Adema
The Ethics of Emergent Creativity: Can We Move Beyond Writing as Human Enterprise, Commodity and Innovation?
2019


# 3\. The Ethics of Emergent Creativity: Can We Move Beyond Writing as Human
Enterprise, Commodity and Innovation?

Janneke Adema

© 2019 Janneke Adema, CC BY 4.0
[https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0159.03](https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0159.03)

In 2013, the Authors’ Licensing & Collecting Society
(ALCS)[1](ch3.xhtml#footnote-152) commissioned a survey of its members to
explore writers’ earnings and contractual issues in the UK. The survey, the
results of which were published in the summary booklet ‘What Are Words Worth
Now?’, was carried out by Queen Mary, University of London. Almost 2,500
writers — from literary authors to academics and screenwriters — responded.
‘What Are Words Worth Now?’ summarises the findings of a larger study titled
‘The Business Of Being An Author: A Survey Of Authors’ Earnings And
Contracts’, carried out by Johanna Gibson, Phillip Johnson and Gaetano Dimita
and published in April 2015 by Queen Mary University of
London.[2](ch3.xhtml#footnote-151) The ALCS press release that accompanies the
study states that this ‘shocking’ new research into authors’ earnings finds a
‘dramatic fall, both in incomes, and the number of those working full-time as
writers’.[3](ch3.xhtml#footnote-150) Indeed, two of the main findings of the
study are that, first of all, the income of a professional author (which the
research defines as those who dedicate the majority of their time to writing)
has dropped 29% between 2005 and 2013, from £12,330 (£15,450 in real terms) to
just £11,000. Furthermore, the research found that in 2005 40% of professional
authors earned their incomes solely from writing, where in 2013 this figure
had dropped to just 11.5%.[4](ch3.xhtml#footnote-149)

It seems that one of the primary reasons for the ALCS to conduct this survey
was to collect ‘accurate, independent data’ on writers’ earnings and
contractual issues, in order for the ALCS to ‘make the case for authors’
rights’ — at least, that is what the ALCS Chief Executive Owen Atkinson writes
in the introduction accompanying the survey, which was sent out to all ALCS
members.[5](ch3.xhtml#footnote-148) Yet although this research was conducted
independently and the researchers did not draw conclusions based on the data
collected — in the form of policy recommendations for example — the ALCS did
frame the data and findings in a very specific way, as I will outline in what
follows; this framing includes both the introduction to the survey and the
press release that accompanies the survey’s findings. Yet to some extent this
framing, as I will argue, is already apparent in the methodology used to
produce the data underlying the research report.

First of all, let me provide an example of how the research findings have been
framed in a specific way. Chief Executive Atkinson mentions in his
introduction to the survey that the ALCS ‘exists to ensure that writers are
treated fairly and remunerated appropriately’. He continues that the ALCS
commissioned the survey to collect ‘accurate, independent data,’ in order to
‘make the case for writers’ rights’.[6](ch3.xhtml#footnote-147) Now this focus
on rights in combination with remuneration is all the more noteworthy if we
look at an earlier ALCS funded report from 2007, ‘Authors’ Earnings from
Copyright and Non-Copyright Sources: a Survey of 25,000 British and German
Writers’. This report is based on the findings of a 2006 writers’ survey,
which the 2013 survey updates. The 2007 report argues conclusively that
current copyright law has empirically failed to ensure that authors receive
appropriate reward or remuneration for the use of their
work.[7](ch3.xhtml#footnote-146) The data from the subsequent 2013 survey show
an even bleaker picture as regards the earnings of writers. Yet Atkinson
argues in the press release accompanying the findings of the 2013 survey that
‘if writers are to continue making their irreplaceable contribution to the UK
economy, they need to be paid fairly for their work. This means ensuring
clear, fair contracts with equitable terms and a copyright regime that support
creators and their ability to earn a living from their
creations’.[8](ch3.xhtml#footnote-145) Atkinson does not outline what this
copyright regime should be, nor does he draw attention to how this model could
be improved. More importantly, the fact that a copyright model is needed to
ensure fair pay stands uncontested for Atkinson and the ALCS — not surprising
perhaps, as protecting and promoting the rights of authors is the primary
mission of this member society. If there is any culprit to be held responsible
for the study’s ‘shocking’ findings, it is the elusive and further undefined
notion of ‘the digital’. According to Atkinson, digital technology is
increasingly challenging the mission of the ALCS to ensure fair remuneration
for writers, since it is ‘driving new markets and leading the copyright
debate’.[9](ch3.xhtml#footnote-144) The 2013 study is therefore, as Atkinson
states ‘the first to capture the impact of the digital revolution on writers’
working lives’.[10](ch3.xhtml#footnote-143) This statement is all the more
striking if we take into consideration that none of the questions in the 2013
survey focus specifically on digital publishing.[11](ch3.xhtml#footnote-142)
It therefore seems that — despite earlier findings — the ALCS has already
decided in advance what ‘the digital’ is and that a copyright regime is the
only way to ensure fair remuneration for writers in a digital context.

## Creative Industries

This strong uncontested link between copyright and remuneration can be traced
back to various other aspects of the 2015 report and its release. For example,
the press release draws a strong connection between the findings of the report
and the development of the creative industries in the UK. Again, Atkinson
states in the press release:

These are concerning times for writers. This rapid decline in both author
incomes and in the numbers of those writing full-time could have serious
implications for the economic success of the creative industries in the
UK.[12](ch3.xhtml#footnote-141)

This connection to the creative industries — ‘which are now worth £71.4
billion per year to the UK economy’,[13](ch3.xhtml#footnote-140) Atkinson
points out — is not surprising where the discourse around creative industries
maintains a clear bond between intellectual property rights and creative
labour. As Geert Lovink and Ned Rossiter state in their MyCreativity Reader,
the creative industries consist of ‘the generation and exploitation of
intellectual property’.[14](ch3.xhtml#footnote-139) Here they refer to a
definition created as part of the UK Government’s Creative Industries Mapping
Document,[15](ch3.xhtml#footnote-138) which states that the creative
industries are ‘those industries which have their origin in individual
creativity, skill and talent and which have a potential for wealth and job
creation through the generation and exploitation of intellectual property’.
Lovink and Rossiter point out that the relationship between IP and creative
labour lies at the basis of the definition of the creative industries where,
as they argue, this model of creativity assumes people only create to produce
economic value. This is part of a larger trend Wendy Brown has described as
being quintessentially neoliberal, where ‘neoliberal rationality disseminates
the model of the market to all domains and activities’ — and this includes the
realm of politics and rights.[16](ch3.xhtml#footnote-137) In this sense the
economization of culture and the concept of creativity is something that has
become increasingly embedded and naturalised. The exploitation of intellectual
property stands at the basis of the creative industries model, in which
cultural value — which can be seen as intricate, complex and manifold —
becomes subordinated to the model of the market; it becomes economic
value.[17](ch3.xhtml#footnote-136)

This direct association of cultural value and creativity with economic value
is apparent in various other facets of the ALCS commissioned research and
report. Obviously, the title of the initial summary booklet, as a form of
wordplay, asks ‘What are words worth?’. It becomes clear from the context of
the survey that the ‘worth’ of words will only be measured in a monetary
sense, i.e. as economic value. Perhaps even more important to understand in
this context, however, is how this economic worth of words is measured and
determined by focusing on two fixed and predetermined entities in advance.
First of all, the study focuses on individual human agents of creativity (i.e.
creators contributing economic value): the value of writing is established by
collecting data and making measurements at the level of individual authorship,
addressing authors/writers as singular individuals throughout the survey.
Secondly, economic worth is further determined by focusing on the fixed and
stable creative objects authors produce, in other words the study establishes
from the outset a clear link between the worth and value of writing and
economic remuneration based on individual works of
writing.[18](ch3.xhtml#footnote-135) Therefore in this process of determining
the economic worth of words, ‘writers’ and/or ‘authors’ are described and
positioned in a certain way in this study (i.e. as the central agents and
originators of creative objects), as is the form their creativity takes in the
shape of quantifiable outputs or commodities. The value of both these units of
measurement (the creator and the creative objects) are then set off against
the growth of the creative industries in the press release.

