‘Materialities of Political Publishing: A Conversation with AAAAARG, Chto Delat, I Cite, Mute, & Neural’

Pauline van Mourik Broekman, Jodi Dean, Sean Dockray, Alessandro Ludovico, Dmitry Vilensky, Simon Worthington, and Nick Thoburn (chair)

Over the course of the two week symposium and after, this conversation will discuss the materialities of political or independent publishing. The aim is to explore the specificities of these publishing projects that work across the mediums and forms of newspaper, blog, digital archive, and magazine. A particular focus of the conversation will be on how these media projects understand and interrogate the relation between their political content and their material form, especially with regard to the capacities and constraints of digital media and digital/print hybridisation. As with the other aspects of Materialities of Text, we welcome comment from online readers, some of which we hope to include in the print version of the conversation to be published in New Formations.

Nick Thoburn: In one way or another all of you have an investment in publishing as an independent and political practice—publishing, as Nat Muller and Alessandro Ludovico have it, as a political ‘gesture’ located ‘between the realm of discourse and the material act’ (Mag.net 3). And I think it is also true to say that you take critical intervention in the mediums within which you work—newspaper, blog, magazine, and digital archive—to be a central aspect of your practice. That is, media come forward in your publishing practice and writing as rich and complex sets of materials, capacities, and effects, and as sites of political intervention and critical reflection.

The aim of this conversation is to concentrate on these materials, capacities, and effects of independent or political media. I’m keen as much as possible to keep each or your specific publishing projects at the foreground of the conversation, to convey a strong sense of their ‘materialities’: the technical, aesthetic, social, emotional, or bodily materials they mobilize; how they function day to day; what strategies of authorship, editorship, or collectivity they employ; how they relate to publics, laws, media paradigms, financial structures; how they model or represent their media form, and so on.

To get things started, can you each introduce your publishing project with a few sentences: its aims, the mediums it uses, where it’s located, when established—that kind of thing?

Jodi Dean: I started my blog, I Cite, in January 2005. It’s on the Typepad platform. I pay about 20 dollars a year for some extra features.

I first started the blog so that I could ‘talk’ to people in a format that was not an academic article or an email. Or maybe it’s better to say that I was looking for a medium in which to write, where what I was writing was not immediately constrained by the form of an academic piece, written alone, appearing once and late, if at all, or by the form of an email which is generally of a message sent to specific people, who may or may not appreciate being hailed or spammed every time something occurs to me.

There was another reason for starting the blog, though. I had already begun formulating my critique of communicative capitalism (in the book Publicity’s Secret and in a couple of articles). I was critical of the way that participatory media entraps people into a media mentality, a 24/7 mindset of reaching an audience and competing with the mainstream press. I thought that if my critique is going to be worth anything, I better have more firsthand experience, from the very belly of the beast.

Alessandro Ludovico: I’m the editor in chief of Neural, a printed and online magazine established in 1993 in Bari (Italy) dealing with new media art, electronic music and hacktivism. It’s a publication which beyond being committed to its topics, always experimented with publishing in various ways. Furthermore, I’m one of the founders (together with Simon Worthington of Mute and a few others) of Mag.net, electronic cultural publishers, a network of magazines related to new media art whose slogan is: ‘collaboration is better than competition’. Finally, I’m finishing a book called Post-Digital Print, about the historical and contemporary relationship between offline and online publishing.

Sean Dockray: About five years ago, I wrote this description:

More straightforwardly, the project is a website where people share texts: usually PDFs, anything from a couple inspiring pages to a book or a collection of essays. The people who use the site tend to be writers, artists, organizers, activists, curators, architects, librarians, publishers, designers, philosophers, teachers, or students themselves.   Although the texts are most often in the domain of critical or political theory, there are also technical documents, legal decisions, works of fiction, government declarations, poetry collections and so on. There is no moderation.

It’s hard to imagine it now as anything other than it is—which is really a library, and not a school, a reading group, or a journal!  Still, AAAARG supports quite a few self-organized reading groups, it spawned a sister project called The Public School, and now produces a small online publication, ‘Contents’. It’s used by many people in many ways, and even when that use is ‘finished,’ the texts remain available on the site for others to use as a shared resource.

Dmitry Vilensky: The workgroup Chto delat has been publishing a newspaper since 2003. The newspaper was edited by Dmitry Vilensky and David Riff (2003-2208) in collaboration with the workgroup Chto delat, and since 2008 is mostly edited by me in collaboration with other members of the platform Chto delat.

The newspaper is bilingual (Russian and English), and appears on an irregular basis (roughly 4-5 times a year). It varies between 16 and 24 pages (A3). Its editions (1,000-9,000 copies) are distributed for free at different cultural events, exhibitions, social forums, political gatherings, and universities, but it has no fixed network of distribution. At the moment, with an on-line audience much bigger than that for the paper version of the newspaper, we concentrated more on newspapers as part of the exhibition and contextualisation of our work—a continuation of art by other means.

Each newspaper addresses a theme or problem central to the search for new political subjectivities, and their impact on art, activism, philosophy, and cultural theory. So far, the rubrics and sections of the paper have followed a free format, depending on theme at hand. There are no exhibition reviews. The focus is on the local Russian situation, which the newspaper tries to link to a broader international context. Contributors include artists, art theorists, philosophers, activists, and writers from Russia, Western Europe and the United States.

It is also important to focus on the role of publication as translation device, something that is really important in the Russian situation—to introduce different voices and languages and also to have a voice in different international debates from a local perspective.

Pauline van Mourik Broekman: Hello everyone, great to be talking, thank you Nick! After so many years—we’ve been at it for 17!—I seem to find it harder and harder to figure out what ‘Mute’ is… But sticking to the basic narrative for the moment, it formed as an artist-initiated publication engaging with the question of what new technologies (read: the internet and convergent media) meant for artistic production; asking whether, or to what degree, the internet’s promise of a radically democratised space, where a range of gate-keepers might be challenged, would upset the ‘art system’ as was (and sadly, still is). Since that founding moment in 1994, when Mute appeared appropriating the format of the Financial Times, as producers we have gradually been forced to engage much more seriously—and materially—with the realities of Publishing with a capital ‘P’. Having tried out six different physical formats in an attempt to create a sustainable niche for Mute’s critical content—which meanwhile moved far beyond its founding questions—our production apparatus now finds itself strangely distended across a variety of geographic, institutional, professional and social spaces, ranging from the German ‘Leuphana’ university (with whom we have recently started an intensive collaboration), to a series of active email lists, to a small office in London’s Soho. It will be interesting to see what effect this enforced virtualisation, which is predominantly a response to losing our core funding from Arts Council England, will have on the project overall… Our fantastic and long-serving editorial board are thankfully along for the ride… These are: Josephine Berry Slater, Omar El-Khairy, Matthew Hyland, Anthony Iles, Demetra Kotouza, Hari Kunzru, Stefan Szczelkun, Mira Mattar and Benedict Seymour.

Nick: Many thanks for your initial introductory words; I’m very pleased, they set us off in intriguing and promising directions. I’m struck by the different capacities and aims that you’ve highlighted in your publishing projects—among others, a mutable conversation platform, a self-experimenting magazine form, an alternative mode of writing, a tentative means of political subjectivation, a ‘strangely distended’ media apparatus (I especially like that formulation Pauline!).

It suggests to me that this conversation might work best if I direct specific questions to one or two of you at a time, focusing on aspects of your publishing projects, but hopefully in a manner that will encourage others to join in when you feel grabbed by a theme.

So, I’d like to consider a little the question of political writing, which comes across most apparently in the descriptions from Jodi and Dmitry of I Cite and Chto delat. Clearly, political writing published more or less independently of corporate media institutions has been an absolutely central aspect of the history of radical cultures. Regis Debray recently identified what he calls the ‘genetic helix’ of socialism as the book, the newspaper, and the school/party. Debray argues, not uniquely, that in our era of the screen and the image, this nexus collapses, taking socialism with it—it’s a gloomy prognosis.

Jodi and Dmitry, for both of you political writing I think still holds some kind of political power today (however much more complicated the conjunction between writing and radicalism may have become). Dmitry, you talk of the themes of Chto delat newspapers contributing to a ‘search for new political subjectivities’. Can you discuss any specific examples of that practice—however tentative or precarious they may be—from the concrete experience of publishing Chto delat? Also, I’m interested in the name of your group, ‘What Is to Be Done?’ What kind of effect or function does a name with such strong associations to the Russian revolutionary tradition have in Russia—or indeed the US—today? (I’m reminded of course that it is in Lenin’s pamphlet of that title that he sets out his understanding of the party newspaper as ‘collective organiser’—not only in its distribution and consumption, but in its production also.)

And Jodi, with regard to your comment about I Cite enabling a different mode of ‘talk’ or ‘writing’ to that of academic writing or email, is there a political dimension to this? Put another way, you have been exploring the theme of ‘communism’ in I Cite, but does this link up with the communicative form of blog talk at all—or are blogs always and only in the ‘belly of the beast’?

Jodi: Is there a political dimension to I Cite’s enabling a different mode of ‘talk’ or ‘writing’? This is hard. My first answer is no. That is, the fact of blogging, that there are blogs and bloggers, is not in itself any more politically significant than the fact that there is television, radio, film, and newspapers. But saying this immediately suggests the opposite and I need to answer yes. Just as with any medium, blogs have political effects. Much of my academic writing is about the ways that networked communication supports and furthers communicative capitalism, helping reformat democratic ideals into means for the intensification of capitalism—and hence inequality. Media democracy, mass participation in personal media, is the political form of neoliberal capitalism. Many participate, a few profit thereby. The fact that I talk about communism on my blog is either politically insignificant or significant in a horrible way. As with the activity of any one blog or blogger, it exemplifies and furthers the hold of capitalism as it renders political activity into individual acts of participation. Politics becomes nothing but the individual’s contribution to the flow of circulating media.

Well, this is a pretty unpleasant way for me to think about what I do on I Cite, why I have kept track of the extremes of finance capital for over five years, why I blog about Zizek’s writing, why I’ve undertaken readings of Lenin, etc. And lately, since the Egyptian revolution, the mass protests in Greece and Spain, and the movement around Occupy Wall Street in the US, I’ve been wondering if I’ve been insufficiently dialectical or over-played the negative. What this amazing outpouring of revolutionary energy has made me see is the collective dimension of blogs and social media. The co-production of a left communicative common, that stretches across media and is constituted through photos and videos uploaded from the occupations, massive reposting, forwarding, tweeting, and lots of blog commentary, and that includes mainstream journalistic outlets like the Guardian, Al Jazeera, and the New York Times, this new left communicative common seems, for now at any rate, to have an urgency and intensity irreducible to any one of its nodes. It persists as the flow between them and the way that this flow is creating something like its own media storm or front (I’m thinking in part here of some of the cool visualizations of October 15 on Twitter—the modeling of the number of tweets regarding demonstrations in Rome looks like some kind of mountain or solar flare). I like thinking of I Cite as one of the thousands of elements contributing to this left communicative common.

Nick: I was a little concerned that starting a conversation about the ‘materialities’ of publishing with a question about writing and text might give the wrong impression, but as is clear from Jodi’s comments, writing is of course a material practice with its own technological and publishing forms, cognitive and affective patterns, temporal structures, and subjectifying powers (for good or ill—your ambivalence here, Jodi, seems to be the necessary position to hold). I want to move now to look more closely at these material forms and publishing platforms, at abstract and concrete scales.

