Nicholas Thoburn: Anti-Book: On the Art and Politics of Radical Publishing (2014–) [EN, SC]

“No, Anti-Book is not a book about books. Not exactly. And yet it is a must for anyone interested in the future of the book. Presenting what he terms “a communism of textual matter,” Nicholas Thoburn explores the encounter between political thought and experimental writing and publishing, shifting the politics of text from an exclusive concern with content and meaning to the media forms and social relations by which text is produced and consumed. Taking a “post-digital” approach in considering a wide array of textual media forms, Thoburn invites us to challenge the commodity form of books—to stop imagining books as transcendent intellectual, moral, and aesthetic goods unsullied by commerce. His critique is, instead, one immersed in the many materialities of text.

Anti-Book engages with an array of writing and publishing projects, including Antonin Artaud’s paper gris-gris, Valerie Solanas’s SCUM Manifesto, Guy Debord’s sandpaper-bound Mémoires, the collective novelist Wu Ming, and the digital/print hybrid of Mute magazine. Empirically grounded, it is also a major achievement in expressing a political philosophy of writing and publishing, where the materiality of text is interlaced with conceptual production. Each chapter investigates a different form of textual media in concert with a particular concept: the small-press pamphlet as “communist object,” the magazine as “diagrammatic publishing,” political books in the modes of “root” and “rhizome,” the “multiple single” of anonymous authorship, and myth as “unidentified narrative object.””

Publisher University of Minnesota Press, 2016
Cultural Critique Books series
ISBN 9780816621965, 0816621969
xvi+372 pages

Interview with author: Ron Hanson (White Fungus, 2020).
Reviews: Filipe Carreira da Silva (Contemporary Political Theory, 2017), Anthony Iles (Mute, 2018), Samuel A. Moore (Cultural Studies, 2018), Ola Ståhl (Parallax, 2018), Nick Thurston (Comparative Critical Studies, 2019), Martin Paul Eve (American Literature, 2019), Terrine M. Friday (Canadian Journal of Communication, 2019), Simone Murray (Left History, 2019).

Publisher (EN)
Publisher (SC)
WorldCat (EN)

Anti-knjiga: Materijalni tekst i političko izdavaštvo (Serbo-Croatian, 2014, 1 MB, added on 2017-5-2)
Anti-Book: On the Art and Politics of Radical Publishing (English, 2016, HTML; PDF, updated on 2019-7-2)

Armand Mattelart, Seth Siegelaub (eds.): Communication and Class Struggle, 2: Liberation, Socialism (1983)

“Communication and Class Struggle, a two-volume work, is the first general marxist anthology of writings on communication, information and culture. Its purpose is to analyse the relationship between the practice and theory of communication and their development with the context of class struggle. Armand Mattelart and Seth Siegelaub, the editors, have selected more 128 essential marxist and progressive texts originating in over 50 countries and written since the mid-nineteenth century to explain three interrelated phenomena: (1) how basic social, economic and cultural processes condition communication; (2) how bourgeois communication practice and theory have developed as part of the capitalistic mode of production; and (3) how in the struggle against exploitation and oppression, the popular and working classes have developed their own communication practice and theory, liberated mode of communication, culture and daily life.

The second volume provides an analysis of the development of popular and working-class communication and culture, its theory and practice under different political-social and historical conditions, and its contemporary expression. The book contains 64 texts. 38 are published for the first time in English, and some texts appear for the first time in any language. In addition, it includes a 650-entry bibliography.” (from the back cover)

Publisher International General, New York, and International Mass Media Research Center (IMMRC), Bagnolet, 1983
ISBN 0884770192, 9780884770190
438 pages

Review: Dallas W. Smythe (Journal of Communication 1985, p 218ff).

Publisher
WorldCat

PDF (40 MB, updated to OCR’d version on 2017-10-30 via Memory of the World)
See also Volume 1.

Masha Gessen: The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin (2012)

Handpicked in 1999 by the ‘Family’ surrounding an ailing and increasingly unpopular Boris Yeltsin, Vladimir Putin, with very little governmental or administrative experience beyond having served as deputy mayor of St Petersburg, seemed like the perfect choice in the eyes of an oligarchy bent on moulding the president’s successor to its own designs. Suddenly the boy who had scrapped his way through post-war Leningrad schoolyards, dreaming of ruling the world, was a public figure, and his popularity soared. Russia and an infatuated West were determined to see the progressive leader of their dreams, even as with ruthless efficiency Putin dismantled the country’s media, wrested control and wealth from the country’s burgeoning business class, and decimated the fragile mechanisms of democracy. Within a few brief years, virtually every obstacle to his unbridled control was removed and every opposing voice silenced, with political rivals and critics driven into exile or to the grave. As a journalist living in Moscow, Masha Gessen experienced this history firsthand, and for The Man Without a Face she has drawn on information and sources no other writer has tapped. Her horrifying and spellbinding account of how this ‘faceless’ man manoeuvred his way into absolute – and absolutely corrupt – power will stand as a classic of narrative non-fiction.

Publisher Riverhead Books, 2012
EISBN 9781101560600

Video interview with the author (52 min, Sydney Writers Festival, May 2012)
Review (Luke Harding, The Guardian, 2012)
Review (Anne Applebaum, The New York Review of Books, 2012)
Review (John Ehrman, Studies in Intelligence, 2014)

Publisher

MOBI, (2)