The ALCS commissioned survey provides some important insights into how
authorship, cultural works and remuneration — and ultimately, creativity — is
currently valued, specifically in the context of the creative industries
discourse in the UK. What I have tried to point out — without wanting to
downplay the importance either of writers receiving fair remuneration for
their work or of issues related to the sustainability of creative processes —
is that the findings from this survey have both been extracted and
subsequently framed based on a very specific economic model of creativity (and
authorship). According to this model, writing and creativity are sustained
most clearly by an individual original creator (an author) who extracts value
from the work s/he creates and distributes, aided by an intellectual property
rights regime. As I will outline more in depth in what follows, the enduring
liberal and humanist presumptions that underlie this survey continuously
reinforce the links between the value of writing and established IP and
remuneration regimes, and support a vision in which authorship and creativity
are dependent on economic incentives and ownership of works. By working within
this framework and with these predetermined concepts of authorship and
creativity (and ‘the digital’) the ALCS is strongly committed to the upkeep of
a specific model and discourse of creativity connected to the creative
industries. The ALCS does not attempt to complicate this model, nor does it
search for alternatives even when, as the 2007 report already implies, the
existing IP model has empirically failed to support the remuneration of
writers appropriately.

I want to use this ALCS survey as a reference point to start problematising
existing constructions of creativity, authorship, ownership, and
sustainability in relation to the ethics of publishing. To explore what ‘words
are worth’ and to challenge the hegemonic liberal humanist model of creativity
— to which the ALCS adheres — I will examine a selection of theoretical and
practical publishing and writing alternatives, from relational and posthuman
authorship to radical open access and uncreative writing. These alternatives
do not deny the importance of fair remuneration and sustainability for the
creative process; however, they want to foreground and explore creative
relationalities that move beyond the individual author and her ownership of
creative objects as the only model to support creativity and cultural
exchange. By looking at alternatives while at the same time complicating the
values and assumptions underlying the dominant narrative for IP expansion, I
want to start imagining what more ethical, fair and emergent forms of
creativity might entail. Forms that take into consideration the various
distributed and entangled agencies involved in the creation of cultural
content — which are presently not being included in the ALCS survey on fair
remuneration, for example. As I will argue, a reconsideration of the liberal
and humanist model of creativity might actually create new possibilities to
consider the value of words, and with that perhaps new solutions to the
problems pointed out in the ALCS study.

## Relational and Distributed Authorship

One of the main critiques of the liberal humanist model of authorship concerns
how it privileges the author as the sole source and origin of creativity. Yet
the argument has been made, both from a historical perspective and in relation
to today’s networked digital environment, that authorship and creativity, and
with that the value and worth of that creativity, are heavily
distributed.[19](ch3.xhtml#footnote-134) Should we therefore think about how
we can distribute notions of authorship and creativity more ethically when
defining the worth and value of words too? Would this perhaps mean a more
thorough investigation of what and who the specific agencies involved in
creative production are? This seems all the more important given that, today,
‘the value of words’ is arguably connected not to (distributed) authors or
creative agencies, but to rights holders (or their intermediaries such as
agents).[20](ch3.xhtml#footnote-133) From this perspective, the problem with
the copyright model as it currently functions is that the creators of
copyright don’t necessarily end up benefiting from it — a point that was also
implied by the authors of the 2007 ALCS commissioned report. Copyright
benefits rights holders, and rights holders are not necessarily, and often not
at all, involved in the production of creative work.

Yet copyright and the work as object are knit tightly to the authorship
construct. In this respect, the above criticism notwithstanding, in a liberal
vision of creativity and ownership the typical unit remains either the author
or the work. This ‘solid and fundamental unit of the author and the work’ as
Foucault has qualified it, albeit challenged, still retains a privileged
position.[21](ch3.xhtml#footnote-132) As Mark Rose argues, authorship — as a
relatively recent cultural formation — can be directly connected to the
commodification of writing and to proprietorship. Even more it developed in
tandem with the societal principle of possessive individualism, in which
individual property rights are protected by the social
order.[22](ch3.xhtml#footnote-131)

Some of the more interesting recent critiques of these constructs of
authorship and proprietorship have come from critical and feminist legal
studies, where scholars such as Carys Craig have started to question these
connections further. As Craig, Turcotte and Coombe argue, IP and copyright are
premised on liberal and neoliberal assumptions and constructs, such as
ownership, private rights, self-interest and
individualism.[23](ch3.xhtml#footnote-130) In this sense copyright,
authorship, the work as object, and related discourses around creativity
continuously re-establish and strengthen each other as part of a self-
sustaining system. We have seen this with the discourse around creative
industries, as part of which economic value comes to stand in for the creative
process itself, which, according to this narrative, can only be sustained
through an IP regime. Furthermore, from a feminist new materialist position,
the current discourse on creativity is very much a material expression of
creativity rather than merely its representation, where this discourse has
been classifying, constructing, and situating creativity (and with that,
authorship) within a neoliberal framework of creative industries.

Moving away from an individual construct of creativity therefore immediately
affects the question of the value of words. In our current copyright model
emphasis lies on the individual original author, but in a more distributed
vision the value of words and of creative production can be connected to a
broader context of creative agencies. Historically there has been a great
discursive shift from a valuing of imitation or derivation to a valuing of
originality in determining what counts as creativity or creative output.
Similar to Rose, Craig, Turcotte and Coombe argue that the individuality and
originality of authorship in its modern form established a simple route
towards individual ownership and the propertisation of creative achievement:
the original work is the author’s ownership whereas the imitator or pirate is
a trespasser of thief. In this sense original authorship is
‘disproportionately valued against other forms of cultural expression and
creative play’, where copyright upholds, maintains and strengthens the binary
between imitator and creator — defined by Craig, Turcotte and Coombe as a
‘moral divide’.[24](ch3.xhtml#footnote-129) This also presupposes a notion of
creativity that sees individuals as autonomous, living in isolation from each
other, ignoring their relationality. Yet as Craig, Turcotte and Coombe argue,
‘the act of writing involves not origination, but rather the adaptation,
derivation, translation and recombination of “raw material” taken from
previously existing texts’.[25](ch3.xhtml#footnote-128) This position has also
been explored extensively from within remix studies and fan culture, where the
adaptation and remixing of cultural content stands at the basis of creativity
(what Lawrence Lessig has called Read/Write culture, opposed to Read/Only
culture).[26](ch3.xhtml#footnote-127) From the perspective of access to
culture — instead of ownership of cultural goods or objects — one could also
argue that its value would increase when we are able to freely distribute it
and with that to adapt and remix it to create new cultural content and with
that cultural and social value — this within a context in which, as Craig,
Turcotte and Coombe point out, ‘the continuous expansion of intellectual
property rights has produced legal regimes that restrict access and downstream
use of information resources far beyond what is required to encourage their
creation’[27](ch3.xhtml#footnote-126)

To move beyond Enlightenment ideals of individuation, detachment and unity of
author and work, which determine the author-owner in the copyright model,
Craig puts forward a post-structuralist vision of relational authorship. This
sees the individual as socially situated and constituted — based also on
feminist scholarship into the socially situated self — where authorship in
this vision is situated within the communities in which it exists, but also in
relation to the texts and discourses that constitute it. Here creativity takes
place from within a network of social relations and the social dimensions of
authorship are recognised, as connectivity goes hand in hand with individual
autonomy. Craig argues that copyright should not be defined out of clashing
rights and interests but should instead focus on the kinds of relationships
this right would structure; it should be understood in relational terms: ‘it
structures relationships between authors and users, allocating powers and
responsibilities amongst members of cultural communities, and establishing the
rules of communication and exchange’.[28](ch3.xhtml#footnote-125) Cultural
value is then defined within these relationships.