Jodi, your description of a ‘media storm’ emerging from the Occupy movement is very suggestive of the way media flows can aggregate into a kind of agential, quasi-autonomous entity. In the past that might have been the function of a manifesto, slogan, or image, but with social media, as you suggest, the contributing parts to this agential aggregate become many and various, including particular blogs, still and moving image files, analytic frameworks, slogans or memes (‘We are the 99%’), but also more abstract forms such as densities of reposting and forwarding, and, in that wonderful Twitter visualisation, cartographies of data flow (the conversion from Tweet text to visual pattern is really a fascinating exemplar of how interlaced and mutually transforming mediums have become, and of the possibilities for political recasting of social media). Here a multiplicity of Tweets, each with their specific communicative function on the day, are converted into a strange kind of collective, intensive entity. It has analytic power (the linked website is interesting on this point, on the possible real-time effectivity of the model) but also an agential power as a self-image of the undulating event—it would be interesting in this regard to compare the representational and agential effects of the Twitter visualization with those of the photograph of the 1848 ‘monster meeting’ of the Chartists in Kennington Common, said to be the first photograph of a crowd.

I suspect that this agential power of media may also play a part in the material form of all your publishing projects. I want to ask Pauline, Simon, and Sean a few questions about this.

First off, do you think of Mute and AAAAARG, in their day-to-day functioning, as having any kind of quasi-autonomy, existence in their own right, or agential power?

And that leads into some questions about the way you characterized Mute and AAAARG earlier. Sean, you talk very evocatively of AAAARG as a generative ‘scaffolding’ between institutions. Can you say more about this? Does this image of scaffolding relate to discourses of media ‘independence’ or ‘institutional critique’? And if that is the more abstract aspect of AAAARG—its governing ‘image’—can you talk concretely about how specific aspects of the AAAARG platform function to further (and perhaps also obstruct) the scaffolding? (As I say above, I’m very keen to hear how all your publishing projects work concretely, their specific functionalities and effects etc.) It would be interesting to hear too if this manner of existence runs into any difficulties—do some institutions object to having scaffolding constructed between them?

Pauline, you comment on Mute’s distended production apparatus, and this is also a good characterization of Mute’s existence as a whole, isn’t it? As Mute has developed from a printed magazine to this current arrangement of different platforms and institutions, has it been accompanied by changes in the way the editorial group have characterized or imagined Mute as an entity? Have these characterizations been associated with any wider cultural or political discourses? And, as with my question to Sean, can you or Simon talk concretely about how specific aspects of Mute’s publishing platforms and institutional structures function to further (and perhaps also obstruct) your distributed publishing model?

Pauline: So many interesting questions, it’s hard to do them all justice… But to confirm for myself those specifically directed at us at Mute, they are: the possible (autonomous) agential power of the project; how its evolving form lends itself to being characterised and re-characterised by its core producers/editors (and how this might reflect broader social/political discourses); and the way these are then facilitated or blocked in their various institutional, economic or organisational relations…

Reading across these I would say that, in Mute’s case, a decisive role has been played by the persistently auto-didactic nature of the project; also the way we tend to see-saw between extreme stubbornness and extreme pragmatism. Overall, our desire has been, simply, to produce the editorial content that feels culturally, socially, politically ‘necessary’ in the present day (and of course this is historically and even personally contingent; a fundamentally embodied thing), and to find and develop the forms in which to do that. These forms range from textual and visual styles and idioms (artistic, experimental, academic, journalistic), the physical carriers for them, and then the software systems and infrastructures for which these are also converted and adapted. It bears re-stating that these need to be ones we are able to access, work with; and that grant us the largest possible audience for our work.

If you mix this ‘simple’ premise with the cultural and economic context in which we found ourselves in the UK, then you have to account for its interaction with a whole raft of phenomena, ranging from the dot com boom and yBa cultures of the 90s; the New Labour era (with its Creative Industries and Regeneration-centric funding programmes); the increasing corporatisation of mainstream cultural institutions and media; the explosion of cheap, digital tools and platforms; the evolution of anti-capitalist struggles and modes of activism; state incursion into/control over all areas of the social body; discourses around self-organisation; the financial crisis; and so on and so forth. In this context, which was one of easy credit and relatively generous state funding for culture, Mute for a long time did manage to eek out a place for its activity, adapting its working model and organisational economy in a spirit of—as I said—radical pragmatism. The complex material and organisational form that has resulted from this (which, to some people’s surprise, includes things like consultancy services in ‘digital strategy’ aimed at the cultural sector, next to broadly leftist cultural critique) may indeed have some kind of agential power, but it is really very hard to say what it is, particularly since we resist systematic analysis of, and ‘singularising’ into, homogenous categories of ‘audience’ or ‘client base’.

Listening to other small, independent publications analyse their developmental process (like I recently did with, to name one example, the journal Collapse), I think there are certain processes at play which recur in many different settings. For me the most interesting and important of these is the way that a journal or magazine can act as a kind of connection engine with ‘strangers’, due to its function as a space of recognition, affinity, or attractive otherness (with this I mean that it’s not just about recognising and being semi-narcissistically drawn to an image of oneself, one’s own subjectivity and proclivities; but the manner readers are drawn to ‘alien’ ideas that are nonetheless compelling, troubling, or intriguing—hence drawing them into the reader—and potentially even contributor-circle of that journal). If there’s quite an intense editorial process at the ‘centre’ of the journal—like there is, and has always been, with Mute—then this connection-engine draws people in, propels people out, in a continual, dynamic process, which, due to its intensity, very effectively blurs the lines of ‘professionalism’, friendship, editorial, social, political praxis.

For fear of being too waffly or recherché about this, I’d say this was—if any—the type of agential power Mute also had, and that this becomes heavily internationalised by dint of its situation on the internet. In terms of how Editors then conjure that, each one would probably do it differently—some seeing it more like a traditional (print) journal, some getting quite swallowed up by discourses around openness/distributedness/community-participation. Aspects of that characterisation have probably also changed over time, in the sense that, circa 2006/7, we might have held onto a more strictly autonomous figure for our project, which is something I don’t think even the most hopeful are able to do now—given our partnerships with an ‘incubator’ project in a university (Leuphana), or our state funding for a commercially oriented publishing-technology project (Progressive Publishing System / PPS). Having said all that, the minute any kind of direct or indirect manipulation of content started to occur, our editors would cease to be interested, so whatever institutional affiliations we might be open to now that we would not have been several years ago, it remains a delicate balance…

Sean: The image of scaffolding was simply a way of describing an orientation with respect to institutions that was neither inside nor outside, dependent nor independent, reformist or oppositional, etc. At the time, the institutions I meant were specifically Universities, which seemed to have absorbed theory into closed seminar rooms, academic formalities, and rarefied publishing worlds. Especially after the momentum of the anti-globalization movement ran into the aftermath of September 11, criticality had more or less retreated, exhausted within the well-managed circuits of the academy. ‘Scaffolding’ was meant to allude to both networks communication media and to prefigurative, improvisational quasi-institutions. It suggested the possibility of the office worker who shuts her door and climbs out the window.

How did AAAARG actually function with respect to this image? For one, it circulated scans of books and essays outside of their normal paths (trajectories governed by geographic distribution, price, contracts, etc.) so that they became available for people that previously didn’t have access. People eventually began to ask others for scans or copies of particular texts, and when those scans were uploaded they stayed available on the site. When a reading group uploaded a few texts as a way to distribute them among members, those texts also stayed available. Everything stayed available. The concept of ‘Issues’ provided a way for people to make subjective groupings of texts, from ‘anti-austerity encampment movements’ to ‘DEPOSITORY TO POST THE WRITTEN WORKS OF AMERICAN SOCIALISM. NO SOCIAL SCIENCES PLEASE.’ These groupings could be shared so that anyone might add a text into an Issue, an act of collective bibliography-making.  The idea was that AAAARG would be an infinite resource, mobilized (and nurtured) by reading groups, social movements, fringe scholars, temporary projects, students, and so on.

My history is too general to be accurate and what I’m about to write is too specific to be true, but I’ll continue anyway: due in part to the seductiveness of The Coming Insurrection as well as the wave of student occupations beginning in 2009 (many accompanied by emphatic communiqués with a theoretical force and refusal to make demands) it felt as though a plug had been pulled. Or maybe that’s just my impression. But the chain of events—from the revolution in Tunisia to Occupy Everything, but also the ongoing hemorrhaging of social wealth into the financial industry—has certainly re-oriented political discourse and one’s sense of what is possible.

I’ve never felt as though AAAARG has had any agential power because it’s never really been an agent. It didn’t speak or make demands; it’s usually been more of a site of potential or vision of what’s coming (for better or worse) than a vehicle for making change. Compared to publishing bodies, it certainly never produced anything new or original, rather it actively explored and exploited the affordances of asynchronous, networked communication. But all of this is rather commonplace for what’s called ‘piracy,’ isn’t it?

Anyway, yes, some entities did object to the site—AAAARG was ultimately taken down by the publisher Macmillan over certain texts, including Beyond Capital.

***This conversation is continuing offline. The complete conversation will be published in the Materialities of Text issue of New Formations***

‘Invisible Ink: Atomizing Textual Materialism’

Insofar as ‘textual materialism’ denotes a theoretical position insisting that meaning is always immanent to the object or set of objects through which it is articulated, it must reject the idea that parchment, paper, ink, screen, and light are merely the ‘material support’ through or on which significance is projected. This position has a long history, as do the problems associated with it. The capacity of written characters to produce meaningful cognitive objects or poetic affection by virtue of their configuration, relative disposition, and repetition was a favorite figure for classical atomists like Lucretius when they sought to analogize their materialist ontologies. With the rise of the print era and the subsequent ubiquity of print-culture accoutrement (at least in the life of a well-appointed and productive European intellectual), this figure was revived by seventeenth-century neo-atomists like Pierre Gassendi. For Gassendi, Lucretius’ ‘similitude of the letter’ depended less on the innate tendency of a finger or quill to swerve in an unexpected direction thereby producing a surprising word and more on the deliberate intervention of the printer- or compositor-artisan who smoothly distributed a multiplicity of type pieces in carefully ordered letter cases or meticulously loaded them onto composing sticks in order to actualize a textual end. Neo-atomisms like Gassendi as well as the broader field of early modern mechanist and corpuscular accounts of material nature are riven by a paradox closely related to this figure, also traceable back to the classical Greek and Roman atomists: on the one hand, all that is (or all that matters in natural world) is body; on the other, no true body (no corpuscular body, no atomos, primordia nor semina rerum) is ever available to experience. From this derives a classical objection to all materialisms: in the name of affirming the fundamentally corporeal nature of the world, they idealize the constituents of corporeality itself, rendering them forever invisible and insensible. The language of textual materialism, that is, has been written, then printed, and now displayed in invisible ink. By tracing to the early modern era one source for our own confrontation with radical shifts in technologies of inscription and the remediation they demand, this essay seeks to provide a partial genealogy of a fundamental problem wracking theories of the material text: where and what is material in the text once the transcendence of meaning is subtracted or declared to be an effect of the disposition of a textual apparatus? What is material in textual materialism and how can it be read?

Daniel Selcer is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Duquesne University, where he teaches early modern philosophy and late twentieth-century French thought.  He is the author of Philosophy and the Book: Early Modern Figures of Material Inscription (Continuum, 2010), which deals with the philosophical impact of images of inscription and technologies of textual organization in Descartes, Leibniz, Spinoza, Bayle, and others.

