by EILEEN JOY
I recently had the great pleasure and honor of participating in the recent symposium,
"Disrupting DH," convened under the auspices of GWU's Digital Humanities Institute, managed by Jonathan Hsy, M.W. Bychowski and Shyama Rajendran, and blogged about already, quite eloquently, by
Jonathan Hsy,
Angela Bennett Segler,
M.W. Bychowski, and
Alan Montroso (the symposium's live-tweeting has also been Storify-ed
HERE and it is importantly connected to the larger
"Disrupting DH" project, which was inaugurated at the 2015 MLA Convention in Vancouver and will eventually be published in a variety of platforms, by
punctum books).
The symposium was significant, in my mind, for bringing together 6 speakers (Angela Bennett Segler, Dorothy Kim, Jesse Stommel, Roopika Risam, myself, and Suey Park) who are not just DH theorists, but also DH makers and/or activists. I would never privilege DH making, by the way, as the ONLY way the humanities will somehow move forward (and thrive) -- I believe instead in cultivating what I call a "biodiversity" of practices and modes of thought within and outside of the Academy: just as with various biospeheres, a diversity of communities of living organisms, and the (productive and mutually-sustaining) connections between those communities, promises an ecological well-being that certain measures of supposed "economic" austerity and competition for resources NEVER WILL provide. Nevertheless, it was refreshing and invigorating to be part of a symposium in which various notable practitioners of the so-called "Digital Humanities" were asked to collectively re-think what "disruption" means, or might mean [historically, theoretically, practically], at a point in time when DH is often spoken of as a sort of monolith in ways that distress early adopters such as Kim and Stommel, who have written in their prospectus for the "Disrupting DH" project --
Many scholars originally were drawn to the Digital Humanities because we
felt like outcasts, because we had been marginalized within the
academic community. We gathered together because our work collectively
disrupted the hegemony and insularity of the “traditional” humanities.
Our work was collaborative, took risks, flattened hierarchies, shared
resources, and created new and risky paradigms for humanities work. As
attentions have turned increasingly toward the Digital Humanities, many
of us have found ourselves more and more disillusioned. Much of that
risk-taking, collaborative, community-supported, and
open-to-all-communities practice has started to be elided for a Digital
Humanities creation-and-inclusion narrative that has made a turn towards
traditional scholarship with a digital hand, an interest in only
government or institutionally-funded database projects and tools, and a
turn away from critical analysis of its own embedded practices in
relation to issues around multilingualism, race, gender, disability, and
global praxis.
So, again, I was honored to be part of this group of scholars and, decidedly,
activists, who committed themselves, if even for one Friday at the end of a chilly and windy January, to re-thinking and challenging what we [whoever "we" might be] think we mean when we say, "Digital Humanities."
My own thoughts, of late, have often grown dark. In the almost 2 years since I stopped receiving a paycheck from Southern Illinois University and began to devote (almost) all of my (uncompensated) labors to running and sustaining punctum books (and in tandem and partnership with Dan Rudmann, who ignited and runs
punctum records, and who is my partner in all labors we have jointly devoted to a recuperative public cultural commons), I have mainly encountered the specter of financial ruin and a variety of institutional, foundational, and other impediments that have given rise to no few feelings of despair (and occasionally, anger). It turns out that the ventures most worth fighting for are never the easiest, the safest, nor the most popular (nor able to be instrumentalized by those who therefore need to clear you out of the way, or more minimally-but-no-less-harmfully, act as if you don't exist), and they are also the most difficult to explain to funding agencies who
like to hear the same buzz-words over and over again (like
"born-digital," "mega-journal," "massive open online" anything,
"outputs assessment," "data visualization,"
"aggregation/disaggregation," etc.), while at the same time there is no end to the numbers of persons who require the safe harbor and sustenance of such ventures. One has an existential obligation to "go on" even while one feels, "I can't go on." My own contribution to the symposium, originally titled "Down With Authority: The Importance of Illegitimacy," was written in a spirit much aligned with Kim and Stommel's disillusionment with the ways in which DH has become more of the business-as-usual, but also with a fierce commitment to keep insisting otherwise [which I believe meshes well with the overall ethos of the larger "Disrupting DH" project and its practitioners]. My talk was also partly structured as a response and riposte to Johanna Drucker's essay in the
Los Angeles Review of Books, published in January 2014,
"Pixel Dust: Illusions of Innovation in Scholarly Publishing." So, without further ado, I share with everyone here the audiofiles of the talks by Angela Bennett Segler and Dorthy Kim -- “Medium Data–Machine Reading, Manual Correction and the End of the Archive” and "Disrupting the Archive: The Ethics of Digital Archives," respectively -- along with an expanded (textual) version of my own talk, which is going to be published in
Chiasma: A Site for Thought, as a follow-up to my earlier
Chiasma essay,
"A Time for Radical Hope: Freedom, Responsibility, Publishing, and Building New Publics."