## Open Access and the Ethics of Care

Craig, Turcotte and Coombe draw a clear connection between relational
authorship, feminism and (the ideals of) the open access movement, where as
they state, ‘rather than adhering to the individuated form of authorship that
intellectual property laws presuppose, open access initiatives take into
account varying forms of collaboration, creativity and
development’.[29](ch3.xhtml#footnote-124) Yet as I and others have argued
elsewhere,[30](ch3.xhtml#footnote-123) open access or open access publishing
is not a solid ideological block or model; it is made up of disparate groups,
visions and ethics. In this sense there is nothing intrinsically political or
democratic about open access, practitioners of open access can just as well be
seen to support and encourage open access in connection with the neoliberal
knowledge economy, with possessive individualism — even with CC licenses,
which can be seen as strengthening individualism —[31](ch3.xhtml#footnote-122)
and with the unity of author and work.[32](ch3.xhtml#footnote-121)

Nevertheless, there are those within the loosely defined and connected
‘radical open access community’, that do envision their publishing outlook and
relationship towards copyright, openness and authorship within and as part of
a relational ethics of care.[33](ch3.xhtml#footnote-120) For example Mattering
Press, a scholar-led open access book publishing initiative founded in 2012
and launched in 2016, publishes in the field of Science and Technology Studies
(STS) and works with a production model based on cooperation and shared
scholarship. As part of its publishing politics, ethos and ideology, Mattering
Press is therefore keen to include various agencies involved in the production
of scholarship, including ‘authors, reviewers, editors, copy editors, proof
readers, typesetters, distributers, designers, web developers and
readers’.[34](ch3.xhtml#footnote-119) They work with two interrelated feminist
(new materialist) and STS concepts to structure and perform this ethos:
mattering[35](ch3.xhtml#footnote-118) and care.[36](ch3.xhtml#footnote-117)
Where it concerns mattering, Mattering Press is conscious of how their
experiment in knowledge production, being inherently situated, puts new
relationships and configurations into the world. What therefore matters for
them are not so much the ‘author’ or the ‘outcome’ (the object), but the
process and the relationships that make up publishing:

[…] the way academic texts are produced matters — both analytically and
politically. Dominant publishing practices work with assumptions about the
conditions of academic knowledge production that rarely reflect what goes on
in laboratories, field sites, university offices, libraries, and various
workshops and conferences. They tend to deal with almost complete manuscripts
and a small number of authors, who are greatly dependent on the politics of
the publishing industry.[37](ch3.xhtml#footnote-116)

For Mattering Press care is something that extends not only to authors but to
the many other actants involved in knowledge production, who often provide
free volunteer labour within a gift economy context. As Mattering Press
emphasises, the ethics of care ‘mark vital relations and practices whose value
cannot be calculated and thus often goes unacknowledged where logics of
calculation are dominant’.[38](ch3.xhtml#footnote-115) For Mattering Press,
care can help offset and engage with the calculative logic that permeates
academic publishing:

[…] the concept of care can help to engage with calculative logics, such as
those of costs, without granting them dominance. How do we calculate so that
calculations do not dominate our considerations? What would it be to care for
rather than to calculate the cost of a book? This is but one and arguably a
relatively conservative strategy for allowing other logics than those of
calculation to take centre stage in publishing.[39](ch3.xhtml#footnote-114)

This logic of care refers, in part, to making visible the ‘unseen others’ as
Joe Deville (one of Mattering Press’s editors) calls them, who exemplify the
plethora of hidden labour that goes unnoticed within this object and author-
focused (academic) publishing model. As Endre Danyi, another Mattering Press
editor, remarks, quoting Susan Leigh Star: ‘This is, in the end, a profoundly
political process, since so many forms of social control rely on the erasure
or silencing of various workers, on deleting their work from representations
of the work’.[40](ch3.xhtml#footnote-113)

## Posthuman Authorship

Authorship is also being reconsidered as a polyvocal and collaborative
endeavour by reflecting on the agentic role of technology in authoring
content. Within digital literature, hypertext and computer-generated poetry,
media studies scholars have explored the role played by technology and the
materiality of text in the creation process, where in many ways writing can be
seen as a shared act between reader, writer and computer. Lori Emerson
emphasises that machines, media or technology are not neutral in this respect,
which complicates the idea of human subjectivity. Emerson explores this
through the notion of ‘cyborg authorship’, which examines the relation between
machine and human with a focus on the potentiality of in-
betweenness.[41](ch3.xhtml#footnote-112) Dani Spinosa talks about
‘collaboration with an external force (the computer, MacProse, technology in
general)’.[42](ch3.xhtml#footnote-111) Extending from the author, the text
itself, and the reader as meaning-writer (and hence playing a part in the
author function), technology, she states, is a fourth term in this
collaborative meaning-making. As Spinosa argues, in computer-generated texts
the computer is more than a technological tool and becomes a co-producer,
where it can occur that ‘the poet herself merges with the machine in order to
place her own subjectivity in flux’.[43](ch3.xhtml#footnote-110) Emerson calls
this a ‘break from the model of the poet/writer as divinely inspired human
exemplar’, which is exemplified for her in hypertext, computer-generated
poetry, and digital poetry.[44](ch3.xhtml#footnote-109)

Yet in many ways, as Emerson and Spinosa also note, these forms of posthuman
authorship should be seen as part of a larger trend, what Rolf Hughes calls an
‘anti-authorship’ tradition focused on auto-poesis (self-making), generative
systems and automatic writing. As Hughes argues, we see this tradition in
print forms such as Oulipo and in Dada experiments and surrealist games
too.[45](ch3.xhtml#footnote-108) But there are connections here with broader
theories that focus on distributed agency too, especially where it concerns
the influence of the materiality of the text. Media theorists such as N.
Katherine Hayles and Johanna Drucker have extensively argued that the
materiality of the page is entangled with the intentionality of the author as
a further agency; Drucker conceptualises this through a focus on ‘conditional
texts’ and ‘performative materiality’ with respect to the agency of the
material medium (be it the printed page or the digital
screen).[46](ch3.xhtml#footnote-107)

Where, however, does the redistribution of value creation end in these
narratives? As Nick Montfort states with respect to the agency of technology,
‘should other important and inspirational mechanisms — my CD player, for
instance, and my bookshelves — get cut in on the action as
well?’[47](ch3.xhtml#footnote-106) These distributed forms of authorship do
not solve issues related to authorship or remuneration but further complicate
them. Nevertheless Montfort is interested in describing the processes involved
in these types of (posthuman) co-authorship, to explore the (previously
unexplored) relationships and processes involved in the authoring of texts
more clearly. As he states, this ‘can help us understand the role of the
different participants more fully’.[48](ch3.xhtml#footnote-105) In this
respect a focus on posthuman authorship and on the various distributed
agencies that play a part in creative processes is not only a means to disrupt
the hegemonic focus on a romantic single and original authorship model, but it
is also about a sensibility to (machinic) co-authorship, to the different
agencies involved in the creation of art, and playing a role in creativity
itself. As Emerson remarks in this respect: ‘we must be wary of granting a
(romantic) specialness to human intentionality — after all, the point of
dividing the responsibility for the creation of the poems between human and
machine is to disrupt the singularity of human identity, to force human
identity to intermingle with machine identity’.[49](ch3.xhtml#footnote-104)

