionts. PMLA. 122/5; 2012. How We Think: Digital Media and Contemporary Technogenesis. Chicago: Chicago University Press.
- 14.
For example, Chris Sylvester’s Troll Thread imprint (2010–) and Sam Riviere’s If a Leaf Falls (2015–) both aptly demonstrate ‘how’ with very different strategies of response: the former uses a digital-first model that explores print-on-demand and runs on a social media platform (Tumblr); the latter is a highly subjective editorial project that uses domestic stationery and printers to produce micro-editions. Both seem eerily contemporary.
- 15.
For a critical overview of ghostwriting’s professional history, see Azalea Hulbert and John Knapp. 2017. Ghostwriting and the Ethics of Authenticity. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
- 16.
‘Mediatisation’ is a popular, if contested, concept in communication studies. For an overview of its applications therein, and some of the debates about its popularity, see Andrea Hepp, Stig Hjarvard, Knut Lundby. 2015. Mediatization: Theorising the Interplay Between Media, Culture and Society. Media, Culture & Society 37/2: 1–11.
- 17.
Analytical coverage of the Los Angeles Times article included Will Oremus. 2014. The First News Report on the L.A. Earthquake was Written by a Robot. Slate. 17 March; https://slate.com/technology/2014/03/quakebot-los-angeles-times-robot-journalist-writes-article-on-la-earthquake.html (accessed 8 August 2019).
- 18.
Narrativescience.com; https://bluetext.narrativescience.com/products/quill/ (accessed 8 August 2019).
- 19.
For an overview of digital library cultures and politics, see Joe Kagaris (ed.). 2018. Shadow Libraries: Access to Knowledge in Global Higher Education. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, including a brief contextualised overview of the Swartz case in Kagaris’s ‘Introduction’, 6.
- 20.
The Pirate Bay; https://thepiratebay.org/torrent/6554331/Papers_from_Philosophical_Transactions_of_the_Royal_Society__fro (accessed 12 August 2019).
- 21.
On the concept and politics of ‘delegated performance’, see Claire Bishop. 2012. Outsourcing Authenticity: Delegated Performance. October 40: 91–112.
- 22.
This connection between the radical publishing self and the idea of realism can also be thought art historically vis-à-vis the historical avant garde, in particular, for example, the interwar realism of Soviet art, which developed formalist methods to explore the mutability of the human body emerging with and from a utopic idea of communism. See Devin Fore. 2012. Realism After Modernism: The Rehumanisation of Art and Literature. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
- 23.
OED.
- 24.
For a comprehensive comparativist history of ‘the document’, see Lisa Gitelman. 2014. Paper Knowledge: Toward a Media History of Documents. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
- 25.
See Nick Thurston. 2018. What Was Conceptual Writing? In Postscript: Writing After Conceptual Art. Edited by Andrea Anderson. Toronto: Toronto University Press, 244–253.
- 26.
Heimrad Bäcker. 2014. Documentary Poetry. Trans. Jacquelyn Deal and Patrick Greaney. Calgary: No Press.
- 27.
See Patrick Greaney. 2014. Quotational Practices: Repeating the Future in Contemporary Art. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 133–140.
- 28.
See Jacob Edmond. 2019. Make it the Same: Poetry in the Age of Global Media. New York: Columbia University Press.
- 29.
This idea was first proposed in a philosophically adequate form by Rachel Malik. Fixing Meaning: Intertextuality, Inference and the Horizons of the Publishable.
- 30.
Re-engaging the formative discourses of new historicism (i.e. Stephen Greenblatt) and the text-oriented lineage of British cultural studies (i.e. Raymond Williams) might be particularly helpful for trying to understand how the traps of postmodern contextualisms emerged and how we might avoid repeating them without giving up on context-sensitive approaches.
- 31.
Here, ‘unworking’ is meant directly in the sense proposed in 1983 by Jean-Luc Nancy in The Inoperative Community as ‘the unworking of works that the community as such produces: its peoples, its towns, its treasures, its patrimonies, its traditions, its capital, and its collective property of knowledge and production’. Jean-Luc Nancy. 1991. The Inoperative Community. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 72.
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Thurston, N. (2020). The Publishing Self: The Praxis of Self-Publishing in a Mediatised Era. In: Colby, G., Marczewska, K., Wilson, L. (eds) The Contemporary Small Press. New Directions in Book History. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-48784-3_7
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