Angela Bennett Segler,
Medium Data–Machine Reading, Manual Correction and the End of the Archive
Dorothy Kim,
Disrupting the Archive: The Ethics of Digital Archives
My own paper:
Let Us Now Stand Up
for Bastards: The Importance of Illegitimate Publics
[What might be] the possibility
of liberating oneself from a cycle of disengaged production motivated by a
craving for legitimising praise? Paradoxically, I looked toward a mutual
admiration society — to that ecstatic reciprocal attention-paying of lovers —
as an alternative model for understanding how and why intellectuals might
freely collaborate.
~ Frances Stark, Structures that fit my opening and other parts
considered in the whole (2006)
In her essay “Pixel Dust: Illusions
of Innovation in Scholarly Publishing,” published in the
Los Angeles Review of Books last January, Johanna Drucker cautioned
against what she calls “the hyped myths of digital publishing.”
Drucker, who has described herself as both an “aesthetician” and “token
humanist” within the digital humanities and information sciences
(where she has played important roles, both at the University of Virginia and,
more recently, at UCLA), believes there are many “prevailing misconceptions”
relative to digital scholarship, such as —
·
that it is “cheap, permanent yet
somehow immaterial, and that it is done by machines”;
·
that “everything” is digitized and that
everything digital is available;
·
that it participates in all sorts of
“fantasies about crowdsourced, participatory knowledge generation that would
essentially de-professionalize knowledge production”;
·
that it operates with a
“business model in which publishing thrives without a revenue stream”;
·
and, that it provides multi-modal
platforms for dissemination and reading that go far beyond the supposed flat
“linearity” of the print book.
Drucker is concerned about these
“hyped myths” (her phrase), in part, because they arise, along with the digital
humanities itself (writ large as a field that cuts across multiple
institutions), at a time of crisis in academic publishing, described by Drucker
as a situation in which: university presses are shrinking, not expanding, their
lists; libraries are being crippled by rising and exorbitant journal
subscription rates; sales of monographs have dropped dramatically; and the
production of PhDs has not abated while at the same time the outlets for the
dissemination of their work has dramatically narrowed. And what Drucker is most
at pains in her essay to demonstrate is that, in the face of this publishing crisis,
“we can’t rely on a purely technological salvation, building
houses on the shifting sands of innovative digital platforms.”
I
actually think Drucker, whom I deeply admire and who is herself a significant
innovator within and theorist of the digital humanities, raises some important
cautions in her essay, about which I am mainly in agreement — for
example, digital scholarship is not cheaper, easier to produce, nor even
necessarily more accessible than traditional print scholarship. Indeed,
born-digital scholarship can be extremely expensive, especially in terms of the
technical expertise and software+hardware required, and it also often
necessitates long-term funding strategies that are overly reliant on private
foundational support. Further, open-access publishing initiatives, such as
those initiated in the UK after the Finch Report, and also by the University of
California’s Office of Scholarly Communication,
do
indeed bring with them serious funding perils: if all academic work is to be
made fully available with no fees imposed upon readers and users, then the
financial burden falls more squarely upon institutions of higher learning and
governments at the exact moment that funding for higher education, and
especially for more speculative forms of research, is shrinking and under siege.