Sas Mays is Senior Lecturer in Cultural and Critical Theory in the Department of English, Linguistics, and Cultural Studies at the University of Westminster, London. He is also a member of Westminster’s Institute for Modern and Contemporary Culture, within which he leads the research project ‘Archiving Cultures’. Publications relating to this project include: ‘Anselm Adams: The Gender Politics of Photographic and Literary Archives’, in Cunningham, Fisher, Mays (eds), Literature and Photography in the Twentieth Century (2005); ‘Consigning Badiou to the Past: The Encyclopaedia & Philosophy’s Gendered Thought of the Endless Archive’, in Cultural Politics 5:1 2009; ‘Witnessing the Archive: Art, Capitalism, & Memory’, in Judy Vaknin (ed), All this Stuff: Archiving the Artist, ARLIS Press 2012; and the edited collection, Literatures, Libraries, & Archives (Routledge, 2013).

‘On the Political Materiality of the ‘Infinite’ Text’.

 

Intro: the Encyclopaedia.

The purpose of these notes is to discuss a purported textual condition, specifically in terms of the characterisation of text as, in itself, in its intertextuality, or in its material accumulation, endless – uncountable, incommensurable, and untotalisable – a condition that has become the foundation for a number of poststructuralist and postmodernist accounts. But it is also one that determines a key figure in contemporary Continental philosophy: Alain Badiou opposes the positivity of axiomatic, performative thought and an endless, descriptive textualism negatively associated with deconstruction. My following discussion of this opposition is designed to provide a context for the way in which both the book and the internet have tended to have been conceptualised, throughout Western culture, through their relationships to the infinites (simply put, despite their historically disparate figurations, the endlessness of the ad infinitum and the totalisation of the absolute infinite). Briefly then, for the history of philosophy, we could begin with the Platonic antipathy toward the endless repetition and indeterminacy of written text in comparison to direct speech, as much as, in our own time, the idea that the internet is an infinite archival repository or an information source that defies commensuration. We might note here that such endlessness can be positively valorised, for example, as the possibility of human creativity and difference or negatively, for example, as the impossibility of determinate meaning. While the former stance might be said to characterise, in complex ways, a number of digital humanities practices, Philosophy has tended, in its history, to denigrate textual-archival endlessness. Between Plato and the internet, Kant and Hegel might be taken as key figures in the intervening development of Western philosophy’s antipathy toward the material accumulation of writings, as I have discussed elsewhere. Hence, I would like here to begin with a brief, schematic indication of Badiou’s intersection with this field. Why this matters is not only because it is a matter of the materiality of academic institutional politics, but also because it will allow a formulation of how political engagement might be thought in the contemporary, digital world, and thus gesture toward what I will call social inscription.

For Badiou, in Being and Event (1988), and in a number of other works, the circulating knowledge of the bourgeois status quo, which is inertial in its resistance to the revolutionary production of new political organisations, is termed ‘the encyclopaedia’. It comprises ‘everything’ that everyone generally knows about science, politics, art, etc. Such a term refers us back, no doubt, to that totalisating gesture, the dream of the book of all books, or the book of the world, manifested in its Enlightenment form in the work of the French Encyclopaedists, as a substitution or displacement of divine totalisation in codex form. Thus, effectively for Badiou, this ‘book’ of staid knowledge determines the world. The encyclopaedia has thus become a feature of what I might refer to as staticity – that inertia of the bourgeois state.

In ‘The (Re)turn of Philosophy to Itself’ (1992), deconstruction is specified by Badiou as pernicious case of an endless enmeshment within the past that (by logical necessity) would merely extend encyclopaedic knowledge. But, in comparison to the engagement with technology in Derrida’s work, for example most explicitly in Echographies (1996), there is really almost nothing in Badiou’s work that attempts to analyse the institutional and technological specificity of such knowledge, although we should see that its institutional-material impact (maintaining the status quo) can only be operated through specific technologies and institutions. All knowledge, and all thought, of course, requires inscription and storage for dissemination, and in whatever sense the substrate of such inscription is understood (psychic, printed, digital, social, etc), all knowledge is thus, and in this sense, archival. Against such a notion of mnemonic materialism, Badiou attends to politics as a mode of thought, proposing, against the encyclopaedia, the new political event – an occurrence that cannot be accounted for by existing knowledge, and which thus exceeds it. While there are a number of complexities here, which would need to include the codex forms of Badiou’s work – the monograph, the manifesto, the dialogue, etc – it should be emphasised then that political action – axiomatic and performative – is privileged over the supposedly endless entraction of deconstruction within existing textuality – within an endless archive.

Against Badiou’s refusal to engage systematically with the technical mediations of thought and knowledge, the character of this archive might be figured, in technological terms, through Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition (1979), and it is brought out clearly by Jameson’s description of the opposition between ‘story-telling and ‘scientific’ abstraction’ in the Foreword to that book. As Jameson writes:

The Nietzschean “strength to forget the past”—in preparation for the mutation of the superman to come—is here paradoxically redeployed as a property of storytelling itself, of precisely those narratives, heroic or other, in which we have been taught to see a form of primitive data storage or of social reproduction. What this formulation does very sharply achieve, at any rate, is the radical differentiation between the consumption of the past in narrative and its storage, hoarding, and capitalization in ‘science’ and scientific thought: a mode of understanding that, like the first surplus on the economic level, will little by little determine a whole range of ever more complex and extensive institutional objectifications—first in writing; then in libraries, universities, museums; with the breakthrough in our own period to microstorage, computerized data, and data banks of hitherto unimaginable proportions, whose control or even ownership is, as Herbert Schiller and others have warned us (and as Lyotard is very well aware), one of the crucial political issues of our own time.

In this context, of the politics of the archive, there is a route that might be followed from the preceding points concerning Badiou and Derrida: an analysis of the conceptualisation of the archive in deconstruction; and analysis of the conceptualisation of the political in deconstruction. Indeed, the necessary imbrication of the archival and the political, and the way in which the archive for Derrida opens onto the future of politics rather than merely onto the past of textual interpretation, is one of the central objects Derrida’s ‘Force of Law: The Mystical Foundation of Authority’ (1990). The pertinence of this text to the themes of this discussion is also lodged in its engagement with Benjamin, a thinker who, in ‘Unpacking my Library’, for example, understands the codex form as a liminal type that might gesture to a redemption of bourgeois property ownership. And part of Derrida’s purpose in ‘Force of Law’ is to understand how a radicalisation of the liminal complexity of Benjamin’s writings might be thought in the context of contemporary, technological politics.

Deconstruction: the Politics of Immediacy & Delay

‘Force of Law’ self-reflexively encounters the question of infinite proliferation and delay where Derrida questions the right ‘to multiply protocols and detours’ in contiguity with the ‘infinite problems’ associated to questions of law and justice. But the concept of infinity at work here is swiftly qualified, as Derrida says:

‘we know that these problems are not infinite simply because they are infinitely numerous, nor because they are rooted in the infinity of memories and cultures (religious, philosophical, juridical, and so forth) that we shall never master. They are infinite, if one may say so, in themselves, because they require the very experience of the aporia that is not unrelated to […] the mystical’.

The aporia related to, but not identical to the mystical here is not of the order of the occult, of course, but of a logic concerning the limit of discourse, or what Derrida refers to as the performative silence within language – that is: not a transcendental exteriority, or an ineffable alterity, but a prosaic limit internal and necessary to articulation. Since what is being invoked here is the différance of language in its broadest sense, we might then clarify the relation to the infinites by way of reference to ‘Structure, Sign, and Play’ (1967), which makes clear that différance cannot be circumscribed by the classical oppositions of the infinites and their associated terms – ad infinitum and absolute, empirical and transcendental, contingent and necessary, etc. Indeed, the extended discussion of the infinites in that text might be quickly condensed into that apparently pithier statement in Dissemination (1972): ‘infinite différance is finite’.

This turn away from the infinites classically considered has a direct relation to the political: the incalculable is thus not of the order of the transcendental, but of the ‘mediate’ – of worldly decision – a position endorsed by the priority of the ‘mediate’ character of the event of the law:

‘the inaccessible transcendence of the law [loi], before which and prior to which ‘man’ stands fast, only appears infinitely transcendent and thus theological to the extent that, nearest to him, it depends only on him, on the performative act by which he institutes it […] in an absolute performative whose presence always escapes him. The law [loi] is transcendent and theological, and so always to come, always promised, because it is immanent, finite, and thus already past. Every ‘subject’ is caught up in this aporetic structure in advance’.

Need this be emphasized: the transcendental ‘only appears’ as a product of the worldly, differential world, and where institutionalisation is performed in its descriptive difference, this is the divided ‘origin’ of the idea of justice. Law and justice thus, for deconstruction, are not the domain of ethics as ‘first philosophy’, as Levinas would have it: the face to face relation is always and already disrupted by the figure of the ‘third party’ – the figure of others, rather than the other, or tout-autre, or, in other words, a figure that gestures toward the political world as the complex, divided, and differential origin of a transcendental projection or image. The world in this sense is not ‘mediate’ in the sense that it occurs between the empirical and the transcendental considered as a priori realms, but it is mediate in the sense that it is the site of media of mediation in a technological and social sense. Indeed, Derrida argues that kinds of horizons of knowledge (that would be materialised in institutions of knowledge) are ‘always pretending to’ irreducible singularity, and thus there is ‘a law [loi] of irreducible competition’ between them. Such competition is, of course, a matter of institutional violence, the violence of institutional foundation, and the violence of institutional self-preservation. Yet, against the association of deconstruction with endless delay, such endless contestation may spur things on, gain strength and speed. Hence, says Derrida: ‘What I am saying here is anything but conservative and antirevolutionary’. What then is perhaps radical and revolutionary is this affirmation of the emergence of new laws (tied as they are to the idea of justice) out of or against the old. Indeed, isn’t the point that such a process is the articulation of justice, and that injustice would be the foreclosure of such a process of endless revolution? Perhaps then there is some comparability to Badiou’s antipathy towards the static quality of the state, registered in the phrase ‘When nothing changes, men die’. But if Derrida has appeared in many accounts as a proponent of liberalism, the recognition of violence in ‘Force of Law’ suggests that this is not merely a restatement of a process of bourgeois melioration – and to say that revolution is repetitive, not an absolute rupture, not a pure foundation, is not to deny revolutionary events, general strikes, etc. Hence, the attention to the mediate world is again registered in terms of political action:

‘This excess of justice over law and calculation […] cannot and should not [ne peut pas et ne doit pas] serve as an alibi for staying out of juridico-political battles, within an institution or state, between institutions and states’.

Against Benjamin’s idea of a non-violent use of technological communication, and an exteriority of the private sphere to the state through the figure of the lie, Derrida proposes a violent, subversive, (re)instituting entraction with the state through technological means.

Outro: the Net.

What is then required, in a world so evidently defined by the technological archive, is a theory of communicative and mnemonic violence that can provide a structure for the understanding of, and deployment of, technologically mediated political action. In order to engage with such a theorisation, the idea of textuality itself needs to be shifted from the traditional associations of ‘writing’, to that of computer coding as form of writing aligned to social inscription – that is, a form of language aligned to the practice of the political.

