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.)

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‘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)



For a speculative research and publishing economy

What I have been describing in terms of work-in-progress is very much part of a new strategy for academic writing and publishing that I and a number of others are critically experimenting with at the moment. One of the aims of this strategy is to move away from thinking of open access primarily in terms of scholarly journals, books and even central, subject and institutionally-based self-archiving repositories. Instead, the focus is on developing a publishing economy characterized by a multiplicity of models and modes of creating, writing, binding, collecting, archiving, grouping, storing, depositing, labelling, reading, searching and inter-acting with academic research and publications.

This new publishing strategy has its basis in a number of speculative gambles with the future. It challenges a number of long-held assumptions by suggesting, among other things:

•    that the ‘correct’, ‘proper’ and most effective form for creating, publishing, disseminating and archiving academic research will be progressively difficult to determine and control. Scholars will continue to write and publish paper and papercentric texts. However, they will also generate and distribute their research as video, film, music, photography, graphics, animation and 3-D technology and combinations thereof. (What the academic publisher Elsevier is calling the ‘Article of the Future’ is already pointing in this direction -- although, as we can see from the beta version, in being based on the webpage, it actually repeats a lot of the latter’s papercentrism.)

•    that scholars will be far less likely to  publish a piece of academic research in just one place, such as a tightly bound book or edition of a peer-reviewed journal produced by a ‘brand name’ press. Again, they will no doubt still place their work in such venues. Nevertheless, their publishing strategies are likely to be far more pluralistic, distributed, multifaceted and liquid, with academics making simultaneous use of the likes of WordPress, MediaWiki, Aaaarg.org, YouTube, Vimeo,  iTunesU and their future equivalents to disseminate their research in a wide variety of different places and contexts. It is even possible we will move to a situation where the same material will be reiterated as part of a number of different texts and groupings; or, as Derrida speculates in ‘The Book to Come’, where research will no longer be grouped according to the ’corpus or opus – not finite and separable oeuvres; groupings no longer forming texts, even, but open textual processes offered on boundless national and international networks, for the active or interactive intervention of readers turned authors, and so on’.

•   that an increasing number of scholars will create and publish their research not just as long or even medium-length forms of shared attention along the lines of Amazon’s Kindle Singles, Ted Books (part of the Kindle Singles imprint), The Atavist and Stanford Literary Lab pamphlets, but in modular or ‘chunked’ forms, too – from the ‘between the blog and the journal’  posts of ‘The New Everyday’ section Nicholas Mirzoeff co-ordinates and edits for  Media Commons, right down to the level of passages, paragraphs and at times even perhaps sentences. Scholars will do so to facilitate the flow of their research between different platforms and other means of support: books, journals and archives, but also emails, blogs, podcasts, tweets, text messages, p2p file-sharing networks, e-book readers and iPad apps - places where, depending on the platform, it can be commented and reflected upon, discussed, debated, critiqued, changed, updated, annotated, linked to, ripped, remixed, reimagined, re-combined, reversioned and reiterated.

•    that scholars will also publish and disseminate their research in beta, pre-print and grey literature form (as the Public Library of Science is already doing to a limited extent with PLoS Currents: Influenza, as is the recently launched PressForward).  In other words, academics will publish and archive the pieces of paper, website or blog posts, emails or tweets on which the idea was first recorded, and any drafts,  working papers or reports that were circulated to garner comments from peers and interested parties, as well as the finished, peer-reviewed and copyedited texts.

•   that many scholars and scholarly journals will publish just the data generated in the course of research, with a view to making this source material openly and rapidly available for others to shape and bind into an interpretation, narrative, argument, thesis, article or book (see FigShare, for one such example).

•    that much of the emphasis in institutional publishing, archiving and dissemination strategies will switch. This will be achieved not least by both institutions and scholars offering users new ways to read, write, interpret and engage with their research, references and data, both pre- and post-‘publication’, and in the process create new texts, objects, artefacts and performances from this source material. It is even conceivable that the process of creating new texts, objects, artefacts and performances from this source material - including bringing groups of people together, organising, educating, training and supporting them, providing the appropriate platforms, applications and tools and so on - will become the main driver of research, with the production of papercentric texts such as books and journal articles merely being a by-product of this process rather than one of its end goals.

(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)

What do we have the right not to call a 'book'?