## Emergent Creativity

This more relational notion of rights and the wider appreciation of the
various (posthuman) agencies involved in creative processes based on an ethics
of care, challenges the vision of the single individualised and original
author/owner who stands at the basis of our copyright and IP regime — a vision
that, it is worth emphasising, can be seen as a historical (and Western)
anomaly, where collaborative, anonymous, and more polyvocal models of
authorship have historically prevailed.[50](ch3.xhtml#footnote-103) The other
side of the Foucauldian double bind, i.e. the fixed cultural object that
functions as a commodity, has however been similarly critiqued from several
angles. As stated before, and as also apparent from the way the ALCS report
has been framed, currently our copyright and remuneration regime is based on
ownership of cultural objects. Yet as many have already made clear, this
regime and discourse is very much based on physical objects and on a print-
based context.[51](ch3.xhtml#footnote-102) As such the idea of ‘text’ (be it
print or digital) has not been sufficiently problematised as versioned,
processual and materially changing within an IP context. In other words, text
and works are mostly perceived as fixed and stable objects and commodities
instead of material and creative processes and entangled relationalities. As
Craig et al. state, ‘the copyright system is unfortunately employed to
reinforce the norms of the analog world’.[52](ch3.xhtml#footnote-101) In
contrast to a more relational perspective, the current copyright regime views
culture through a proprietary lens. And it is very much this discursive
positioning, or as Craig et al. argue ‘the language of “ownership,”
“property,” and “commodity”’, which ‘obfuscates the nature of copyright’s
subject matter, and cloaks the social and cultural conditions of its
production and the implications of its
protection’.[53](ch3.xhtml#footnote-100) How can we approach creativity in
context, as socially and culturally situated, and not as the free-standing,
stable product of a transcendent author, which is very much how it is being
positioned within an economic and copyright framework? This hegemonic
conception of creativity as property fails to acknowledge or take into
consideration the manifold, distributed, derivative and messy realities of
culture and creativity.

It is therefore important to put forward and promote another more emergent
vision of creativity, where creativity is seen as both processual and only
ever temporarily fixed, and where the work itself is seen as being the product
of a variety of (posthuman) agencies. Interestingly, someone who has written
very elaborately about a different form of creativity relevant to this context
is one of the authors of the ALCS commissioned report, Johanna Gibson. Similar
to Craig, who focuses on the relationality of copyright, Gibson wants to pay
more attention to the networking of creativity, moving it beyond a focus on
traditional models of producers and consumers in exchange for a ‘many-to-many’
model of creativity. For Gibson, IP as a system aligns with a corporate model
of creativity, one which oversimplifies what it means to be creative and
measures it against economic parameters alone.[54](ch3.xhtml#footnote-099) In
many ways in policy driven visions, IP has come to stand in for the creative
process itself, Gibson argues, and is assimilated within corporate models of
innovation. It has thus become a synonym for creativity, as we have seen in
the creative industries discourse. As Gibson explains, this simplified model
of creativity is very much a ‘discursive strategy’ in which the creator is
mythologised and output comes in the form of commodified
objects.[55](ch3.xhtml#footnote-098) In this sense we need to re-appropriate
creativity as an inherently fluid and uncertain concept and practice.

Yet this mimicry of creativity by IP and innovation at the same time means
that any re-appropriation of creativity from the stance of access and reuse is
targeted as anti-IP and thus as standing outside of formal creativity. Other,
more emergent forms of creativity have trouble existing within this self-
defining and sustaining hegemonic system. This is similar to what Craig
remarked with respect to remixed, counterfeit and pirated, and un-original
works, which are seen as standing outside the system. Gibson uses actor
network theory (ANT) as a framework to construct her network-based model of
creativity, where for her ANT allows for a vision that does not fix creativity
within a product, but focuses more on the material relationships and
interactions between users and producers. In this sense, she argues, a network
model allows for plural agencies to be attributed to creativity, including
those of users.[56](ch3.xhtml#footnote-097)

An interesting example of how the hegemonic object-based discourse of
creativity can be re-appropriated comes from the conceptual poet Kenneth
Goldsmith, who, in what could be seen as a direct response to this dominant
narrative, tries to emphasise that exactly what this discourse classifies as
‘uncreative’, should be seen as valuable in itself. Goldsmith points out that
appropriating is creative and that he uses it as a pedagogical method in his
classes on ‘Uncreative Writing’ (which he defines as ‘the art of managing
information and representing it as writing’[57](ch3.xhtml#footnote-096)). Here
‘uncreative writing’ is something to strive for and stealing, copying, and
patchwriting are elevated as important and valuable tools for writing. For
Goldsmith the digital environment has fostered new skills and notions of
writing beyond the print-based concepts of originality and authorship: next to
copying, editing, reusing and remixing texts, the management and manipulation
of information becomes an essential aspect of
creativity.[58](ch3.xhtml#footnote-095) Uncreative writing involves a
repurposing and appropriation of existing texts and works, which then become
materials or building blocks for further works. In this sense Goldsmith
critiques the idea of texts or works as being fixed when asking, ‘if artefacts
are always in flux, when is a historical work determined to be
“finished”?’[59](ch3.xhtml#footnote-094) At the same time, he argues, our
identities are also in flux and ever shifting, turning creative writing into a
post-identity literature.[60](ch3.xhtml#footnote-093) Machines play important
roles in uncreative writing, as active agents in the ‘managing of
information’, which is then again represented as writing, and is seen by
Goldsmith as a bridge between human-centred writing and full-blown
‘robopoetics’ (literature written by machines, for machines). Yet Goldsmith is
keen to emphasise that these forms of uncreative writing are not beholden to
the digital medium, and that pre-digital examples are plentiful in conceptual
literature and poetry. He points out — again by a discursive re-appropriation
of what creativity is or can be — that sampling, remixing and appropriation
have been the norm in other artistic and creative media for decades. The
literary world is lagging behind in this respect, where, despite the
experiments by modernist writers, it continues neatly to delineate avant-garde
from more general forms of writing. Yet as Goldsmith argues the digital has
started to disrupt this distinction again, moving beyond ‘analogue’ notions of
writing, and has fuelled with it the idea that there might be alternative
notions of writing: those currently perceived as
uncreative.[61](ch3.xhtml#footnote-092)

## Conclusion

There are two addendums to the argument I have outlined above that I would
like to include here. First of all, I would like to complicate and further
critique some of the preconceptions still inherent in the relational and
networked copyright models as put forward by Craig et al. and Gibson. Both are
in many ways reformist and ‘responsive’ models. Gibson, for example, does not
want to do away with IP rights, she wants them to develop and adapt to mirror
society more accurately according to a networked model of creativity. For her,
the law is out of tune with its public, and she wants to promote a more
inclusive networked (copy) rights model.[62](ch3.xhtml#footnote-091) For Craig
too, relationalities are established and structured by rights first and
foremost. Yet from a posthuman perspective we need to be conscious of how the
other actants involved in creativity would fall outside such a humanist and
subjective rights model.[63](ch3.xhtml#footnote-090) From texts and
technologies themselves to the wider environmental context and to other
nonhuman entities and objects: in what sense will a copyright model be able to
extend such a network beyond an individualised liberal humanist human subject?
What do these models exclude in this respect and in what sense are they still
limited by their adherence to a rights model that continues to rely on
humanist nodes in a networked or relational model? As Anna Munster has argued
in a talk about the case of the monkey selfie, copyright is based on a logic
of exclusion that does not line up with the assemblages of agentic processes
that make up creativity and creative expression.[64](ch3.xhtml#footnote-089)
How can we appreciate the relational and processual aspects of identity, which
both Craig and Gibson seem to want to promote, if we hold on to an inherently
humanist concept of subjectification, rights and creativity?

