Response to Pirate Philosophy, Experimental Publishing and Beta-Testing the Future

(The text below is my response to Roger Malina's review of Pirate Philosophy: 'Pirate Philosophy, Experimental Publishing and Beta-Testing the Future', July 10, 2016. The full text of Malina's review, along with the corresponding discussion and my response, can be found on his website here.) 

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Dear Roger, 

Many thanks for such a perceptive – and generous – engagement with Pirate Philosophy. I read your review in Venice, where I was visiting the Architecture Biennale. But I also had an opportunity to see an interesting exhibition at the Gallerie dell’Accademia on the invention of both the concept of publishing and the modern book. ‘Aldo Manuzio. Il rinascimento di Venezia’ positions Renaissance Venice as the Silicon Valley of its age due to its role as the international capital of print (1). Yet Venice was a doubly fitting place to read your post as of course it’s a city built on water that has no fixed or stable boundaries. It’s interesting to bear in mind that European publishing – which, as a technology and as a process, has always been liquid rather than having only become so with the advent of the digital age – itself emerged from an inherently fluid environment. 

I’m going to respond to the issues you raise in separate posts containing some of the thoughts that were triggered as I read your review. That way I can do so in a correspondingly ‘brief, non-comprehensive’ fashion. 

So, I guess the first question is, why have I written a book, Pirate Philosophy, that ‘rails against the academic system that privileges the book and monograph form published via academic or commercial publishers’, and yet published it with just such a press, MIT? 

Well, versions of most of the material that makes up Pirate Philosophy are already available open access. This material can be found on my website as pre-prints, as part of my Open Humanities Notebook (2), and on the websites of some the journals in which versions of particular chapters were first published (3). Given that much of the work is already available in other places and in other forms, the question then becomes more: why did Ialso publish this material as a conventional print book with a traditional academic press? 

The last conventional print monograph I wrote was Digitize This Book! which came out with Minnesota in 2008. Since then I’ve published all sorts of free, libre, open access books and texts – some of them indeed in open, collaborative, collective and anonymous forms of theorizing (4). But as the comments that were made about Pirate Philosophy on Twitter a few weeks ago bear witness (5), people still respond (in the form of tweets, blog posts and reviews, for example) more to material published as a conventional print book with a traditional academic or commercial press. And so if my ambition is to challenge the way we work and think as theorists and philosophers with regard to concepts such as the individualized named author, the sovereign proprietorial subject, originality, the book, and copyright, then it looks like I still do have to publish in ‘conventional’ ways now and again. 

At this point I’d like to take a cue from your idea that ‘in the process of reading you accept to have the author change you the reader through the act of reading… since this contributes to creating the community of practice.’ I want to do so in order to raise a question for us as a community of readers in turn, as I think you’re absolutely right here: the community has to take some responsibility for this situation. My question for the community is this: why are we still so focused on privileging ideas of ‘the book’, even when material is already freely and openly available (just not in a bound, linear, sequential, print-on-paper form that has been published by a traditional academic press)? In other words, is it my practices as an ‘author’ that need to change, or our practices as a community of readers / scholars? 

As for Pirate Philosophy, it endeavours to move beyond ideas of open and closed access, legal and illegal modes of publication, even the human and nonhuman, the ‘I’ and the ‘we’, as a way of engaging with our scholarly practices and the technologies involved in them – while also avoiding, as you rightly observe, any positions of moral or political purity. 

Best, Gary 

References: 

1) http://www.gallerieaccademia.org/exhibitions-and-events/current/aldo-manuzio-il-rinascimento-di-venezia/?lang=en.

2) http://garyhall.squarespace.com/journal.

3) See here for one example: http://www.radicalphilosophy.com/commentary/pirate-radical-philosophy-2. 

4) This material and/or the relevant links can be found on my website: http://www.garyhall.info/. 

5) https://twitter.com/BiellaColeman/status/733025063637819392;

https://twitter.com/dm_lemaire/status/733324306462191617.