Having said that Media Gifts is a book ‘gathered through dispersion’, I should stress we don’t necessarily need to go quite this far in dispersing our books if we just want to establish a publishing strategy that others can follow. Prior to the publication of The Hacker Manifesto Wark had already disseminated versions of his text on the internet as work-in-progress, by means of the nettime mailing list especially. It is a practice that is of course increasingly common today, down to the level of blog posts, emails and tweets, with most presses being willing to republish material that has previously been published in these forms. Still, what if authors provide interested readers with something as simple as a set of guidelines and links showing how such distributed constellations of texts can be bound together in a coherent, sequential form (perhaps using a collection and organisation tool such as Anthologise which uses WordPress to turn distributed online content into an electronic book)? Just how dispersed, loosely gathered and structured does a free, open, online version of a book have to be for ‘brand name’ presses to be prepared to publish a bound version?

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In an essay in Paper Machine called ‘The Book to Come’, Jacques Derrida asks: ‘What then do we have the right to call a “book” and in what way is the question of right, far from being preliminary or accessory, here lodged at the very heart of the question of the book? This question is governed by the question of right, not only in its particular juridical form, but also in its semantic, political, social, and economic form – in short, in its total form’.

My question is: What do we have the right not to call a ‘book’?

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Dispersing our current work-in-progress will not only provide us with a way of loosening some of the legal ties that bind books, however; it may also help us to think differently about the idea of the book itself.

As Graham Harman writes on his Object-Orientated Philosophy blog:

In not too many years we will have reached the point where literally anyone can publish a philosophy book in electronic form in a matter of minutes, even without the least trace of official academic credentials. I don’t bemoan this at all – the great era of 17th century philosophy was dominated by non-professors, and the same thing could easily happen again. As far as publishing is concerned, what it means is that all publishing is destined to become vanity publishing. (Alberto Toscano recently pointed this out to me.) You’ll just post a homemade book on line, and maybe people will download it and read it, and maybe you’ll pick up some influence.

Yet what is so interesting about recent developments in electronic publishing is not that, what with open access, WordPress, Scribd, Smashwords, Booki and Aaaaarg.org, producing and distributing (and even selling in the case of Smashwords and Kindle) a book is something nearly everyone can do today in a matter of minutes. It is not even that book publishing may, as a result, be steadily becoming more like blogging or vanity publication, with authority and certification provided as much by an author’s reputation or readership, or the number of times a text is visited, downloaded, cited, referenced, linked to, blogged about, tagged, bookmarked, ranked, rated or ‘liked’, as it is by conventional peer-review or the prestige of the press. All of those criteria still rest upon and retain fairly conventional notions of the book, the author, publication and so on. What seems much more interesting is the way certain developments in electronic publishing contain at least the potential for us to perceive the book as something that is not completely fixed, stable and unified, with definite limits and clear material edges, but as liquid and living, open to being continually and collaboratively written, edited, annotated, critiqued, updated, shared, supplemented, revised, re-ordered, reiterated and reimagined.  Here, what we think of as ‘publication’ -- whether it occurs in ‘real time’ or after a long period of reflection and editorial review, ‘all’ at once or in fits and starts, in print-on-paper or electronic form -- is no longer an end point. Publication is rather just a stage in an ongoing process of unfolding.

(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)

'Gathered through dispersion': the book to come

At what point does the material that goes to make up a book become bound tightly enough for it to be understood as actually making up a book? Where in practice is the line going to be drawn?

And what if some of this material is disseminated out of sequence, under different titles, in other versions, forms and places where it is not quite so easy to bind, legally, economically or conceptually, as a book? Let us take as an example the version of the chapter in Media Gifts that explores the idea of liquid books. This appears as part of an actual liquid book that is published using a wiki, and is free for users to read, comment upon, rewrite, remix and reinvent. Similarly, the chapter on pirate philosophy is currently only available on a ‘pirate’ peer-to-peer network. There is no ‘original’ or ‘master’ copy of this text in the conventional sense: this text exists only to the extent it is part of a ‘pirate network’ and is stolen or ‘pirated’ (and translated, in the case of the version that recently appeared in the Japanese magazine Gendai-Shiso).