A
troubling recent development in this regard is revealed in the (revised) “White
Paper” released by University of California Press on April 30, 2014, “The
Future of the Humanities in the Digital Age at UC Press.” This “White Paper”
was developed as an outcome of a two‐day workshop that involved “an
interdisciplinary group of fifteen faculty across the UC system, four senior
staff from the UC Press, and three representatives from the library community.”
The “White Paper” proposes that the “perennial problem of monograph publishing”
(meaning, it is both required for tenure and promotion at most institutions
while it is also not economically sustainable) be addressed by creating “a new
Open Access model which would make [monographs] … freely available in digital
form, with the costs of publication shared between the different stakeholders
(the Press, the author/department, and libraries).”
In other words, a severe (and importantly, new)
financial burden would be imposed upon authors and their departments, and where
do their monies come from, anyway? Is it not the same stream of revenue
(legislative appropriations, for example) that ostensibly funds the UC Press?
This feels economically tautological in the extreme, not to mention that it
places faculty authors under the strain of having to compete with other faculty
authors for already-limited resources, and perhaps even unwittingly will cause
a situation where authors situated in departments and colleges with higher
enrollments (and thus more tuition income) and generous endowments will have an unfair advantage over
authors working in more esoteric (yet still highly valuable) fields that do not
attract as many students, and they will have an unfair advantage as well as
over faculty in more economically-disadvantaged institutions. Not to mention
that if you are a scholar who is not attached to an institution, you are in a
somewhat precarious position if you had any notion of UC Press (or other
presses adopting this model) publishing your book. Ultimately, what this really
signals, in my mind, is that state legislatures and the public universities
funded by them are somewhat turning their back on their responsibility to
disseminate research findings, which should be a matter of great public concern
(and outrage). Surely there is a better “business model” for academic
publishing that neither lapses into “author-department” pay schemes nor merely
hands over all of its existing funds for research development to commercial
presses that have no concern for the university other than the profits to be
derived therefrom?
It
is thus also worrisome, in this vein, that large sums of money are already
being set aside (such as by the UK Research Councils), in the wake of the Finch Report, to pay commercial and university
presses to publish open-access monographs, edited volumes, and journals at
exorbitant rates that are based on exceedingly bloated “business-as-usual” pricing
structures.
And what this means is that, even though publishers such as Palgrave Macmillan
are willing to work with universities and research councils in order to make
the scholarly archive more fully open and accessible, they are only willing to
do so at very high prices — prices that, understandably, represent what they
need to make in order to survive, and yet that also reflect the increasingly
untenable overheads they carry into the bargain, and at a time when the actual
editorial quality of their publications is actually on a downturn, and has been
for quite some time. For example, publishers such as Palgrave, Oxford
University Press, Springer, Nature Publishing Group, Fordham University Press,
Duke University Press, Taylor & Francis, and a host of other supposedly
“gold-standard” academic presses have been outsourcing most of their editorial
work (proofreading, copy-editing, typesetting, illustration and design, HTML
and XML coding, etc.) to companies such as Newgen KnowledgeWorks (http://www.newgen.co/),
which has offices in India, the US, and the UK, and is growing at a rapid rate,
with lots of proliferating spin-off and copycat companies.
Although
Newgen describes itself as having been established to
“cater to the
pre-press publishing needs of books and journals publishers in the UK, US, and
Europe,” it is clear that their current ambition is to essentially take over
all aspects of the pre- (and maybe even post-)press publishing processes, with
services now also including “digital archiving, data conversion, electronic
publishing, and large-scale ePUB conversion services.” I wouldn’t care if they
did all of these things well, but as the editor of a Palgrave journal, postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural
studies, whose proofing and copy-editing is handled by Newgen with somewhat
minimal oversight by Palgrave, I can categorically assert that their care for
the editorial quality of our journal does not even come close to the care it
would receive from dedicated copy-editors whose experience and expertise would
not only hew closely to the journal’s subject matter, but whose efforts would
not be compromised by also having to edit hundred of other journals, all with
different style guidelines, in sweatshop-like conditions.