Significantly in this context, Derrida argues that a general strike would not now need initial mass action, but could be precipitated, for example, by the introduction of viruses into computer network. Of course, a virus is a self-replicating code that (as a law unto itself that is designed to refound itself in different instances) interrupts normative function. But a virus may not have an explicit legislating function other than its own extension to infinity, despite the fact that it might have a political dimension in its deployment. Other forms of technological resistance might be invoked here, for example: ‘Low Orbit Ion Cannon’ – a programme coded by the numinous Anonymous collective that, downloaded onto multiple users’ computers, enabled Distributed Denial of Service attacks on business and government websites. As a technological assault on capitalist institutions, we might see such as an anarchic anti-legislation or de-legislation that nevertheless describes and performs or reinstitutes and remembers the idea of freedom of speech and information. But perhaps this remains within a scene of endless violence, a naïve anarchism, as the mere antithesis of perpetual peace. As I have indicated, however, institutionalisation entails the collapse of the opposition between peace and violence: peace, as preservation, is violence; violence is necessary for political change as (re)institutionalization.

The social materialization of a deconstructive archival politics might be gestured toward through the online digital archive and communications network ‘Sukey’, which emerged from the UCL Occupation in London, 2011, in order to facilitate demonstration against the inequalities deriving from government changes to education funding. By centralizing data from the location of and information from protesters’ mobile devices at street level, and reformatting and redeploying such information back to participants, the project allowed protesters to avoid the police tactic of ‘kettling’ and containing demonstrators. Indeed the project was initiated as a response to the violence of kettling – it emerged from a particular form of state control and its injustice in order to subvert it. We might also see kettling as paradigmatic of state control: in its demobilization of the violent difference that it has produced, the state relays the violence of its inertia, its staticity, its preserving violence, and thus speaks of its fear of a founding violence that nevertheless brought it into existence. Thus, while the project aimed to facilitate peaceful protest (and in this sense to re-institute the nominally democratic character of the state), it did founding violence to preserving violence – as much as, in its affirmation of a democracy that is the nominal character of that state, it reiterated it. Yet, if there is a différance between the protestors and the state, is clearly not simply of the order of infinite delay. The circulation of information, involving the archiving of digital data and thus a delay, within the in-finite extension of the digital archive, thus facilitated what is generally referred to as ‘immediate’ political action. Indeed, as the Executive Summary of the project states: ‘We exist to support decisions’. Such immediacy, of course, can no longer be conceptualized in a pure sense, but this is not to detract from its performativity.

Through this argument, we could also figure the difference of the archive here in terms of the opposition of transparency and secrecy. It is a common adage that the bigger, more endless the internet gets, the more difficult it is to locate information; a condition indicated in the counter-development of search engines. Indeed: absolute transparency is opacity – all information, without selection, is chaos. But the issue of transparency is political as much as epistemological, in consideration of the transparency of the law, for example, and Sukey was designed to enable the visibility of dissent through mobile street demonstration and to defend the right to peaceful protest. Sukey’s presence on the internet is, according to the logic of open source, visible, appropriable, and self-reflexive – open to intervention and transformation – to a rewriting that is not expressive of the subject, but of the social. Indeed, in terms of such visibility and communicativity, the police were informed of its launch in 2011, and could engage with it. But the archival component of the project, its shifting database, nevertheless indicates secretion and opacity, if in an emphatically non-metaphysical sense – a secretion that its transparency depends upon. And it is this form of inscriptive secretion, ‘mediate’, technological, and political, structured as it is by the difference of transparency, that is the ‘origin’ of those supposedly a priori transcendental, metaphysical, and philosophical forms of absolute exteriority, and not the reverse. We would also have to see Sukey, then, in these terms, located at the collapse of metaphysical polarities, including those of the infinites.

Thus, we might see in Sukey a subversive, politically motivated and politically facilitating archive for and of the now; one pointing backwards (as memory) and forwards (as possibility). Importantly, the collective programmes running the system cannot determine the outcome of events in terms of a future-determining programme, but respond to the contingency of events, and thus while not being neutral as such, is without a specific teleology. It is in this sense, then, that Sukey – in mobilizing capitalized technologies in the digital sphere with an opening to contingency – nevertheless points toward the future in the divided complexity of the present. This suggests not only that Badiou is wrong to associate deconstruction with endless, depoliticizing procrastination, and an inability to engage with political, performative activity, but that the active engagement with political technologies of inscription, archiving, and dissemination in Derrida’s work offers a framework through which the complexity of contemporary techno-political action might be thought.

Davin Heckman

‘The Politics of Plasticity: Neoliberalism and the Digital Text’

In reflecting upon Derrida’s observation in Paper Machine that internet is haunted by the book, I am compelled by an inverse transposition that has taken place in the realm of ontology. Building off of earlier research on “smart houses” and ongoing research on digital poetics, I am in the habit of looking at digital media from two perspectives. In the first case, I look at digital media as an extension of consumer culture.[i] In the second case, I am interested in poetic practices that make alternative use of the inherited systems of transmission, signification, and power.[ii] In my work on smart houses, I noticed that rapid innovation in digital media, where the plasticity of the programmable machine relies upon interfaces that are socially mediated, following industrial designer Raymond Loewy’s famous MAYA principle (which is an acronym for “Most Advanced Yet Acceptable”). In my readings of electronic literature, I noticed that artists seemed intent to take great liberties with interface design. My first impulse was to interpret this merely as an extension of avant-garde sensibilities. But this superficial reading gave way to a more profound understanding, both of the historical avant-garde tradition and the contemporary practice of digital media, as my smart homes research enlightened me to the real dystopian potentials of ubiquitous computing, automated surveillance, and access to highly processed and manipulated streams of data. As much as I’d like to say that “critical thinking” is somehow part of my personality, those who know me would recognize that I am chronically optimistic. Rather, the critical response was initiated by the overwhelming realization of the deep political stakes of consciousness once the historical, media-specific formalities had been loosed from their bindings. The merits of linear argument no longer entrenched by print modalities, it would be left to us to insist, not only on the terms of debate, but upon the very nature of debate itself. This is neither to say that we can return to the Enlightenment nor that we would necessarily want to. Instead, it is to recognize that the only forms that will persist are the ones that we value. If the Neoliberal turn towards deregulation, the valorization of valorization, and the increasing degeneration of the state have any lessons to offer, it is that healthy societies do not emerge automatically from free markets.  They are forged by the commitments of their participants. The crises in publishing and epistemology, believe it or not, offer insights into the significant of this shift and what we might do to direct this change in a more favorable direction.

At the precise point where the book has migrated from a practical constraint (ink on paper gathered in a binding) to a cognitive one (the decision whether or not to simulate the book in digital format), the speculative ontologies of the poststructuralists (the social construction of reality and the lack essential identity) have been converted into practical realities (the fabrication of virtual realities and identification through profiling). These transitions have coincided with a general cultural malaise in the United States (and elsewhere) that is marked by everything from poor academic performance, a pervasive distrust of political processes, hostility towards the state, a backlash against science, a return of nativism and demagoguery, and general decline in public life. The problem of cultural decline has been addressed and theorized by many scholars and many have offered various solutions. This essay deals with the general problem of consciousness and plasticity and its relationship to politics. In their 2010 Manifesto, the Ars Industrialis group has argued that we must “struggle against carelessness [incurie], against the destruction of attention.” This essay seeks to uncover a latent politics of deliberation that is active within the landscape of media change, specifically, it looks at the contested ground of digital media as the potential site for political resistance to neoliberalism.

Phenomenal Constructions

In the course of my research on smart houses, I found myself taken in by the thought that consciousness migrates from subjects into objects, specifically as articulated by Deleuze and Guattari’s elaboration on assemblages, which they explain in the following passage:

‘Hans is also taken up in an assemblage: his mother’s bed, the paternal element, the house, the cafe across the street, the nearby warehouse, the street, the right to go out onto the street, the winning of this right, the pride of winning it, but also the dangers of winning it, the fall, shame … . These are not phantasies or subjective reveries: it is not a question of imitating a horse, “playing” horse, identifying with one, or even experiencing feelings of pity or sympathy. Neither does it have to do with an objective analogy between assemblages. The question is whether Little Hans can endow his own elements with the relations of movement and rest, the affects, that would make it become horse, forms and subjects aside. Is there an as yet unknown assemblage that would be neither Hans’s nor the horse’s, but that of the becoming-horse of Hans? An assemblage, for example in which the horse would bare its teeth and Hans might show something else, his feet, his legs, his peepee-maker, whatever?’ (D&G 257-58).

The web of concepts served up in A Thousand Plateaus (“desiring machines,” “becoming-,” and “assemblage”) all point to an astute observation about ontology: the idea that the discrete “self” is an idea which is not supported by the way that we live in the world. As we inhabit a set of relationships (spatial, interpersonal, cognitive), the discrete nature of objects disappears as each discrete thing is brought under the umbrella of agency. A more simple elucidation of this point is available in Heidegger’s description of “useful things”:

‘In accordance with their character of being usable material, useful things always are in terms of their belonging to other useful things: writing materials, pen, ink, paper, desk blotter, table, lamp, furniture, windows, doors, room. These “things” never show themselves initially by themselves, in order then to fill out a room as a sum of real things. What we encounter as nearest to us, although we do not grasp it thematically, is the room, not as what is “between the four walls” in a geometrical, spatial sense, but rather as material for living. On the basis of the latter we find “accommodations,” and in accommodations the actual “individual” useful thing. A totality of useful things is always discovered before the individual useful thing’ (Being and Time 64).

In other words, the discrete materiality of objects tends to be forgotten through active use. The more “available” something is to the range of our expression, the less self-consciously we use it. Instead, the useful thing becomes subject to intuitive, presumed use, and thus becomes a simple reflection of an agency that can be taken for granted. From this basic observation regarding individually useful things, Heidegger expands this notion to cover the environment, the larger milieu within which our notion of the world is “enframed.”

The home, in my view, was the perfect platform, a practical instance of the sort of “enframing” described in Heidegger and the perfect playground for all sorts of “becomings,” it was a platform within which discrete objects could acquire meaning. As a counterpoint to a world of individuals and a life defined by discrete purchases, the home (with some help from Baudrillard’s System of Objects) offered another way of seeing how discrete acts could be meaningfully integrated, how the actions of atomized individuals could fit into a larger social context.  At one time, the idea of the seamlessly integrated “smart” environment was purely a topic of science fiction or phenomenological musing about how we think about things. Within the discourse of philosophy, this was a theoretical position which could be used to crack open the discursive frameworks that hold knowledge in place. It is no longer speculation. Nor is it an expression of the human subject’s ability to situate herself or himself within the world. What we are living through is a very late stage of being as an existential matter merged with the being as a technical matter.

On the one hand, Heidegger describes the formation of the world that we inhabit as a phenomenological fact. In the “Question Concerning Technology”, Heidegger explains, “[Techne] reveals whatever does not bring itself forth and does not yet lie here before us, whatever can look and turn out now one way and now another” (319). Here, Heidegger describes the process by which this phenomenological conception of the world is fed by the process of technical development, the idea that capitalism, in the course of creating new commodities, transforms what was previously unconsidered from a technical perspective into a resource. Though his language seems almost mystical in its prophetic musing, this concept is very familiar to the observers of the digital. Digital images or sounds are rendered in discrete parts. Processes are rendered in discrete, logical languages. Even human behaviors are parsed into discrete actions, linked to discrete inputs, these, in turn, are internally fed back into the equation, the interactions are weighted, perhaps some randomizing or stabilizing elements are added, and lifelike behavior or decision-making is simulated through ever-evolving databases and equations. In the present day, we are seeing the most minute aspects of human behavior incorporated into the sphere of economic activity. Furthermore, the process through which this economic activity has been opened up is greatly enhanced and the means of recording and analyzing the field of everyday existence as the process through which information is gathered from raw data, research is written, and knowledge is applied is increasingly algorithmic.