Indeed, while each of the media projects the book is concerned with – at the moment there are ten in all - constitutes a distinct project in its own right, they can also be seen as forming a dynamic network of texts, websites, archives, wikis, IPTV programmes and other internet traces. Consequently, if it is to be thought of as a book at all, it should be understood as an open, distributed and multi-location book: parts of it are to be found on a blog, others on wikis, others again on p2p networks. To adapt a phrase of Maurice Blanchot’s from The Book to Come (for whom Stéphane Mallarmé’s ‘Un Coup de dés orients the future of the book both in the direction of the greatest dispersion and in the direction of a tension capable of gathering infinite diversity, by the discovery of more complex structures’), Media Gifts is a book ‘gathered through dispersion’. 

(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)

Open notebook humanities

So what options are available to book authors if (like Wark) they wish to have their work read beyond a certain ‘underground’ level (in Wark’s case that associated with net art and net theory), while at the same time being part of the academic gift economy? 

1.    Authors can publish with an open access press such as Australian National University’s ANU E Press, Athabasca University's AU Press, or Open Book Publishers. Graham Harman brought out Prince of Networks: Bruno Latour and Metaphysics with re.press, for instance, with John Carlos Rowe’s The Cultural Politics of the New American Studies shortly due to appear from Open Humanities Press, while Lev Manovich is publishing his new book Info-Aesthetics with Bloomsbury Academic, all of which are open access presses. Still, with the best will in the world, few open access book publishers are already established and prestigious enough as yet to have the kind of ‘brand name’ equivalence to Harvard that Wark desires.

2.    Authors can insist on signing only a non-exclusive contract with a press, one that would allow them to self-archive a peer-reviewed and perhaps even copy-edited version of their book. The difficulty, of course, is in finding a ‘brand name’ publisher willing to agree to this.

3.    Authors can endeavour to negotiate with such a press -- as Wark did with Harvard -- to see if they would be willing to make the published version of their book available for free online, with only the printed version available for sale. Ted Striphas is an author who, with The Late Age of Print, has published a book with Columbia University Press in this fashion. However, such instances often seem to be regarded by publishers as little more than one-off experiments.

4.    Authors can adopt a variation of the strategy advocated on the Self-Archiving FAQ written for the Budapest Open Access Initiative with regard to scholarly journal articles. This is simply ‘“don't-ask/don't-tell”’. Instead, publish with whichever publisher you like, self-archive the full text ‘and wait to see whether the publisher ever requests removal’.

5.    Either that or, if all else fails, author’s can wait for someone to publish a ‘pirate’ copy of this their book on Aaaaarg.org.

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Noticeably, however, all these strategies in effect fasten what are identified -- conceptually, materially and economically -- as finished, complete, unified and bound books in legal binds; they are just different ways of negotiating such binds.

What though if book authors were to pursue ways of openly publishing their research before it is tied up quite so tightly?

To test this, last year I began experimenting with what I am calling an Open Humanities Notebook, taking as one model for doing so the Open Notebook Science of the organic chemist Jean-Claude Bradley. As was emphasized in an interesting 2010 interview with Richard Poynder on the impact of open notebook science, Bradley is making the ‘details of every experiment done in his lab’ - i.e. the whole research process, not just the findings – freely available to the public on the web. This ‘includes all the data generated from these experiments too, even the failed experiments’. What is more, he is doing so in ‘real time’, ‘within hours of production, not after the months or years involved in peer review’.

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Given that one of my books-in-progress deals with a series of projects which use digital media to actualise, or creatively perform, critical and cultural theory, I decided to make the research for this volume freely available online in such an Open Notebook. I am doing so more or less as this research emerges, not just in draft and pre-print form as journal articles, book chapters, catalogue essays and so on, but also as contributions to email discussions, conference papers, lectures. Long before any of these texts are collected together and given to a publisher to be bound as a book, economically, materially and conceptually, then. 

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As is the case with Bradley’s Notebook, this Open Humanities Notebook offers a space where the research for this volume, provisionally titled Media Gifts, can be disseminated quickly and easily in a manner that enables it to be openly shared and discussed.  More than that, though, it provides an opportunity to experiment critically with loosening at least some of the ties used to bind books once a text has been contracted by a professional press.

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For instance, it is common for most book contracts to allow authors to retain the right to republish in their own works material that has previously appeared elsewhere (as scholarly articles in peer-reviewed journals, say), provided the necessary permissions have been granted. But what if draft or pre-print versions of the chapters that make up my book are gathered together in this Open Notebook? When it comes to publishing this research as a bound book, are ‘brand name’ presses likely to reject it on the grounds of reduced potential sales since a version of the material will already be available online? Will I be required to remove this material to ensure they have the exclusive right to sell or give away copies?

(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)