Secondly, I want to highlight that we need to remain cautious of a movement
away from copyright and the copyright industries, to a context of free culture
in which free content — and the often free labour it is based upon — ends up
servicing the content industries (i.e. Facebook, Google, Amazon). We must be
wary when access or the narrative around (open) access becomes dominated by
access to or for big business, benefitting the creative industries and the
knowledge economy. The danger of updating and adapting IP law to fit a
changing digital context and to new technologies, of making it more inclusive
in this sense — which is something both Craig and Gibson want to do as part of
their reformative models — is that this tends to be based on a very simplified
and deterministic vision of technology, as something requiring access and an
open market to foster innovation. As Sarah Kember argues, this technocratic
rationale, which is what unites pro-and anti-copyright activists in this
sense, essentially de-politicises the debate around IP; it is still a question
of determining the value of creativity through an economic perspective, based
on a calculative lobby.[65](ch3.xhtml#footnote-088) The challenge here is to
redefine the discourse in such a way that our focus moves away from a dominant
market vision, and — as Gibson and Craig have also tried to do — to emphasise
a non-calculative ethics of relations, processes and care instead.

I would like to return at this point to the ALCS report and the way its
results have been framed within a creative industries discourse.
Notwithstanding the fact that fair remuneration and incentives for literary
production and creativity in general are of the utmost importance, what I have
tried to argue here is that the ‘solution’ proposed by the ALCS does not do
justice to the complexities of creativity. When discussing remuneration of
authors, the ALCS seems to prefer a simple solution in which copyright is seen
as a given, the digital is pointed out as a generalised scapegoat, and
binaries between print and digital are maintained and strengthened.
Furthermore, fair remuneration is encapsulated by the ALCS within an economic
calculative logic and rhetoric, sustained by and connected to a creative
industries discourse, which continuously recreates the idea that creativity
and innovation are one. Instead I have tried to put forward various
alternative visions and practices, from radical open access to posthuman
authorship and uncreative writing, based on vital relationships and on an
ethics of care and responsibility. These alternatives highlight distributed
and relational authorship and/or showcase a sensibility that embraces
posthuman agencies and processual publishing as part of a more complex,
emergent vision of creativity, open to different ideas of what creativity is
and can become. In this vision creativity is thus seen as relational, fluid
and processual and only ever temporarily fixed as part of our ethical decision
making: a decision-making process that is contingent on the contexts and
relationships with which we find ourselves entangled. This involves asking
questions about what writing is and does, and how creativity expands beyond
our established, static, or given concepts, which include copyright and a
focus on the author as a ‘homo economicus’, writing as inherently an
enterprise, and culture as commodified. As I have argued, the value of words,
indeed the economic worth and sustainability of words and of the ‘creative
industries’, can and should be defined within a different narrative. Opening
up from the hegemonic creative industries discourse and the way we perform it
through our writing practices might therefore enable us to explore extended
relationalities of emergent creativity, open-ended publishing processes, and a
feminist ethics of care and responsibility.

This contribution has showcased examples of experimental, hybrid and posthuman
writing and publishing practices that are intervening in this established
discourse on creativity. How, through them, can we start to performatively
explore a new discourse and reconfigure the relationships that underlie our
writing processes? How can the worth of writing be reflected in different
ways?

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adema-pdsc14/>

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(Lueneburg: Centre for Digital Cultures (CDC)),


— and Gary Hall (2013) ‘The Political Nature of the Book: On Artists’ Books
and Radical Open Access’, New Formations 78.1, 138–56,


— and Samuel Moore (2018) ‘Collectivity and Collaboration: Imagining New Forms
of Communality to Create Resilience in Scholar-Led Publishing’, Insights 31.3,


ALCS, Press Release (8 July 2014) ‘What Are Words Worth Now? Not Enough’,


Barad, Karen (2007) Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the
Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Durham, N.C., and London: Duke University
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Boon, Marcus (2010) In Praise of Copying (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
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Brown, Wendy (2015) Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press).

Chartier, Roger (1994) The Order of Books: Readers, Authors, and Libraries in
Europe Between the 14th and 18th Centuries, 1st ed. (Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press).

Craig, Carys J. (2011) Copyright, Communication and Culture: Towards a
Relational Theory of Copyright Law (Cheltenham, UK, and Northampton, MA:
Edward Elgar Publishing).

— Joseph F. Turcotte, and Rosemary J. Coombe (2011) ‘What’s Feminist About
Open Access? A Relational Approach to Copyright in the Academy’, Feminists@law
1.1,

Cramer, Florian (2013) Anti-Media: Ephemera on Speculative Arts (Rotterdam and
New York, NY: nai010 publishers).

Drucker, Johanna (2015) ‘Humanist Computing at the End of the Individual Voice
and the Authoritative Text’, in Patrik Svensson and David Theo Goldberg
(eds.), Between Humanities and the Digital (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press), pp.
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— (2014) ‘Distributed and Conditional Documents: Conceptualizing
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Materialidades da Literatura 2.1, 11–29.

— (2013) ‘Performative Materiality and Theoretical Approaches to Interface’,
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Ede, Lisa, and Andrea A. Lunsford (2001) ‘Collaboration and Concepts of
Authorship’, PMLA 116.2, 354–69.

Emerson, Lori (2008) ‘Materiality, Intentionality, and the Computer-Generated
Poem: Reading Walter Benn Michaels with Erin Moureacute’s Pillage Land’, ESC:
English Studies in Canada 34, 45–69.

— (2003) ‘Digital Poetry as Reflexive Embodiment’, in Markku Eskelinen, Raine
Koskimaa, Loss Pequeño Glazier and John Cayley (eds.), CyberText Yearbook
2002–2003, 88–106,

Foucault, Michel, ‘What Is an Author?’ (1998) in James D. Faubion (ed.),
Essential Works of Foucault, 1954–1984, Volume Two: Aesthetics, Method, and
Epistemology (New York: The New Press).

Gibson, Johanna (2007) Creating Selves: Intellectual Property and the
Narration of Culture (Aldershot, England and Burlington, VT: Routledge).

— Phillip Johnson and Gaetano Dimita (2015) The Business of Being an Author: A
Survey of Author’s Earnings and Contracts (London: Queen Mary University of
London), [https://orca.cf.ac.uk/72431/1/Final Report - For Web
Publication.pdf](https://orca.cf.ac.uk/72431/1/Final%20Report%20-%20For%20Web%20Publication.pdf)

Goldsmith, Kenneth (2011) Uncreative Writing: Managing Language in the Digital
Age (New York: Columbia University Press).

Hall, Gary (2010) ‘Radical Open Access in the Humanities’ (presented at the
Research Without Borders, Columbia University),
humanities/>

— (2008) Digitize This Book!: The Politics of New Media, or Why We Need Open
Access Now (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press).