Thus, the poststructuralist critique of the self has been effectively exteriorized. It is no mere thought experiment to pull one’s notion of a unitary consciousness apart by reflecting upon that which is forgotten. Rather, that which has historically been forgotten has itself been invested with a consciousness of its own. Perhaps it is not our consciousness, but it is consciousness of the sort that is able to picture us, to enframe us, not as a mere consequence of our own forgetting, but as an expression of its own rationalizations.

Constructing Phenomena

Concurrent with the external realization of poststructuralist speculation, the constructed object itself is being derealized, converted into abstract information, freed from one set of material constraints and dumped into another. While the digital is not without material body (information is stored in some medium, processed on some machine), the characteristics of the medium are no longer so specific as they once were. Floppy disks give way to optical disks, hard drives to flash, the specific medium of storage is no longer particular (marks on paper, bound and shelved). What remains, however, for the sake of legibility, is the question of how much energy we will continue to invest in specific modes of activity in relation to the stored data. Will conventional modes of literacy be maintained? Will platforms be preserved for future access? Will archives be saved in newer media? What will be saved and erased? Who will be allowed to access data and at what rates? When we think of “rates,” will we talking about Terabytes per second or dollars per minute? It depends on who is doing the thinking.

Rather than being tied to a consideration of books within which the materiality of print is inseparable from its literary qualities and the literacy required for reading, the digital content, form (as literary/rhetorical presentation), and medium (material existence as an object) are not intrinsically connected. The objective form of the book is tied to a specific mode of consciousness by the cultural practice associated with reading. In other words, the book is well suited to the narratives presented in the form of the novel, just as pre-Gutenberg cultures found narrative best presented through performed narratives. The essay is well-suited and the tract is well-suited towards specific types of argument that are married to Enlightenment models of subjectivity and political will. While I am reluctant to say that the printing press caused audiences to prefer the novel over, say, the short story or the closet drama, which both enjoyed popularity thanks to the printing press, I do want to say that these objects exist within an ecology. A mode of presentation, by virtue of its mode of production, can lead to formal patterns which effect the cultural competencies of those who are interacting with the content. For instance, the standard 78rpm record allowed about 3 minutes per side, effectively limiting the length of popular music. The LP, with its narrower grooves and slower speed (33 1/3 RPM) allowed for 45 minutes of music on a 12 inch disc. This shift, in allowing longer songs and/or more of them to appear within the same context, creates the condition in which longer songs and/or integrated conceptual albums become possible. Thus, there is a relationship between the materiality of media and what cultural patterns form within the possibilities of this framework.

On the other hand, as Raymond Williams has noted, emergent media does not necessarily lead to dominant patterns of use. Rather, emergent forms exist in a cultural tension with residual forms, competing for dominance and/or against dominance. In his introduction to the edited volume on Residual Media, Charles Acland notes that “Williams’ model throws a wrench into the impression of the smooth dynastic sweep of social change” (xxi).  In Williams’ formulation, media change is always influenced by cultural forms and political desires that are associated with the very terrain of communication itself. As Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin note, the reappearance residual forms not only have a long history within the history of mediation, but that such remediation seems particularly inflected by the digitality itself: “Repurposing as remediation is both what is ‘unique to digital worlds’ and what denies the possibility of that uniqueness” (50). In other words, the very lack of formal difference that exists within the digital format means that it is uniquely suited for rich and pervasive repurposing, recontextualizing, recombining. To return to the illustration of the vinyl record, the advent of digital formats, specifically the mp3, shatters the constraints posed by the 78 and the possibilities embodied by the LP, in such a way that songs can easily and inexpensively be transmitted regardless of length, but not necessarily associated with other songs. The result is that the only forms that the mp3 must abide by are determined by a host of other factors: intention, marketability, copyright, and consumer preference.

As applied to digital publication, this means that these formal inheritances—the page, the poem, the novel, the chapter, the bookshelf, copying, pasting, cutting, and any other designation—are not mere traces of ghosts, as Derrida suggests, but that they are active tracings, conjurings, invocations of residual forms. While, yes, form and custom, for some time might aid in the assimilation of such matter, the application of form and custom themselves are not driven by new media forms, they are chosen. Though they might seem as ghosts to those who dislike these materialized phantoms, they do not, in fact, impose themselves upon us unbidden. Rather, they are applied metaphors for an age of immateriality.

The Political Necessity of Deliberation

It might be curious to use the term deliberation in the context of addressing the question of human freedom in an age of digital media. After all, “liberation” is associated with freedom, while “de-liberation” may signal its opposite. However, my use of the term in this sense is entirely deliberate. For, if we define the term more conventionally, to mean something like, “making a decision after a process of consideration,” we approach something that, once again, brings us back to a fundamental understanding of liberty: the freedom to make meaningful decisions.

To return to the “inverse transposition” described in the introduction, we have a situation in which two things are occurring: Digital texts are materially decoupled from print forms and recoupled to them through acts of metaphor and imagination. Philosophical decouplings accomplished through metaphor and imagination are being materially realized through digital recording and analysis. What at first blush might seem like a coincidence of history brought about by a profound shift in technology is actually a radical shift in the dynamics of political power. The primacy of text, particularly the triangle of the human as playback mechanism for these texts, once tied content, form, and materiality to the general framework for cultural existence. As the poststructuralists have noted, the human subject is tied to this particular mode of literacy, the particular object, its mode of archiving, and the general cycle of cultural production associated with this mode of literacy.

In the digital age, the triangle of content, modes of literacy, and formal presentation have shifted dramatically, connected only by a thread of residual media. We purchase, for example, record and cassette players that can be plugged into the USB port as an effort to preserve a residual form that is quickly escaping. The consumer marketplace furnishes e-readers, complete with “digital ink” that will satisfy eyes accustomed to reading the old texts in the old ways. We still buy (or steal) songs and listen to radios, even on our computers. We bookmark our favorite pages. We recycle those documents we no longer read and place others upon our virtual bookshelves. In other words, we maintain these residual forms only because we passively insist upon them, but rarely do we take the time to consider the political implications of these everyday acts of resistance for what they are really saying.

Yes, culture is a construction. Yes, who we think we are is not as simple as a name, or set of fingerprints, or serial number might indicate. Yet, we do not connect the real and practical power of consciousness as it is expressed against a growing network of social surveillance by articulating what it is that we wish to preserve. The desire to maintain the structures which have supported the development of human consciousness and rational discourse are not simply reactionary grunts against change, they are the seeds of an intuitive and emergent political awakening: the assertion of being without recourse to essence.[iii] Rather than simply fall back on a presumed set of human rights, they are the assertion of those rights as a political desire, however poorly articulated the resistance has been formed.

With every microscopic assertion, we insist impose an order on an arbitrary system of signs. With every concession, no matter how minute, we are also consenting to a system of representation that is socially bound. With every small act of adaptation, we intervene in the flow of information. With every acquiescence to the adaptations of others, we participate in a community. However, it is not enough to say that these small glimmers of agency, as expressed through subtly passive or active means, are enough to constitute political power. All uses of popular media are not resistance. Nor is all resistance benign or effective. That we (readers, writers, users) are still more than automatons feeding increasingly meaningless cash into the markets does not offer the hope that we will someday be able to control the market or our place in it. Rather, it suggests that we still matter to ourselves as individuals situated within communities. Thus, the project is not so much to offer our resistance (critical thinking of any sort already implies resistance), rather it is to build real things beyond the reach of the market’s unreal ambitions. Against the Neoliberal virtualization of all things into fungible commodities, we must make another economy, once based in understanding wants and needs, and satisfying these wants and needs as broadly as possible. To do this, we must pull back from universal signification, and have the hard conversations that community requires. In other words, we have to turn our backs the unrestricted freedom of markets, and start deliberating about how to prioritize common resources, how to define and negotiate the use of common spaces, and how to negotiate rights and obligations within the context of common identities (ethnic, gender, class, national, global, etc.). And this requires that we valorize many of the same things that the Enlightenment defined as the qualities of the Human: Reason, Creativity, Education, Human Rights, Debate, Discourse, and Democracy.

In short, the spectre that yearns upon the horizon is not a ghost reaching out to us from the grave of technologies past, it is an active yearning for deliberation, conjured up by the very subjects who feel the increasing pressures of advancing markers. Without relying upon a presumed unitary subject, human beings are crying out for power. At a time when neoliberalism has resulted in a liberation of materiality itself, at a time when everything from water, to health, to the bodies of workers themselves are exchanged as commodities on world markets, the process of deliberation holds the potential for individuals and communities to put liberated capital to human use by subjecting it to the careful consideration of the human subject.

Works Cited

Acland, Charles R., editor. Residual Media. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007.

Ars Industrialis. “Manifesto.” 2010. <http://arsindustrialis.org/manifesto-2010>

Bolter, Jay David, and Richard Grusin. Remediation. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000.

Baudrillard, Jean. The System of Objects. Trans. J. Benedict. New York: Verso, 1996.

Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1987.

Derrida, Jaques.  Paper Machine. Trans. Rachel Bowlby. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005.

Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Trans. Joan Stambaugh. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996; “The Question Concerning Technology.” Trans. William Lovitt. Basic Writings. Editor David Farrell Krell. San Francisco: Harper Collins, 1993.

Stiegler, Bernard. Technics and Time, Vol I. Trans. George Collins and Richard Beardsworth. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998.

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[i] To read more about my thinking on “smart houses,” see Davin Heckman, A Small World: Smart Houses and the Dream of the Perfect Day (Duke UP, 2008).

[ii] To read more about my thoughts on digital poetics, see Davin Heckman, “Technics and Violence in Electronic Literature” in Culture Machine 12 (2011): http://www.culturemachine.net/index.php/cm/issue/view/23 and Davin Heckman “Electronic Literature as a Sword of Lightning” in Leonardo Electronic Almanac 17.1 (2011): http://www.leoalmanac.org/index.php/lea/entry/mish_mash1/.

[iii] In Technics and Time, Vol 1., Bernard Stiegler identifies the essential inessentiality of the human.

Johanna Drucker is Martin and Bernard Breslauer Professor of Bibliography in the Information Studies Department at UCLA. She is author of numerous books on digital aesthetics, textual materialism, visual poetry, and artists’ books, and is a renowned practitioner of book art. Her books include, Speclab: Digital Aesthetics and Projects in Speculative Computing (Chicago UP, 2010), The Century of Artists’ Books (Granary Books, 2004), Figuring the Word: Essays on Books, Writing and Visual Poetics (Thames and Hudson, 1998), The Alphabetic Labyrinth (Granary Books, 1998).

Johanna Drucker: ‘Diagrammatic Writing & the Poetics of Relations’

The concept of the “diagram” is vaguely defined in common usage, used to refer to a broad variety of schematic images—graphs, charts, anatomical images, working drawings and so on. By working towards a tighter definition, we might use the term to refer to a specific category of graphical expressions that spatialize relations. These relations, I suggest, are themselves meaningful—they are a kind of poetics, a bringing into being of meaning through articulation and expression. The materiality of this poetics of relations provides a way to analyse its formats and features—to get at, to grasp, to read, see, describe, elaborate the particulars of diagrammatic expressions. The even more specific attention to writing, to written discourse organized in graphical form, exposes the workings of diagrammatic activity within the field of visual verbal activity. We depend upon these, but rarely stop to describe or discuss their structuring principles or effects.

