Some recent-ish publications

Experimental Publishing Compendium

Combinatorial Books: Gathering Flowers (book series)

How To Be A Pirate: An Interview with Alexandra Elbakyan and Gary Hall by Holger Briel’.

'Experimenting With Copyright Licences' (blogpost for the COPIM project - part of the documentation for the first book coming out of the Combinatorial Books pilot)

Review of Bitstreams: The Future of Digital Literary Heritage' by Matthew Kirschenbaum

Contribution to 'Archipiélago Crítico. ¡Formado está! ¡Naveguémoslo!' (invited talk: in Spanish translation with English subtitles)

'Defund Culture' (journal article)

How to Practise the Culture-led Re-Commoning of Cities (printable poster), Partisan Social Club, adjusted by Gary Hall

'Pluriversal Socialism - The Very Idea' (journal article)

'Writing Against Elitism with A Stubborn Fury' (podcast)

'The Uberfication of the University - with Gary Hall' (podcast)

'"La modernidad fue un "blip" en el sistema": sobre teorías y disrupciones con Gary Hall' ['"Modernity was a "blip" in the system": on theories and disruptions with Gary Hall']' (press interview in Colombia)

'Combinatorial Books - Gathering Flowers', with Janneke Adema and Gabriela Méndez Cota - Part 1; Part 2; Part 3 (blog post)

Open Access

Most of Gary's work is freely available to read and download either here in Media Gifts or in Coventry University's online repositories PURE here, or in Humanities Commons here

Radical Open Access

Radical Open Access Virtual Book Stand

'"Communists of Knowledge"? A case for the implementation of "radical open access" in the humanities and social sciences' (an MA dissertation about the ROAC by Ellie Masterman). 

« Open access bridges the 'two cultures' | Main | For a speculative research and publishing economy »
Thursday
Nov032011

Just think of me as a postproduction of presence

Since we are talking about distributed and multiple publishing networks, the question that needs to be raised at this point concerns the agency of both publishers and authors. Who is it that is experimenting with this new economy exactly?

I am aware I have been saying ‘I’ a lot here -- as if, despite everything, I am still operating according to the model whereby the work of a writer or theorist such as myself is regarded as being conceived, created, and indeed signed by a unique, centered, stable and individualized human author, and presented for the attention of a reading audience who, even for Derrida, can ‘interrogate, contradict, attack, or simply deconstruct’ its logic, but who ‘cannot and must not change it’, as he puts it elsewhere in Paper Machine. Yet actually the series of projects I have been referring to as work-in-progress arises out of a collaborative relationship with a number of different groups. They include those currently acting under the names of Culture Machine, Open Humanities Press and the Open Media Group.

Mark Amerika should be included in this list, as the first version of this text was written as a contribution to his remixthebook project. It is a remix of his ‘Sentences on Remixology 1.0’, which is itself a remix of Sol Lewitt’s ‘Sentences on Conceptual Art’. So when I say ‘I’ here, this also means at least all of the above.

It means even more than that, though, since some of the collaborative projects we are involved with and which feature in the Media Gifts book are also open to being anonymously written. Remixing Amerika remixing, this time, Alfred North Whitehead, it is what might be thought of as stimulating ‘the production of novel togetherness’. In this sense it is not possible to say exactly who, or what, ‘we’ are.

(Even the original title of this series of posts and its topic were generated at least in part by others: Mark Amerika, and also the organisers of The Unbound Book conference, which was held at Amsterdam Central Library and the Royal Library in Den Haag, May, 2011, and where version 1.0 of this material was first presented.)

•   

‘What does it mean to go out of oneself?’ Am ‘I’ unbound?  Out of bounds? Is all this unbound?

I am channelling Mark Amerika again, but we should think of any contemporary writer or theorist such as myself as a medium, sampling from the vocabulary of critical thought. In fact if you pay close attention to what I am doing in this performance you will see I am mutating myself – this pseudo-autobiographical self I am performatively constructing here - into a kind of postproduction processual medium. Just think of me as a postproduction of presence.

 

(This is one of a series of posts written as version 3.0 of a contribution to Mark Amerika's remixthebook project. For other posts in the series, see below and here)



Reader Comments (1)

Don't cut yourself short. It can be argued that all philosophical information is re-hashed and re-analyzed, and in your method of presentation you will always be creating new information. You ARE the author even if you feel humbled by the fact that you can spot a lot of influences and contributions from outside sources. Organizing data is something 'certain people and organizations' make a lot of money on, and are regarded as some of the most innovative organizations on the planet.

May 20, 2012 | Unregistered CommenterPhilo

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