Finally, with Drucker, I
believe that print technologies actually
are
more impervious to the ravages of time than digital technologies. Yes, I also know
about LOCKSS (Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe),
an
open-source, library-led digital preservation system:
I believe that this is the same strategy, along with piracy, employed by the
Ptolemaic dynasty in ancient Egypt, and it’s the reason why today we are
thankfully and miraculously able to read Homer and Aeschylus and Sophocles and
so on,
and using a platform called a ‘manuscript’ or a ‘book’ that doesn’t require
electricity, software, or hardware to be legible. The book is its own best
all-in-one platform, and that is one of the reasons why we still buy and read
them,
whereas, at the same time, you will have to search far and wide to find someone
to develop your 35mm celluloid film or the machine that will still read and
play your cassette tapes, your zip-discs, your CDs, your DVDs, and so on (and
yes, ‘old’ media, such as LP vinyl records, are witnessing a comeback, and
there are good reasons for that).
For
the most part, so-called ‘hard’ media and the devices for ‘playing’ and storing
those are disappearing: Welcome to the Cloud: you live in it now, you don’t own
any piece of its ephemeral Unreal-estate, your ‘stuff’ no longer really belongs
to you (you’re just leasing it), and if Benjamin Bratton is right, cloud
computing promises a future of delaminated and partially private, partially
inhuman accelerationist, semi-privatized
polities operating in de-sovereigned territories that will take over the core
functions of state powers in order to provide dividends to an elite
technologized minority: welcome to Cloud Feudalism.
For better or worse (probably, worse), it is the future-to-come, and you have
probably already uploaded a prototype of yourself there.
But
that’s not really my concern here. Nor are Drucker’s cautions about the
supposed “hype” surrounding the digital humanities and its ability, or supposed
lack thereof, to save publishing. Her cautions are worth considering even while
at the same time we move forward with new (and truly helpful) digital platforms
for scholarly publishing. At punctum books, we are concerned to continue
lavishing attention on the printed book as a cultural arts artifact with
certain sensually phenomenological presencing and time-traveling powers, while
we also want to make as many of our publications as possible available in open-access,
digital form and also in special web-based environments with navigational
structures that are not merely analogues nor surrogates for the print-based
medium. And this is because we are pluralists who believe that a ‘biodiversity’
of intellectual matter and media are critical in the cultivation and fostering
of the most lively and vibrant public commons possible, and further, that such ‘biodiversity’
is critical to liberty and democracy, or to what Ivan Illich once memorably
advocated for as “
the protection, the maximum use, and
the enjoyment of the one resource that is almost equally distributed among all
people: personal energy under personal control.”
Drucker
herself, after all, wants to call our attention to the “mirages” of the digital
humanities in order to help us better steer ourselves towards the more
“usefully innovative” digital publishing initiatives, such as (in her view) the
Digital Public Library of America, launched at Harvard, “
a
fully public, completely integrated online library with access to,” in
Drucker’s words “the highest quality of ongoing knowledge production.”
And this brings me to what really
gave me pause and serious unease in Drucker’s essay: her emphasis throughout on
the ideas that:
1. “crowdsourced,
participatory knowledge generation … would essentially de-professionalize
knowledge production”;
2. that
the Academy-proper “provides a gold standard of scholarship” that is valuable
precisely because that scholarship “filters” downward and “stimulate[s] thought in virtually every field of
human endeavor”;
3. that
“[h]ard, serious, life-long dedication to scholarship, the actual professional
work of experts in a field,” should “remain at the center of knowledge
production”;
4. and,
finally, that the humanities should be careful not to risk its “cultural
authority in the process of becoming digital.”