Early cuneiform tablets, dating to the 3^rd millennium before the Common Era, had their surfaces divided into segments by the use of scored lines. Sometimes a single line, sometimes a double line, these dividing rules segmented the clay surface into bounded units. Like property lines or fences, the divisions maintained distinctions among different types of information that comprised the written record on the tablet. Quantities might be separated from names for things, or, in the more elaborate column structures of inventories, owners from entities, and so on. The performative character of those lines is echoed in the columnar structure of accounting balance sheets and the marshalling of entries into their proper arrangement for purposes of tracking sums and values, names, or other items. The temptation to slip from the description of content typing that made those clay tablet grids work so effectively to the analysis of database structures is, of course, irresistible, and not without justification. So the arc of this discussion will sweep broadly. With all due acknowledgement of the specificity due any instantiation of a particular graphical format or feature, the crux of my argument lies on demonstrating some of the similarities and continuities of the basic elements of diagrammatic writing.

Without the graphical scaffolding, and the diagrammatic features that articulate graphical expressions, writing would not function. Diagrammatic forms carry semantic value in their own organization and relations. They are a form of poiesis, of making, whose materiality eludes us, for the most part. A genealogical chart that lacked the means to track bloodlines or distinguish one generation from another would hardly perform its basic functions—to secure claims to property, identity, or power. The Tree of Jesse, like the ancient symbols for the Tree of Life on which its iconography is based, is not only genealogical and mythic in its power, but embodies assumptions about the organic integrity of derivation and inheritance. These assumptions are not merely expressed in its form, they are made in its format. The images do not simply represent relations of derivation and inheritance, they constitute such relations through graphical means, just as the columnar formats used for accounting designate and confer specific characteristic values through their graphical means. A number placed in a different column obtains a different value. For instance, in a railroad schedule the diagrammatic features are essential to distinguish arrival and departure times, or minutes from hours. Such features are so endemic to our processing of written and visual information, so pervasive in their presence and function, that we rarely pause to consider their operational, functional, instrumental, and rhetorical force. Or, to imagine their poetical dimensions. A study of diagrammatic expression is an opportunity to create a vocabulary of relations by attending to the material specificity of these abstract but essential graphical forms and the poetics by which they construct these meaningful relations.

A diagram is an image that works, it does something, it provokes and supports performative engagement by virtue of its structures and the relations they express. A diagram is a graphic expression of semantic values in spatial form whose specific visual features constitute the semantic values. Diagrams are performative, rather than representational, and an approach to diagrammatic writing that engages with such graphical principles expresses relations that might be expressed through other means—mathematical formulae, textual description, logical propositions. But their graphical materiality makes them available, accessible, and also, makes their historical lineage apparent. So, though some diagrams are graphic, the principles of diagrammatic thinking are not exclusive to graphical expressions. (A concept of the hierarchy of power relations or kinship relations, for example, can be understood diagrammatically and expressed visually, but the relations of subordination, exclusion, proximity, prohibition and taboo do not depend on graphical forms for either their enactment or their apprehension in a human community.)

Diagrammatic writing makes use of specific features of graphical codes. All writing is graphical, by definition, and the graphicality of all writing plays a part in the production of its legible and communicative, expressive, value. Whether by virtue of the reading of stylistic codes, of the place and situated-ness of an inscription (formal monumental writing, informal graffiti, printed communication, official signage and so on), we are able to distinguish orders, genres, types of written language in a millisecond, long in advance of processing textual content. But graphicality and diagrammatic properties are not interchangeable. Pictures are graphical, but they don’t work in the same sense that diagrams do. Representational images are constrained by analogy. Their referential identity determines their form rather than having their form arise from or express values through relations. More forms and formats of writing contain and make use of diagrammatic features than is generally realized. For instance, the basic scoring of prose through the use of word spaces, punctuation, paragraph markers, and so forth creates a fundamentally diagrammatic work. Why? Because the elements of the graphical encoding allow the work to be read as a text predigested by its graphical structure. We have only to take the precise same set of letters and order them alphabetically to recognize that graphical sequencing and chunking are significant. Likewise, in reckoning a mathematical sum, we take advantage of diagrammatic graphic features to align columns of numbers according to the place value of integers. Try adding a set of numbers that has been scattered around the perimeter of a room instead of put in a neat column and the supporting role of graphical organization and scoring becomes quite evident.

The enthusiasm for innovation that came with the first wave of hypertext writing in the 1980s brought equal parts insight and exaggeration to the idea of creating imaginative works that played with diagrammatic features. Hyperbolic rhetoric exaggerated the linearity of print and the non-linearity of programs like Hypercard. Designed for Apple and launched in 1987, it was a milestone, offering an easy to use platform for creating combinatoric works built in chunks whose sequence did not have to be locked into the single linear sequence. Branching and linking, the basic underpinnings of the web, were embodied in its programming. But prose and print are only superficially linear – the alphanumeric sequence follows line by line, letter by letter, but meaning is produced across a field of associations, rhymes, and references that are not only not constrained by linearity but come into being through its capacity for multiplicity of meaning and reading. Poetic forms, more obviously spatial, exploit diagrammatic elements quite conspicuously. Stéphane Mallarmé’s Un Coup de Dés may be the paradigmatic diagrammatic work, and certainly a touchstone for any graphically scored piece whose myriad of themes is spatialized relationally in dramatic ways. But the sheer force of condensation and resonance that makes poems work embodies a diagrammatic engagement with relational principles and forces. Without hesitation or too much qualification, we can enter into a discussion of poems as force fields of vectors, sinks and troughs of meaning, nodes of relation and repetition, reinforcement, or resistance. The dynamic language so crucial to diagrammatic thought springs from poetics quite readily. And the analysis of poetry, as well as that of many aesthetic artifacts, exposes the fields of relations produced in and across such complexities (no matter how refined, reduced, or apparently simple the artifact might be). The diagrams of Erie Loran developed for studying the work of Cezanne, for instance, almost as clichéd seeming at this moment as the analytic schematics used to show the stability of pyramids underlying the composition of the great Renaissance madonnas and so on were wonderful demonstrations of the dynamic principles at work. Diagrammatic methods of analysis do their work in the study of musical pieces, staged drama, film structures, and elaborate narratives, just as the practice of diagramming sentences was used to expose structure of composition.

But diagrammatic methods of writing are not only analytic, they are compositional. Picking up the thread dropped above, a hyperbolic binarism stressed by early hypertext writers and theorists suggested that the compositional techniques of a compositional mode that took up Jorge Luis Borges’s image of the “garden of forking paths” heralded the arrival of a new era of literary liberation from the tedium of linearity imposed by regimes of print. Such fallacies and follies, trival in their perception, and short-lived in their traction on imagination, were not so much wrong as simplistic, as intent on selling the virtues of new media as other hawkers of the digital. But what, of that early shift in compositional mode, grafted onto the study of graphical expressions, allows us now to elicit from our study of written forms a sense of diagrammatic principles in a continuum of manuscript to print to digital expressions? The question is not merely answered by an assertion that writing’s diagrammatic quality inheres in a database combinatoric chunking that produces modular reworked products customized for each new reader. That may be, and may come to be, but will benefit from a higher degree of specificity about kinds and types of diagrammatic thinking expressed in graphic features and formats. Graphicality is neither essential nor incidental—it is a convenience for making relations legible, available to perception, and analysis. The graphic field also provides material evidence for analysis.

For instance, at the most abstract and fundamental level of meaning production, we know that the distinction between a mark and a non-mark, a signifying entity and an incidental trace, depends upon the force of a frame. We can make such a statement without recourse to graphical expression, as a proposition that holds in the abstract. But tractable form immediately gives specificity to such propositions. Delimitation of domain creates meaning. Without differentiation, the graphical has no value. Such insights were the stuff of semiotics and post-structuralist thought. We draw on that legacy for a theory of trace as the coming into being of the possibility of meaning whether we work within a literal graphical comprehension of such processes or on a more abstract plane in which an ecology of semiotics points to more fundamental conditions of knowing and being. But the inventory of graphical features that assume the form of conventions in written language, and then enact diagrammatic possibilities, begins with the play of figure and ground, edge and field of inscription, along lines of basic organizing effects. These offer the chance to engage with the also familiar but still useful principles of gestalt psychology, with its analysis of perceptual tendencies provoked by visual forms. The principles arise from clinical observation, perception studies, that assume a kind of normative subject and a predictable, even mechanical, relation between stimuli and response. So, continuity, grouping, proximity, emergence, invariance and so on are graphical features whose effects can be counted on, more or less, in most visual processes.

The relevance of these principles to the design and study of design of graphical formats depends on the subtlety and finesse with which they are applied. The elaborate study of the mise en page of medieval manuscripts shows how nuanced the notion of “proximity” between one column of text and another can be. The careful calibration of proportions is a dance of subtle metrics, of the division of a page through allocation of one portion to bottom margin and another to the top, to the decisions that keep a book unified across a gutter or throw its portions outward as if by some chaotic force of centrifugal abandon. The differences of proportion that make a design work or not don’t resolve through formulaic principles, and the gestalt inventory lacks refinement. Proximity, for instance, becomes laden with attributes and values in the workings of Raymon Llull’s diagrams for calculating the attributes of God or the mesh of connections generated by Athanasius Kircher (under Llull’s persistent influence) in his magnificent graphical elaborations of the 1669 Ars Magna Sciendi.

The diagrammatic structures conventionalized in medieval manuscripts to create relations of text to commentary, text to paratext, and apparatus to the whole space of the book. Notes also point outward to the discourse field of textual production in the broader sense transfer into book and print formats and even find their way into the sidebars, hyperlinks, and headers that allow us to read and author effectively in digital environments. The navigational functions of graphical expressions are most conspicuously diagrammatic—the relational structures that make a header distinct from a phrase in a paragraph, a footnote other than an entry in the table of contents are vivid demonstrations of the ways we rely on the spatial specificity to organize written language (or multimedia texts, for that matter). So conventionalized are the elements of texts and their codified relations that we author with those structures in mind—the footnote segments itself from our main line of argument, the aside, the comment, the marginal note, the index, and chapter heads or subheads, though hardly natural features of the intellectual landscape, are so naturalized that they are prompted even in the process of composition (and certainly employed in the processes of editing). That they guide our reading is obvious, of course.

In pausing to think about the ways authoring absorbs and depends on provocations coded into the graphical space that diagrams relations among one bit of text and another, we are starting to bring questions about the authoring platforms and potential/poetential of electronic space into view. Formats in electronic space have reprised some of the older textual modes of production, even as these are interpenetrated with the now ubiquitous structure of cross references and linking. Blogs are scroll forms, social media sites are galleries, the list of tweets has some peculiar resemblance to those archaic cuneiform inventories. The diagrammatic codes that structure a Wiki, dividing its screen display into topic, introduction, overview outline, and other features does not mimic any particular script predecessor, but preserves footnote and references cited conventions organized in print resources. Scrolling texts, pop up windows, rapid refresh in screen displays all introduce a more rapid temporal rate of reinscription than print allowed, but the flat space of display to which most screen writing is reduced is, if anything, far less diagrammatically sophisticated than the spaces of a three-dimensional codex.