Hayles, N. Katherine (2004) ‘Print Is Flat, Code Is Deep: The Importance of
Media-Specific Analysis’, Poetics Today 25.1, 67–90,


Hughes, Rolf (2005) ‘Orderly Disorder: Post-Human Creativity’, in Proceedings
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Jenkins, Henry, and Owen Gallagher (2008) ‘“What Is Remix Culture?”: An
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Johns, Adrian (1998) The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making
(Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press).

Kember, Sarah (2016) ‘Why Publish?’, Learned Publishing 29, 348–53,


— (2014) ‘Why Write?: Feminism, Publishing and the Politics of Communication’,
New Formations: A Journal of Culture/Theory/Politics 83.1, 99–116.

Kretschmer, M., and P. Hardwick (2007) Authors’ Earnings from Copyright and
Non-Copyright Sources : A Survey of 25,000 British and German Writers (Poole,
UK: CIPPM/ALCS Bournemouth University),
[https://microsites.bournemouth.ac.uk/cippm/files/2007/07/ALCS-Full-
report.pdf](https://microsites.bournemouth.ac.uk/cippm/files/2007/07/ACLS-
Full-report.pdf)

Lessig, Lawrence (2008) Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid
Economy (New York: Penguin Press).

Lovink, Geert, and Ned Rossiter (eds.) (2007) MyCreativity Reader: A Critique
of Creative Industries (Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures),


McGann, Jerome J. (1992) A Critique of Modern Textual Criticism
(Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press).

McHardy, Julien (2014) ‘Why Books Matter: There Is Value in What Cannot Be
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Mol, Annemarie (2008) The Logic of Care: Health and the Problem of Patient
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Montfort, Nick (2003) ‘The Coding and Execution of the Author’, in Markku
Eskelinen, Raine Kosimaa, Loss Pequeño Glazier and John Cayley (eds.),
CyberText Yearbook 2002–2003, 2003, 201–17,
, pp. 201–17.

Moore, Samuel A. (2017) ‘A Genealogy of Open Access: Negotiations between
Openness and Access to Research’, Revue Française des Sciences de
l’information et de la Communication 11,

Munster, Anna (2016) ‘Techno-Animalities — the Case of the Monkey Selfie’
(presented at the Goldsmiths University, London),


Navas, Eduardo (2012) Remix Theory: The Aesthetics of Sampling (Vienna and New
York: Springer).

Parikka, Jussi, and Mercedes Bunz (11 July 2014) ‘A Mini-Interview: Mercedes
Bunz Explains Meson Press’, Machinology,
meson-press/>

Richards, Victoria (7 January 2016) ‘Monkey Selfie: Judge Rules Macaque Who
Took Grinning Photograph of Himself “Cannot Own Copyright”’, The Independent,
macaque-who-took-grinning-photograph-of-himself-cannot-own-
copyright-a6800471.html>

Robbins, Sarah (2003) ‘Distributed Authorship: A Feminist Case-Study Framework
for Studying Intellectual Property’, College English 66.2, 155–71,


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Spinosa, Dani (14 May 2014) ‘“My Line (Article) Has Sighed”: Authorial
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Star, Susan Leigh (1991) ‘The Sociology of the Invisible: The Primacy of Work
in the Writings of Anselm Strauss’, in Anselm Leonard Strauss and David R.
Maines (eds.), Social Organization and Social Process: Essays in Honor of
Anselm Strauss (New York: A. de Grutyer).

* * *

[1](ch3.xhtml#footnote-152-backlink) The Authors’ Licensing and Collecting
Society is a [British](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Kingdom)
membership organisation for writers, established in 1977 with over 87,000
members, focused on protecting and promoting authors’ rights. ALCS collects
and pays out money due to members for secondary uses of their work (copying,
broadcasting, recording etc.).

[2](ch3.xhtml#footnote-151-backlink) This survey was an update of an earlier
survey conducted in 2006 by the Centre of Intellectual Property Policy and
Management (CIPPM) at Bournemouth University.

[3](ch3.xhtml#footnote-150-backlink) ‘New Research into Authors’ Earnings
Released’, Authors’ Licensing and Collecting Society, 2014,
Us/News/News/What-are-words-worth-now-not-much.aspx>

[4](ch3.xhtml#footnote-149-backlink) Johanna Gibson, Phillip Johnson, and
Gaetano Dimita, The Business of Being an Author: A Survey of Author’s Earnings
and Contracts (London: Queen Mary University of London, 2015), p. 9,
[https://orca.cf.ac.uk/72431/1/Final Report - For Web Publication.pdf
](https://orca.cf.ac.uk/72431/1/Final%20Report%20-%20For%20Web%20Publication.pdf)

[5](ch3.xhtml#footnote-148-backlink) ALCS, Press Release. What Are Words Worth
Now? Not Enough, 8 July 2014, worth-now-not-enough>

[6](ch3.xhtml#footnote-147-backlink) Gibson, Johnson, and Dimita, The Business
of Being an Author, p. 35.

[7](ch3.xhtml#footnote-146-backlink) M. Kretschmer and P. Hardwick, Authors’
Earnings from Copyright and Non-Copyright Sources: A Survey of 25,000 British
and German Writers (Poole: CIPPM/ALCS Bournemouth University, 2007), p. 3,
[https://microsites.bournemouth.ac.uk/cippm/files/2007/07/ALCS-Full-
report.pdf](https://microsites.bournemouth.ac.uk/cippm/files/2007/07/ACLS-
Full-report.pdf)

[8](ch3.xhtml#footnote-145-backlink) ALCS, Press Release, 8 July 2014,
[https://www.alcs.co.uk/news/what-are-words-](https://www.alcs.co.uk/news
/what-are-words-worth-now-not-enough)
worth-now-not-enough

[9](ch3.xhtml#footnote-144-backlink) Gibson, Johnson, and Dimita, The Business
of Being an Author, p. 35.

[10](ch3.xhtml#footnote-143-backlink) Ibid.

[11](ch3.xhtml#footnote-142-backlink) In the survey, three questions that
focus on various sources of remuneration do list digital publishing and/or
online uses as an option (questions 8, 11, and 15). Yet the data tables
provided in the appendix to the report do not provide the findings for
questions 11 and 15 nor do they differentiate according to type of media for
other tables related to remuneration. The only data table we find in the
report related to digital publishing is table 3.3, which lists ‘Earnings
ranked (1 to 7) in relation to categories of work’, where digital publishing
ranks third after books and magazines/periodicals, but before newspapers,
audio/audio-visual productions and theatre. This lack of focus on the effect
of digital publishing on writers’ incomes, for a survey that is ‘the first to
capture the impact of the digital revolution on writers’ working lives’, is
quite remarkable. Gibson, Johnson, and Dimita, The Business of Being an
Author, Appendix 2.

[12](ch3.xhtml#footnote-141-backlink) Ibid., p. 35.

[13](ch3.xhtml#footnote-140-backlink) Ibid.

[14](ch3.xhtml#footnote-139-backlink) Geert Lovink and Ned Rossiter (eds.),
MyCreativity Reader: A Critique of Creative Industries (Amsterdam: Institute
of Network Cultures, 2007), p. 14,


[15](ch3.xhtml#footnote-138-backlink) See:
estimates-january-2015/creative-industries-economic-estimates-january-2015
-key-findings>

[16](ch3.xhtml#footnote-137-backlink) Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos:
Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015), p. 31.

[17](ch3.xhtml#footnote-136-backlink) Therefore Lovink and Rossiter make a
plea to, ‘redefine creative industries outside of IP generation’. Lovink and
Rossiter, MyCreativity Reader, p. 14.