It is to this idea of “cultural
authority” that I now want to turn, and I want to say something like: cultural
authority is the last thing the humanities needs right now if it truly wants to
innovate, in the brightest sense of
the word — from the Latin innovare,
to renew, to restore, to change — and in a fashion that does not mean trashing
the past nor smashing all of the tools seen as supposedly hopelessly outdated
and outmoded, but instead means harnessing all of the energies of the tools and
platforms (old and new and futural) at our disposal in order to create the most
richly tapestried and noisy public commons. Because, contra Drucker, I do not
want a trickle-down knowledge economy that comes from the University
mountaintops down to the streets — at least, not in the humanities. In order
for the public commons to be more open, more diverse, and hopefully more
rowdily democratic, the University itself has to be more open to the ideas and
voices of its supposed non- and para- and anti-institutional Others. It is
precisely at the moment that we believe that the humanities has, or should
have, cultural Authority, that we should revolt. We should also attend better
to one of the questions implicit in the term and practice of ‘open’ in ‘open-access’
that is rarely attended to: who has access to the modes of being published, and who doesn’t? Open-Access (OA) should not just
mean publications that are open to users and readers, with no impediments such
as pay- and firewalls; it should also mean that the services necessary for the
production of public-ation (understood as the formation of publics and
counter-publics ‘seeded’ by new works, however they may be ‘delivered’ -- more on which below) should
be accessible to all. Fully open to authors and
open to readers. This point is rarely discussed as if it matters when
publishers and academics gather to discuss the future of publishing in a
digital world, occasions on which they often appear intent on mainly figuring out ways
to continue, in changing times, to maintain the ‘legitimacy’ and 'prestige' of their exclusive (and exclusionary) Establishments.
We
might remind ourselves that English studies were partly founded in the living
rooms and salons of rogue amateurs such as Frederick Furnivall and his
compatriot para-academics who founded the Early English Text Society in 1864.
When James A.H. Murray was working on what would become the Oxford English
Dictionary, he had to do so in a tin shed in his backyard in Oxford, which tin
shed was sunk into the ground several feet so that it would not obscure the
view of the Oxford don who lived next door, about which situation Murray
himself wrote that “no trace of such a place of real work shall be seen by
fastidious and otiose Oxford.”
Because his Edinburgh degree was not recognized by Oxford and he was also a
Dissenting Congregationalist, he was not initially allowed access to the Common
Rooms or even to Bodleian Library, until Benjamin Jowett, Master of Balliol
College, prevailed upon Oxford to grant Murray an Honorary M.A.
It
is worth mentioning as well that Murray was grossly under-compensated and
always in debt, and that the University hounded him fairly mercilessly for
always falling behind schedule on the
Dictionary,
so much so that he was often on the verge of a nervous breakdown and often in
ill health.
Murray
was eventually knighted in 1908,
multiple honorary doctorates were ultimately conferred upon him, and he was also
feted in a parade in London where he walked alongside Thomas Hardy, so … take
that, you Oxford bastards. And indeed, cadging from Edmund in
King Lear, might now be the time (again)
to stand up for bastards, and for bastard thought — id est, the thoughts, and
the work (such as Murray’s and Furnivall’s) that the Academy does not (initially)
want to claim as its supposedly “rightful” progeny? I definitively answer: yes.
There is no way to move knowledge forward without this “standing up.” The more
difficult question is how to refashion the academic press such that it actually
"stands up" in this way so as to provide safe harbor and nourishment for such refugee bastards.
And
let me be clear here that when I reference the term ‘innovation’ (as I do
above) as a practice of restorative change and renewal that would be opposed to
the stances and further entrenchment of academic Authority, I am careful to distinguish
innovation as a practice that does
not
sign on to the ways in which that term is used within corporations, such as
Microsoft, whose new CEO, Satya Nadella, wrote a letter to Microsoft employees
this past July, after laying off 18,000 of those employees, in which he
precisely opposed innovation to tradition (“our industry does not respect
tradition — it only respects innovation”) as a survival strategy for staying
ahead of the pack in our supposed “mobile-first and cloud-first world.”
Whereas,
for me, innovation within publishing implies change, yes, but this is a change
that both clears the way for the new while also reclaiming the ground of
certain valuable historical structures (such as the Library, the Scriptorium,
the Studio, the Salon, the Seminar, the Lab, the Hermitage, the
School, and so on) that have been smothered and deformed by an increasingly
powerful techno-managerial class of administrators that want to run the
University as if it were a business.
So,
yes, Johanna Drucker, we should be wary about the ways in which some persons
and groups, even within the University, tout their “innovations,” but I also
say, “down with [your] cultural authority” and “up with the people.” Academic
publishing is definitely facing a crisis, but please let us recall, too, that
wherever intellectuals gather to discuss and disseminate ideas, they are always
under threat and always have been, which is to say,
do you want your hemlock hot or cold? So what we need right now, in
my view, are more
distributive
collectives of
someones, nomadic
para-institutions, or “outstitutions,”
who would take responsibility for securing the freedom for the greatest number
of persons possible who want to participate in intellectual-cultural life. And
a publisher would be a person, or a group, or a multiplicity, who desire to be held
hostage for securing this freedom.