Nonetheless, the potential exists for diagrammatic writing as an expression of compositional possibilities that make use of the screen’s flexible and fungible display space, not just as a place in which the forking paths metaphor or hyperlinked network is constantly invoked, but as a fully n-dimensional space. This possibility, to be enabled and enacted graphically, takes several forms: a kind of visio-logico-compositional authoring that engages mind-mapping, grids, matrices, lattices, and other spatialized structures whose semantic value as forms inflects and informs the production of meaning in the works they enable. How do we learn to think and write along rays, arrays, subdivisions and patterns of thought. How can the flexibility morphology of screen display enable framing, enframing, embedment, entanglement, hierarchy, listing, and other schematic strategies of composition. These involve the production of multi-linear discourse as well as non-linear modes (so long as by non-linear we understand that alphanumeric sequence will remain at the level of word, phrase, sentence, and other units of discourse). In addition, the generation of automatic processing of intellectual material, texts in particular, into concordances, word lists, visual formats and ngrams, mined as “data” and expressed in graphics will add other graphically specific conventions to the field of text production.

Diagrammatic writing occurs at several scales. The relation of documents to documents takes a diagrammatic form expressed in structures that create and make explicit statements of the semantic value of those relations. So, a series of articles are, by their “series-ness” accorded a characterization, while “sequence” might suggest a looping and iterative quality of interlinked commentary, argument, or narrative. This level of abstraction operates in document organization of all kinds—but becomes tractable when rendered apparent in a cataloguing or classification system. Whether we take the example of a library shelving system or an archival file structure, when we pull the structure out, like a fish skeleton from its living flesh, we see how its organization articulates the dynamic functioning of the whole. The diagrammatic structure is an expression of relational values in material form.

The diagrammatic quality of textual relations is also apparent in the modular chunking and regulation of bits of semantic content that can be managed by a relational data base. Databases and other forms of structured data allow for textual manipulation at many levels and the repurposing of content along varying lines of argument. These techniques can be used to create a variety of frame arguments and narrative lines on top of the repository materials. Such techniques, like the interpretative presentations of museum exhibits, galleries or catalogues, have a greater flexibility in the electronic environment, but the organizational logic of hierarchies and levels quickly becomes complicated in a constellationary or complexly networked environment where relations take on a high degress of specificity. We have only to conjure the vocabulary of such relations, the poetics of diagrammatic orderings I alluded to above, to see how the concepts of attachment, preference, attraction, embedment, enframing, entanglement, ingestion, encapsulation, indifference, or other affective terms that refine the spatial metaphors of relations might proliferate. Manuscripts, handwritten documents, provide dramatic examples. The flexibility of variable spacing, the ability to change scale and insert lines within lines, commentary wrapped around commentary, discursive strategies marshalling arguments with the spatial dynamics of a military maneuver or a move in a complex dance are all features of the manuscript page that are more difficult to enact within the technologies of print production (for sheer physical reasons—the quadrature and solid geometry of letterpress and its imitation in photo-techniques of production only somewhat modified in the digital environment, in spite of the potential for digital design to accommodate new structuring principles). But screens have remained stuck in print imitation and making them responsive to the combination of manuscript and digital potential to produce a new hybrid, fluid and n-dimensional, is an as yet unrealized dream. The material expression of diagrammatic writing would combine the flexibility of manuscripts with the processing capability of digital platforms.

The embrace of databases was a harbinger of a combinatoric and diagrammatic approach to writing in electronic spaces, but the mechanistic division of content in advance of composition imposes a fixed structure on the types of text and their relations that can be generated from the semantic material entered into the fields. The free form notion of a diagrammatic writing suggests a more associational structuring of argument, one that gives rise to relations and organization that may, in turn, be captured, extracted, studied as a schematic form, but is not the determining mechanism or structure of composition. That distinction is important, since the fully diagrammatic potential of imaginative and algorithmic composition working in concert should not have its expressions fettered in advance by allegiance to the already familiar conventions by which we think our work into form. Both structured and unstructured approaches provide essential features for the way diagrammatic expressions come into being at the moment of compositional production –or are able to be abstracted from graphical expression and analyzed, repurposed, as in the case of our familiar formats of grids, graphs, trees, outlines, and so on.

Diagrammatic writing spatializes semantic relations through graphical expressions. We use diagrammatic techniques in note taking, in thinking associatively about ideas and arguments. We conjure the diagrammatic imagination in our handwritten doodles and white board sketches. But we have yet to fully activate the potential of the electronic environment to create those multiplicities of argument structure that are possible within the digital spaces of an n-dimensional screen. How does a line become a bridge, a rib of text across which a rhetorical gesture stretches to extend a track of thought? Where does the subdivision of argument into its tiniest intimate detailed interiority spiral inward to focus on the minutiae of a thought? To unravel or rework the nuances of a particular set of considerations through their contrast and comparison with other extant arguments or versions of an idea, tale, or bit of evidence? The medieval thought trails will return, their potential enhanced and amplified ahead, and frames will emerge, entanglements arise, a table of many contexts will reframe, reshape before our eyes and according to the thematic whim of our engagement with a text. The running heads will actually run, pitched forward, changing to create their own commentary, anticipation, reflection, retrospection as the “page” which is no longer imitated on the screen reconfigures and regenerates. The elaborating possibilities of the embroidery and tracery of argument will be released from their latency through a tool set of moves that will become as familiar as footnotes and paragraphs, as bullet points and paraphrases, as marginalia and discourse fields to which our references serve as vectors and points, as we engage the diagrammatic potential of writing. With all this in view, we may imagine a material poetics of diagrammatic writing that would enable greater engagement with its graphical possibilities of expression.

Richard Burt is Professor of English at the University of Florida. He is the author of Medieval and Early Modern Film and Media (Palgrave, 2008), Unspeakable ShaXXXspeares: Queer Theory and American Kiddie Culture (St. Martin’s, 1998) and Licensed by Authority: Ben Jonson and the Discourses of Censorship (Cornell UP, 1993). He is the editor of numerous books, including Shakespeare After Mass Media (Palgrave, 2002) and The Administration of Aesthetics: Censorship, Political Criticism, and the Public Sphere (Minnesota, 1994).

‘Shelf-Life: Passing through the Biopolitics of the Archive

On the picture enclosed you see me–thirty five years later—in front of a palm tree. And even if it is not a house palm, the photo on which you now see it was taken for no less external reasons than the masquerade of the childhood picture, for it is a passport photo that I had taken in Mallorca. Note 3, “The passport for which the photograph was taken has not survived.”

Walter Benjamin, Letter to Gretel Karplus San Antonio (Ibiza), c. 8-10.7.1933, in Gretel Adorno and Walter Benjamin, Correspondence 1930-1940, Ed. Henri Lonitz and Christoph Goedde. Trans. Wieland Hobin (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2008), 42; 43.

The “paperless” person is an outlaw, a nonsubject legally, a noncitizen or the citizen of a foreign country refused the right conferred, on paper, by a temporary or permanent visa, a rubber stamp.  The literal reference to the word papers, in the sense of legal justification certainly depends on the language and uses of particular national cultures (in France and Germany, for instance).  But when the United States, for example, the word undocumented is used to designate analogous cases, or undesireables, with similar problems involved, it is the same axioms that carry authority; the law is guranteed by the holding of a “paper” or document, an identity card (ID), by the bearing or carrying [port] of a driving permit or a passport that you keep on your person, that can be shown and that guarantees the self, the juridical personality of “here I am.”  We shouldn’t be dealing with these problems … without asking what is happening today under international law, with the subject of “human rights and the citizen’s rights,” with the future or decline of nation-states.

Jacques Derrida, “Paper or Me, you Know … ”  Paper Machine, 60-61.

Foreign Correspondence

My essay concerns the biopolitical archive, or what I call “self-life,” the relation between the book as storage unit and the book as bio-graph.[i] My essay falls into five parts of which I present two as fragments in draft form (the logic of the relation of the five parts will become apparent in the final draft).  I begin with a discussion, not presented here, of the uncanny relation between Alain Resnais’ documentaries Toute la Memoire du Monde (All the Memory of the World, 1957), a relatively unknown film devoted to France’s Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, and Nuit et broulliard (Night and Fog, 1955), a very famous film devoted to the Holocaust.  I then provide an analysis of a U.S. Government made video entitled “How A US Passport Is Made” (2009)[ii] about the passport as figure of processing citizenship through paper and the problems of what the passport is (a thing, then a book) and narrating when it is what it is.  The passport as thing / book raises a problem of form, its materials already having been mediatized. The passport figures a problem of form related to materiality, a problem of determining the form of the object / thing. The passport as “book” offers resistance to a narrative, especially a genetic narrative of its construction and assemblage; the passport is a hybrid, both a printed book and yet also a kind of e-book, a Kindle that doesn’t function (you can’t read the digital data or subtract from it, add to it / alter it). [iii] It is first a “thing,” then a “book” with fine print and microprint, first made of a foreign, imported cover (thing) with three blank but formatted memory chips, then becomes American (book) when assembled (the paper covering over the foreign chips, which were loaded and locked), and finally a “personalized” book (sort of like on demand publishing).  Only machines “read” the passports (officers “skim” them).  This narrative of passport production reveals and hide its own double Un/American construction (the side of the inside (chip) being covered by the paper laminated onto the plastic cover):  the made in America for Americans book metaphor of assemblage beginning and ending in America (printing, stitching, lamination) competes with a global industrial model of assemblage in which non-American digital parts and cover get imported and data then gets “loaded on” to the imports and covered up without Americans even knowing (unless they watch this video).  Like any (transnational) commodity, American passports alienate American citizens from their own identity papers, covering up the foreign, protective cover, literally secreting the chips that fully functionalize the identity papers from their “owners.”[iv] The printed pages of the passport as book become a cover, literally and metaphorically, for the storage of citizens as data, their reduction to microchips. And the question of “reading” and “skimming” the book is all the more bizarre since there is no narrative to read, just a profile reduced to one’s life span and home. (Gaining a U.S. passport is thus already a process of people into persons in that you have to have a home—you have to reside in your property or someone else’s—before you can become a person who can reenter the U.S. without a passport, you always a potentially illegal alien. And you have to know English to apply and you have to be literate or know someone who is.

By attending to the sediment of the passport as book/thing’s production and processing, I rephrase questions about biopolitics, citizenship, the polis, who can travel legally where, what they can travel with and carry on or not, in relation to materials as questions about archiving, files, and media storage by the State.

The Youtube video does not say what is stored on the chips (the word information is not used) whether it is the same as the information on the passport or in excess of it.  It is information about us, however. That much is clear.   But we are alienated through our data processing, we are booked by the State even, just into persons through personalization.  But we are only informed by change of how our passports are made.   Their making would usually seem to fall under state secrets, so the effect of the ideas that we are learning is like seeing something that we are not supposed to see.  The video is itself a threat because it gives forgers information they could use to forge.  But the issue is that persons are stored as data) when they are turned form persons into citizens.   Citizenship passes though the person in enabling him or her to pass through customs, unsettling distinctions between guest and host, alien and host, and the inhuman outside citizenship (equated with aliens as animals, vermin, threats, viruses, flus, and so on) hostage and hostage taker.  Citizenship not as securing of human rights but as Host-age taking.