[18](ch3.xhtml#footnote-135-backlink) Next to earnings made from writing more
in general, the survey on various occasions asks questions about earnings
arising from specific categories of works and related to the amount of works
exploited (published/broadcast) during certain periods. Gibson, Johnson, and
Dimita, The Business of Being an Author, Appendix 2.

[19](ch3.xhtml#footnote-134-backlink) Roger Chartier, The Order of Books:
Readers, Authors, and Libraries in Europe Between the 14th and 18th Centuries,
1st ed. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994); Lisa Ede and Andrea A.
Lunsford, ‘Collaboration and Concepts of Authorship’, PMLA 116.2 (2001),
354–69; Adrian Johns, The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the
Making (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1998); Jerome J. McGann, A
Critique of Modern Textual Criticism (Charlottesville, VA, University of
Virginia Press, 1992); Sarah Robbins, ‘Distributed Authorship: A Feminist
Case-Study Framework for Studying Intellectual Property’, College English 66.2
(2003), 155–71,

[20](ch3.xhtml#footnote-133-backlink) The ALCS survey addresses this problem,
of course, and tries to lobby on behalf of its authors for fair contracts with
publishers and intermediaries. That said, the survey findings show that only
42% of writers always retain their copyright. Gibson, Johnson, and Dimita, The
Business of Being an Author, p. 12.

[21](ch3.xhtml#footnote-132-backlink) Michel Foucault, ‘What Is an Author?’,
in James D. Faubion (ed.), Essential Works of Foucault, 1954–1984, Volume Two:
Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology (New York: The New Press, 1998), p. 205.

[22](ch3.xhtml#footnote-131-backlink) Mark Rose, Authors and Owners: The
Invention of Copyright (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993).

[23](ch3.xhtml#footnote-130-backlink) Carys J. Craig, Joseph F. Turcotte, and
Rosemary J. Coombe, ‘What’s Feminist About Open Access? A Relational Approach
to Copyright in the Academy’, Feminists@law 1.1 (2011),


[24](ch3.xhtml#footnote-129-backlink) Ibid., p. 8.

[25](ch3.xhtml#footnote-128-backlink) Ibid., p. 9.

[26](ch3.xhtml#footnote-127-backlink) Lawrence Lessig, Remix: Making Art and
Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy (New York: Penguin Press, 2008); Eduardo
Navas, Remix Theory: The Aesthetics of Sampling (Vienna and New York:
Springer, 2012); Henry Jenkins and Owen Gallagher, ‘“What Is Remix Culture?”:
An Interview with Total Recut’s Owen Gallagher’, Confessions of an Aca-Fan,
2008,

[27](ch3.xhtml#footnote-126-backlink) Craig, Turcotte, and Coombe, ‘What’s
Feminist About Open Access?, p. 27.

[28](ch3.xhtml#footnote-125-backlink) Ibid., p. 14.

[29](ch3.xhtml#footnote-124-backlink) Ibid., p. 26.

[30](ch3.xhtml#footnote-123-backlink) Janneke Adema, ‘Open Access’, in
Critical Keywords for the Digital Humanities (Lueneburg: Centre for Digital
Cultures (CDC), 2014), ; Janneke Adema,
‘Embracing Messiness’, LSE Impact of Social Sciences, 2014,
adema-pdsc14/>; Gary Hall, Digitize This Book!: The Politics of New Media, or
Why We Need Open Access Now (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press,
2008), p. 197; Sarah Kember, ‘Why Write?: Feminism, Publishing and the
Politics of Communication’, New Formations: A Journal of
Culture/Theory/Politics 83.1 (2014), 99–116; Samuel A. Moore, ‘A Genealogy of
Open Access: Negotiations between Openness and Access to Research’, Revue
Française des Sciences de l’information et de la Communication, 2017,


[31](ch3.xhtml#footnote-122-backlink) Florian Cramer, Anti-Media: Ephemera on
Speculative Arts (Rotterdam and New York: nai010 publishers, 2013).

[32](ch3.xhtml#footnote-121-backlink) Especially within humanities publishing
there is a reluctance to allow derivative uses of one’s work in an open access
setting.

[33](ch3.xhtml#footnote-120-backlink) In 2015 the Radical Open Access
Conference took place at Coventry University, which brought together a large
array of presses and publishing initiatives (often academic-led) in support of
an ‘alternative’ vision of open access and scholarly communication.
Participants in this conference subsequently formed the loosely allied Radical
Open Access Collective: [radicaloa.co.uk](https://radicaloa.co.uk/). As the
conference concept outlines, radical open access entails ‘a vision of open
access that is characterised by a spirit of on-going creative experimentation,
and a willingness to subject some of our most established scholarly
communication and publishing practices, together with the institutions that
sustain them (the library, publishing house etc.), to rigorous critique.
Included in the latter will be the asking of important questions about our
notions of authorship, authority, originality, quality, credibility,
sustainability, intellectual property, fixity and the book — questions that
lie at the heart of what scholarship is and what the university can be in the
21st century’. Janneke Adema and Gary Hall, ‘The Political Nature of the Book:
On Artists’ Books and Radical Open Access’, New Formations 78.1 (2013),
138–56, ; Janneke Adema and Samuel
Moore, ‘Collectivity and Collaboration: Imagining New Forms of Communality to
Create Resilience In Scholar-Led Publishing’, Insights 31.3 (2018),
; Gary Hall, ‘Radical Open Access in the
Humanities’ (presented at the Research Without Borders, Columbia University,
2010), humanities/>; Janneke Adema, ‘Knowledge Production Beyond The Book? Performing
the Scholarly Monograph in Contemporary Digital Culture’ (PhD dissertation,
Coventry University, 2015),
f4c62c77ac86/1/ademacomb.pdf>

[34](ch3.xhtml#footnote-119-backlink) Julien McHardy, ‘Why Books Matter: There
Is Value in What Cannot Be Evaluated’, Impact of Social Sciences, 2014, n.p.,
[http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocial sciences/2014/09/30/why-books-
matter/](http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2014/09/30/why-books-
matter/)

[35](ch3.xhtml#footnote-118-backlink) Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe
Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Durham,
N.C. and London: Duke University Press, 2007).

[36](ch3.xhtml#footnote-117-backlink) Annemarie Mol, The Logic of Care: Health
and the Problem of Patient Choice, 1st ed. (London and New York: Routledge,
2008).

[37](ch3.xhtml#footnote-116-backlink) Sebastian Abrahamsson and others,
‘Mattering Press: New Forms of Care for STS Books’, The EASST Review 32.4
(2013), press-new-forms-of-care-for-sts-books/>

[38](ch3.xhtml#footnote-115-backlink) McHardy, ‘Why Books Matter’.

[39](ch3.xhtml#footnote-114-backlink) Ibid.

[40](ch3.xhtml#footnote-113-backlink) Susan Leigh Star, ‘The Sociology of the
Invisible: The Primacy of Work in the Writings of Anselm Strauss’, in Anselm
Leonard Strauss and David R. Maines (eds.), Social Organization and Social
Process: Essays in Honor of Anselm Strauss (New York: A. de Gruyter, 1991).
Mattering Press is not alone in exploring an ethics of care in relation to
(academic) publishing. Sarah Kember, director of Goldsmiths Press is also
adamant in her desire to make the underlying processes of publishing (i.e.
peer review, citation practices) more transparent and accountable Sarah
Kember, ‘Why Publish?’, Learned Publishing 29 (2016), 348–53,
. Mercedes Bunz, one of the editors running
Meson Press, argues that a sociology of the invisible would incorporate
‘infrastructure work’, the work of accounting for, and literally crediting
everybody involved in producing a book: ‘A book isn’t just a product that
starts a dialogue between author and reader. It is accompanied by lots of
other academic conversations — peer review, co-authors, copy editors — and
these conversations deserve to be taken more serious’. Jussi Parikka and
Mercedes Bunz, ‘A Mini-Interview: Mercedes Bunz Explains Meson Press’,
Machinology, 2014, mercedes-bunz-explains-meson-press/>. For Open Humanities Press authorship is
collaborative and even often anonymous: for example, they are experimenting
with research published in wikis to further complicate the focus on single
authorship and a static marketable book object within academia (see their
living and liquid books series).