Let’s
distinguish, then, as Paul Boshears has urged, between “publishing” — “making
stuff knowable” — and “publication” as “public-making,” which is a “process . .
. the process of saturating,”
of instantiating and also drenching with writings
many publics.
Publication would thus be focused on creating tools and platforms and holding
areas (some call these books, journals, zines, serials, weblogs, podcasts, databases,
editions, etc.), around which certain communities might coalesce, and be
sustained. More than just ‘publics,’ these spaces would be ‘counter-publics,’
in the sense given to them by
Michael Warner as “spaces
of
circulation in which it is hoped that the poesis of scene making will be
transformative,
not merely replicative.” And a ‘press’
would be that which, following the word’s Old French etymology, serves as the
imprinting device, but also as the
pressing “crush” of the crowd
into the commons. The university — and the presses associated with it — will
hopefully continue to serve as one important site for the cultivation of
thought and cultural studies more broadly, but increasingly their spaces are so
striated by so many checkpoints, watchtowers, and administrative procedures,
that truly radical modes of publishing are difficult to pursue and develop. One
has to do only a brief survey of all of the new academic publishing initiatives
cropping up everywhere — partly due to, on the one hand, a genuine enthusiasm
for digital and open-access and post-monograph publishing modes, and on the
other hand, the fears and anxieties that coalesce around such new directions,
and on yet another (third) hand, the almost anxious hyper-reaction to governmental
and university mandates that would dictate open-access publishing as compulsory
— and one will see that a concern for certain forms of what I will call elite
and bureaucratic-managerial academic oversight still exist (with few
exceptions).
Whether traditional
old-school or forward-leaning progressive in its publishing methods, the
Academy always seeks its own imprimatur as a sign of so-called legitimacy. And
it always talks in the language of austerity and false choices (like,
“monographs only for tenure!” or more recently, “screw monographs; it’s all
just one huge digital mega-journal from now on and everyone can aggregate their
own books and cataloguing systems using Mendeley!”). What we need now are illegitimate publishers willing to build
shelters for illegitimate publics,
which is to say, public-ations, ones that would be hellbent on pressing
a rowdy and unruly crowd of ideas into the ventilating system of this place we
call the University-at-large, an Academy of Thought (and also, thought-practices)
that would not be bound by the specific geographic co-ordinates of specific
schools and colleges, but which insists, nevertheless, on playing the
shadow-demon-parasite-prod-supplement to the University-proper (its para-mour/more).
What we need now is an excess of counter-thought,
an excess of modes and forms of counter-public-ation. There is no epistemic
rigor worth guarding here; there is no good reason to put a limit to thought
within the setting of the Academy of Thought: one must allow in the mad, the
chimeric, the deviant, the teratological, the wayward, the crooked, the lost,
the invalid, and so on. Here be monsters in the Academy of Thought.
In my view, the
time is propitious for reinventing (innovating) the Academy as a site that
would oppose the current situation of overly professionalized
performance, with ‘performance’ here cadged
from business management discourses where it is often invoked as the “key to
increasing corporate productivity by eliciting individual commitment and
competitiveness between employees” — a situation in which, in the university at
least, we may believe “we are the avant-garde but we are also the job-slaves.”
With
Jan Verwoert, I would rather dream and enact a University and an Academy of
Thought where we would practice (and protect) “another logic of agency, an
ethos, which could help us defy the social pressure to perform and eschew the
promise of the regimented options of consumption.” And this would also mean
“claiming the imagination and the aesthetic experience as a field of collective
agency where workable forms of resistance can be devised,” and also “interrupt[ing]
the brute assertiveness of the
I Can
through the performance of an
I Can’t
in the key of
I Can.”