One can do no more here than recall, without exaggerated pathos, the space of a politics of death or of mass extermination the developments of a modern hostage war that probably beagan with kidnapping (there cannot be any kidnapping in the strict sense, without automobiles, wth a certain condition of posts, telephones, and telecomunications, for example), then developed under Nazism, and has recently expanded to worldwide dimensions. . . The same mutation has transformed medicine and modern bio-genetics …. And the progress of research on the so-called human genome (data banks, predictive—thus for the moment still not covered by health insurance—which could not, at least easily, be transferred to developing countries) will drastically exacerbate the differences between the rich and the less rich in our societies, and even more so between our countries and poor countries. Jacques Derrida, Aporias, pp. 59-60

In the second and third parts of the essay, I discuss autobiographical essays on books by Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno to show that the archive paradoxically becomes readable insofar as it is resistant or “closed”:  reading is more about various kinds of reshelving, refiling, and storage of persons on paper, the passport being perhaps the best example of the paper person. Walter Benjamin concludes his essay “Books by the Mentally Ill: From My Library” with a cryptic reference to a “manuscript that is finding it as difficult as ever,” despite these enlightened times, “to obtain the approval of a respected publishing house, even though it is as least the equal of Schreber’s in both human and literary terms.”  In the course of his championing of this un-named manuscript, Benjamin links publication with obtaining a passport:

The mere existence of such works has something disconcerting about it, so long as we habitually regard writing as—despite everything—part of a higher, safer realm, the appearance of insanity, especially when it enters less noisily form elsewhere, is all the more terrifying.  How could this happen?  How did it manage to slip past the passport control of the city of books, this Thebes with a hundred doors? The publishing history of such works must often be as bizarre as their contents. Nowadays, one would like to think, the situation is different.  Interest in the manifestations of madness is as universal as ever, but it has become more fruitful and legitimate. The writings of the insane, so we might suppose, would have no trouble obtaining a valid passport today.  Yet I know of a manuscript that is finding it as difficult as ever to obtain the approval of a respected publishing house, even though it is the equal of Schreber’s in both human and literary form, and far superior in intelligibility. Selected Writing 2: 1, 13.

Some books get left behind in manuscript, even if passports become less restrictive.  Benjamin records the loss by failing to give the author or title of the unpublished manuscript that is not yet a book, instead tabling its contents as if he were hoping it and others like it might thereby slip by passport controls of the biblio-polis.[v]

Obviously, Benjamin’s semi-serious, semi-jocular reach for the passport (“papers please!”) in order to make apparent the ideological underpinnings of the biblio-polis anticipates, desperately, heart-wrenchingly, the fate of so many Europeans, himself included, who found themselves, stateless, niche-less, slot-less, without papers, literally “fatherless,” or “apatrides,” as they fled the Nazis in 1940. While the passport analogy might play differently now than it did in the today of Benjamin’s essay, it indicates that Benjamin’s neurotic re-shelving become “motley order” recovers is what, in “The Book to Come,” Derrida elaborates as the status of the book or biblion as backing, the material support or guarantee which, in purely physical terms permits portability, linearity, enables a manuscript or a person to travel into the hands of readers, find a slot or niche in the physical and ideological or semiotic world of its today, having passed muster at border control. For biblion we may also read person, the “book” now the backing of a particular way of configuring an identity, a mode of citizenship, belonging, and the privileges it affords.

As Derrida observes, “the Greek word biblion…has not always meant ‘book’ or even ‘work’,” instead biblion could designate a support for ‘writing’ (so derived from biblios, which in Greek names the internal bark of the papyrus and thus of paper, like the Latin word liber, which first designated the living part of the bark before it meant ‘book’). Biblion, then, would only mean ‘writing paper,’ and not book, nor oeuvre or opus, only the substance of a particular support—bark. But biblion can also, by metonymy, mean any writing support, tablets for instance or even letters: post (5-6).  The extension of biblion as book, then, represents the development of one particular metonymy, that equates the backing of writing, the underpinning of writing by a physical substance with the figure of the “book,” collating, if you like, writing and book, text and material support and linearizing the biblion as book. For Derrida, the “book to come” signals not something new, so much as something held in abeyance by the repetition and so adoption of one particular metonymy.  That repetition made a world.  Likewise, as Benjamin’s re-shelving discovers, other infra-worlds, other forms of writing, a whole “library of pathology,” for example, inhere within the order provided by the book.

As Derrida turns to the figure of the library—he is giving this lecture at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France—he arrives at the question of the slot or niche, the shelf, as it were, “already in Greek, bibliotheque means the slot for a book, book’s place of deposit, the place where books are put (poser), deposited, laid down (reposer), the entrepôt, where they are stored” (6). And such places of deposit constitute for Derrida a “setting down, laying down, depositing, storing, warehousing—this is also receiving, collecting together, gathering together, consigning (like baggage), binding together, collecting, totalizing, electing, and reading by binding” (7). “So the idea of gathering together, as much as that of the immobility of the statutory and even state deposit,” he writes, “seems as essential to the idea of the book as to that of the library.”  Within this question of gathering, depositing, and so of sorting by gathering, of generating the polis via or in relation to the biblio-polis, he arrives at the “question of the title.” “Can we imagine a book,” asks Derrida, “without a title?” “We can,” he answers, “but only up to the point when we will have to name it and thus also classify it, deposit it in an order, put it into a catalog, or a series, or a taxonomy.” He ends this thinking of the title with the contention that “it is difficult to imagine, or at any rate to deal with, with a book that is neither placed nor collected together under a title bearing its name, an identity, the condition of its legitimacy and of its copyright.” “Sure,” we may say, “yes it is”—for such books, which exist, and which are not properly speaking books at all, or not books quite yet, sit uneasily on their shelves, as Benjamin might tell him, until, of course, the day when those books without titles, such as the manuscript whose title Benjamin withholds from us, reveal their own encrypted infra-titles to us. And in such moments, we may, as did Benjamin, find ourselves, the slightly embarrassed recipients of s/h/elf-help.

In reality, the activity of reading has on the contrary all the characteristics of a silent production:  the drift across the page, the metamorphosis of the text effected by the wandering eyes of the reader the improvisation and expectation of meanings inferred from a few words leaps over written spaces in a n ephemeral dance.  But since he is incapable of stockpiling (unless he writes or records), the reader cannot protect himself against the erosion of time (while reading, he forgets himself and he forgets what he has read) unless he buys the object (book; image) which is no more than a substitute (the spoor or promise) of moments “lost” in reading. (xxi)

Henri Lefevre, “General Introduction” of The Practices of Everyday Life

Reflections on a Damaged Library

In the third part of the essay, not presented here, I turn to Theodor Adorno’s essay In “Bibliographical Musings.”   Adorno tells an anecdote in which he correlates a distinction between real and fake books with a distinction between damaged and undamaged books: damaged books are the real books, and fakery extends not to only reproductions of books but even to the presentation of new books as old.  Adorno’s concern with damaged books is rather with the conditions of book publication and how those conditions make books both more accessible and more resistant. Adorno speaks at the end of both of a singular type of books (older books) and of books in the plural, putting even more pressure on his personification of books by highlighting even more clearly the differences between the non “coterminus” (24) if analogous lives and deaths of books and the lives and deaths of writers and readers.  Books preserve and defend their value by becoming inhuman. Reading a book whose value you cannot determine without reading it effectively reduces reading to information processing.

You can imagine that current events are prompting me to seek naturalization most vigorously. As ever with such matters, one is suddenly faced with difficulties one had not reckoned with; at the moment they consist in acquiring a vast number of papers. All this is consuming a great deal of time.  . . .   even if it were simply to contribute a further dossier to the files to the Ministry of Justice.

Walter Benjamin, Letter to Theodor Adorno, Paris 27 March 1938, in Gretel Adorno and Walter Benjamin, Correspondence 1930-1940, Ed. Henri Lonitz and Christoph Goedde. Trans. Wieland Hobin (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2008), 212.

The Evidence of Disappearing Papers, or Paperworking:  The Textimonial Condition

The final section, not presented here, involves close “un-readings” of Derrida’s references to papers he uses as evidence but that he does not present in Demeure and “The Deaths of Roland Barthes” and also connect reshelving to addressing and corresponding in terms of Derrida’s not reading Walter Benjamin in “Fichus.”  In Derrida’s rendering, Benjamin becomes as a papered person.  But Derrida “reads” the letters, of the dreams and letters in letters, in relation to a dream of a book he won’t write and in which he encrypts or represses the echo of his own statement that he no longer has time to write the book with seven chapters but can only deliver as a TV guide to the chapters of the virtual books he won’t write and Benjamin’s last letter in French not addressed to Adorno but readdressed by the editor of the Correspondence in which Walter Benjamin says he no longer has time to write the letters he would have loved to write.   In “Fichus,” Derrida refuses to play either the librarian, to say that the text belongs here and is a property, a set of papers—the editor calls the letters papers and says they are part of the “Walter Benjamin Papers” in the Bibliothèque Nationale, or the editor, or the philologist for that matter.  He refuses to paper over Benjamin.  Derrida reads Benjamin’s letters as disseminated, as letters, but unaddressed or readdressed.  He doesn’t go as far with his non-reading non-writing of the book as he could in terms of reading the correspondence as a question of rendering Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno papered or paperless persons, the transformation of the letters into papers in order to be rendered readable (or unreadable in my terms) or even thematize them the way he does at the start (this will be about paperless persons). Derrida is reading the letter in the letter as his waking dream of writing and reading.

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[i] Endnote to self: What is a text? What is a version (of a text or a film)?  What is a title? What is an author? What is a document? What is a library? What is an archive? What is a camp? What is an office? What is a thing?  What is life?  What is death?  What is raw material? Raw data? Any attempt to answer these questions in physical / sociological / positive history / material terms will bring metaphysics through the back door—Krajewski, Paper Machines, for example “essential quality”; “the same”; “continuity.”  (See also, Speikert, Big Archive.  More Derridean friendly Vismann, Files, stronger; ditto for Hans-Joerg Rheinberger,  An Epistemology of the Concrete: Twentieth-Century Histories of Life.)  And it returns to literature.  (Kafka’s The Trial and Melville’s “Bartleby the Scrivener” in Files) Return to Heidegger’s intro to metaphysics as Being as the questioning of Being, Being as a question/ing (but thinking as a question as the right questions).  The question comes first (even though there is no “first”).   And from Heidegger’s ontology to Derrida’s hauntology.  And to law and literature.  Not dead end (aporia) but detour, fate (of the nation, of the text), destiny, disinterrance, tropes, noise, error, failure, essence of technology having nothing to do with the technological but related to the work of art and vice versa.  More questions about versions, about the relation between the impression and the subjectile, or material support; about papers and persons; about the textimonial condition; the imp-ression; the adhering of the Referent.  Photographic facsimiles and diplomatic facsimiles.  Texutal faux-rensics; dating, autobiography, fiction, etc. Postscript of Archive Fever. From Ronell’s Test Drive to the Text Drive.

[ii] For the youtube video, go to: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/06/13/how-a-us-passport-is-made_n_215287.html

[iii] See Paul de Man, “Hypogram and Inscription.”

[iv] See Jacques Derrida, Paper, or Me” Paper Machine

[v] This loss of the mss in order to make it possible to find it later in published form would, in any case, only be a temporary solution since Benjamin sees the collector as an endangered species: “But one thing should be noted: the phenomenon of collecting loses its meaning when it loses its subject. Even though public collections may be less objectionable socially and more useful academically than private collections, the objects get their due only in the latter. I do know that night is coming for the type that I am discussing here and have been representing before you a bit ex officio.  But, as Hegel put it, only when it is dark does the owl of Minerva begin its flight.  Only in extinction is the collector comprehended.”  In “Unpacking my Library.”  Thomas Bernhard, Extinction. Thomas Bernhard, Correciton.