Most
important, we have to begin with the caveat that we are existentially obligated
to others, and that publishing — as a vital mode of disseminating research
findings and thus also of ‘seeding’ publics and counter-publics — is a form of
care whose economic limits could never be set in advance and which requires
instead what Verwoert calls a “community committed to the politics of
dedication,” a sort of “mutual admiration society.”
The idea would not be to accumulate capital as a publisher, but instead to
focus on the expenditure of everything we have already accumulated and
will accumulate (talents as well as
money) in order to lovingly build and foster the reparative hospice wards of
the convalescent and increasingly
inoperative
communities of the para-academic precariat — those who are the most vulnerable,
both within and without the University proper, and who are literally
‘convalescent,’ literally meaning, those who are recovering, who are
recuperating, who are always getting better while also always being unwell, and
who choose to ‘recuperate’
together,
which itself literally means ‘to take back” — to take back ourselves to
ourselves, to take back our humanities, our university, and our commons, and to have some room, finally, to
conspire, which is to say, to breathe together. Or, as
Verwoert puts it,
If, living under
the pressure to perform, we begin to see that a state of exhaustion is a
horizon of collective experience, could we then understand this experience as
the point of departure for the formation of a particular sort of solidarity? A
solidarity that would not lay the foundations for the assertion of a potent
operative community, but which would, on the contrary, lead us to acknowledge
that the one thing we share — exhaustion — makes us an inoperative community .
. . . A community, however, that can still act, not because it is entitled to
do so by the institutions of power, but by virtue of an unconditional,
exuberant politics of dedication.
punctum
books was founded, partly following the lead of Michel Foucault in his Preface
to Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus,
as an exercise and experiment in convivial and not-sad militancy of open
thought, in refusing allegiance to the old categories of the Negative, and to
publication itself as an art of living, an ascesis
of freedom. Like the practitioners of Hakim Bey’s amour fou, we strive
to be “illegal,” “saturating” ourselves with our own aesthetic, engaging in
publishing ventures that would fill themselves “to the borders” with “the
trajectories of [their] own gestures,” and never tilting at fates fit for
“commissars & shopkeepers.”
One of the things we have lost sight of in the university, and especially in
our publishing practices, is the importance of play — now is the time,
again cadging from Hakim Bey, to “share the mischievous destiny” of runaways,
“to meet only as wild children might, locking gazes across a dinner table while
adults gibber from behind their masks.”
Without non-utilitarian play, and without the right to flail, flounder, and fail
while playing, we risk the frigid stasis of the status quo, of always being
trapped in what has already been said (the literal definition of ‘fate,’ from
the Latin fatum, ‘that which has
already been spoken’), what has already been played out. How did we get
here? How did the creative arts get so thoroughly de-cathected from the liberal
arts? How will we give birth to heretic-misfit love-child thoughts without
unbridled play (which is to say, experimentation — how does one maintain one’s
cultural ‘authority’ while also playing the fool-who-experiments?).
Publishing, then, and public-ation, as the site where fools do indeed rush in,
taking more seriously the phrase, field of play.
punctum has grown, and
continues to grow, through a vast network of talented persons dedicated to
radically independent publishing ventures that would not be beholden to any
specific university nor to any commercial academic interests, and is dedicated to
fostering the broadest possible range of open-access print- and e-based
platforms for the sustenance of what we are calling a “whimsical
para-humanities assemblage” — an assemblage, moreover, that refuses to
relinquish any possible form of public-ation: the making of
cultural-intellectual stealth publics that would seep in and out of
institutional and non-institutional spaces, hopefully blurring the boundaries
between Inside and Outside, an ultimate fog machine. And we are also intent on
resuscitating what we are calling postmedieval and pastmodern forms of
publication (from breviary and commentary and
florilegium to telegram
and liner notes and inter-office memo, from the Book of Hours to the cassette
mixtape).
Public-ation, then, as also salvage operation, the re-purposing of discarded
objects, discarded forms, and discarded genres as a means for maximizing the
possibilities for thinking. Forms matter. The forms of thinking matter. In the
plural. Again, it is a commitment to excess, and a refusal of all austerity
measures. punctum books is not interested either in the maintenance of specific
genres or disciplines (is it literary theory? poetry? philosophy? art history?
memoir? sociology? cybernetics? speculative fiction? code? who can tell?), and
thus we take seriously Derrida’s belief in a university “without condition,”
where we maintain that it is the humanities’ singular purpose to protect the
right of anyone to publish anything, or as Derrida himself put it, the
“principal
right to say everything, whether it be under the heading of fiction and the
experimentation of knowledge, and the right to say it publicly, to publish it.”
As
the authors of the “Manifesto for an Accelerationist Politics” aver, there may
be no possible stemming of the tide of neoliberal capital’s narrow-minded
“imaginary” and hyper-accelerated technologized infrastructure; therefore, the
task now might be: how to hijack and “re-purpose” this infrastructure to
different ends and unleash new, more capacious imaginaries?
In this scenario, there is room for an aesthetic avant-garde that, in McKenzie
Wark’s words, will “have to reimagine possible spaces for alter-modernities … .
Just as the Situationists imagined a space of play in the interstitial spaces
of the policing of the city via the dérive, so too we now have to imagine and
experiment with emerging gaps and cracks in the gamespace that the commodity
economy has become.”
This is not just a leftist-activist situation with regard to capitalism, it is
also an academic situation, with regard to the techno-managerial culture of the
University, and thus I ask that we replace the idea of the humanities as some
sort of guarded (and self-regarding) reservoir of cultural Authority, whose
ideas trickle down into society, with the idea that the humanities — especially
in its role as a disseminator of knowledge and builder of knowledge forms and
platforms — be reconceptualized as a site for the
care and curatorship of knowledge and of all persons wishing to
contribute to a public commons that must be shared by and accessible to all.
The humanities, and the University more
largely, and also the Library, as sites of care: to care for ourselves, to care
for each other, and to
take care of
the public commons, not in order to maintain its borders and authority,
filtering what is allowed in and what is allowed out and to whom, but rather,
to fashion this
shared (and always
precarious, always vulnerable, always convalescent) commons as a house of
hospitality, an invitation to all, to the friends and the strangers, those with
papers and those without papers.
As
Derrida reminds us, in Plato’s philosophy it “is often the Foreigner (
xenos) who questions. He carries and
puts the [intolerable] question,” and thus he is the very “someone who
basically has to account for [the very] possibility of sophistry.”
The “paternal authority of the
logos”
is always ready to “disarm” the Foreigner who nevertheless prevails as an important
figure of Thought’s (difficult) natality. To welcome this
xenos,
this Foreigner,
invites danger (the guest as enemy, the host as hostage) as well as a way
forward, a way out of Authority, out of our settled (overly-professionalized)
selves, and toward the wilder shores of vagabond (and free) thought.
The publisher as host and hostage, and also as
the person, or collective of persons, who are willing to devote their lives and
service to converting as many illegitimate ideas as possible into objects of
beauty, erudition, and legibility that would hopefully provoke us to rethink
everything we thought we knew and to let go, finally, of our Authority, while
still insisting on Care (which is a gentle form of co-management). So let us
take care.
And as a result of these bloated pricing arrangements,
universities are increasingly finding that they can no longer afford journal
subscriptions. See, for example, Harvard University’s 2012 “Faculty Advisory
Council Memorandum on Journal Pricing,” where it is stated that, “[m]any large journal publishers have made the scholarly
communication environment fiscally unsustainable and academically restrictive”
(http://isites.harvard.edu/icb/icb.do?keyword=k77982&tabgroupid=icb.tabgroup143448). Further, reflecting in 2004
on a battle between Reed Elsevier and the University of California library
system over the pricing of science journal subscription packages, Daniel
Greenstein, Associate Vice-Provost and University Librarian for the University
of California system, writes that “the business model of commercial publishing, which
once served the academy's information needs, now threatens fundamentally to
undermine and pervert the course of research and teaching. Put bluntly, the
model is economically unsustainable for us. If business as usual continues, it
will deny scholars both access to the information they need and the ability to
distribute their work to the worldwide audience it deserves”: “Not so Quiet on
a Western Front,” Nature.com, Web Focus: Access to the Literature
[web supplement feature], 28 May 2004: http://www.nature.com/nature/focus/accessdebate/23.html.