[41](ch3.xhtml#footnote-112-backlink) Lori Emerson, ‘Digital Poetry as
Reflexive Embodiment’, in Markku Eskelinen, Raine Koskimaa, Loss Pequeño
Glazier and John Cayley (eds.), CyberText Yearbook 2002–2003, 2003, 88–106,


[42](ch3.xhtml#footnote-111-backlink) Dani Spinosa, ‘“My Line (Article) Has
Sighed”: Authorial Subjectivity and Technology’, Generic Pronoun, 2014,


[43](ch3.xhtml#footnote-110-backlink) Spinosa, ‘My Line (Article) Has Sighed’.

[44](ch3.xhtml#footnote-109-backlink) Emerson, ‘Digital Poetry as Reflexive
Embodiment’, p. 89.

[45](ch3.xhtml#footnote-108-backlink) Rolf Hughes, ‘Orderly Disorder: Post-
Human Creativity’, in Proceedings of the Linköping Electronic Conference
(Linköpings universitet: University Electronic Press, 2005).

[46](ch3.xhtml#footnote-107-backlink) N. Katherine Hayles, ‘Print Is Flat,
Code Is Deep: The Importance of Media-Specific Analysis’, Poetics Today 25.1
(2004), 67–90, ; Johanna Drucker,
‘Performative Materiality and Theoretical Approaches to Interface’, Digital
Humanities Quarterly 7.1 (2013),
; Johanna
Drucker, ‘Distributed and Conditional Documents: Conceptualizing
Bibliographical Alterities’, MATLIT: Revista do Programa de Doutoramento em
Materialidades da Literatura 2.1 (2014), 11–29.

[47](ch3.xhtml#footnote-106-backlink) Nick Montfort, ‘The Coding and Execution
of the Author’, in Markku Eskelinen, Raine Kosimaa, Loss Pequeño Glazier and
John Cayley (eds.), CyberText Yearbook 2002–2003, 2003, 201–17 (p. 201),


[48](ch3.xhtml#footnote-105-backlink) Montfort, ‘The Coding and Execution of
the Author’, p. 202.

[49](ch3.xhtml#footnote-104-backlink) Lori Emerson, ‘Materiality,
Intentionality, and the Computer-Generated Poem: Reading Walter Benn Michaels
with Erin Moureacute’s Pillage Land’, ESC: English Studies in Canada 34
(2008), 66.

[50](ch3.xhtml#footnote-103-backlink) Marcus Boon, In Praise of Copying
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010); Johanna Drucker, ‘Humanist
Computing at the End of the Individual Voice and the Authoritative Text’, in
Patrik Svensson and David Theo Goldberg (eds.), Between Humanities and the
Digital (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015), pp. 83–94.

[51](ch3.xhtml#footnote-102-backlink) We have to take into consideration here
that print-based cultural products were never fixed or static; the dominant
discourses constructed around them just perceive them to be so.

[52](ch3.xhtml#footnote-101-backlink) Craig, Turcotte, and Coombe, ‘What’s
Feminist About Open Access?’, p. 2.

[53](ch3.xhtml#footnote-100-backlink) Ibid.

[54](ch3.xhtml#footnote-099-backlink) Johanna Gibson, Creating Selves:
Intellectual Property and the Narration of Culture (Aldershot, UK, and
Burlington: Routledge, 2007), p. 7.

[55](ch3.xhtml#footnote-098-backlink) Gibson, Creating Selves, p. 7.

[56](ch3.xhtml#footnote-097-backlink) Ibid.

[57](ch3.xhtml#footnote-096-backlink) Kenneth Goldsmith, Uncreative Writing:
Managing Language in the Digital Age (New York: Columbia University Press,
2011), p. 227.

[58](ch3.xhtml#footnote-095-backlink) Ibid., p. 15.

[59](ch3.xhtml#footnote-094-backlink) Goldsmith, Uncreative Writing, p. 81.

[60](ch3.xhtml#footnote-093-backlink) Ibid.

[61](ch3.xhtml#footnote-092-backlink) It is worth emphasising that what
Goldsmith perceives as ‘uncreative’ notions of writing (including
appropriation, pastiche, and copying), have a prehistory that can be traced
back to antiquity (thanks go out to this chapter’s reviewer for pointing this
out). One example of this, which uses the method of cutting and pasting —
something I have outlined more in depth elsewhere — concerns the early modern
commonplace book. Commonplacing as ‘a method or approach to reading and
writing involved the gathering and repurposing of meaningful quotes, passages
or other clippings from published books by copying and/or pasting them into a
blank book.’ Janneke Adema, ‘Cut-Up’, in Eduardo Navas (ed.), Keywords in
Remix Studies (New York and London: Routledge, 2017), pp. 104–14,


[62](ch3.xhtml#footnote-091-backlink) Gibson, Creating Selves, p. 27.

[63](ch3.xhtml#footnote-090-backlink) For example, animals cannot own
copyright. See the case of Naruto, the macaque monkey that took a ‘selfie’
photograph of itself. Victoria Richards, ‘Monkey Selfie: Judge Rules Macaque
Who Took Grinning Photograph of Himself “Cannot Own Copyright”’, The
Independent, 7 January 2016, /monkey-selfie-judge-rules-macaque-who-took-grinning-photograph-of-himself-
cannot-own-copyright-a6800471.html>

[64](ch3.xhtml#footnote-089-backlink) Anna Munster, ‘Techno-Animalities — the
Case of the Monkey Selfie’ (presented at the Goldsmiths University, London,
2016),

[65](ch3.xhtml#footnote-088-backlink) Sarah Kember, ‘Why Write?: Feminism,
Publishing and the Politics of Communication’, New Formations: A Journal of
Culture/Theory/Politics 83.1 (2014), 99–116.

Marczewska, Adema, McDonald & Trettien
The Poethics of Scholarship
2018


Post
Office
Press

Edited by

The Poethics
of Scholarship
Kaja
Marczewska

Janneke
Adema

Frances
McDonald

Whitney
Trettien

Published by Post Office Press and
Rope Press. Coventry, 2018.
© Post Office Press, papers by
respective Authors.
Freely available at:
http://radicaloa.co.uk/
conferences/ROA2
This is an open access pamphlet,
licensed under a Creative
Commons Attribution 4.0
International (CC BY 4.0) license.
Read more about the license at:
https://creativecommons.org/
licenses/by/4.0/
Figures and other media included
with this pamphlet may be under
different copyright restrictions.

This pamphlet is published in a series
of 7 as part of the Radical Open
Access II – The Ethics of Care
conference, which took place June
26-27 at Coventry University. More
information about this conference
and about the contributors to this
pamphlet can be found at:
http://radicaloa.co.uk/conferences/
ROA2
This pamphlet was made possible due
to generous funding from the arts
and humanities research studio, The
Post Office, a project of Coventry
University’s Centre for Postdigital
Cultures and due to the combined
efforts of authors, editors, designers
and printers.

Table of Contents

Introduction
Post Office Press
Page 4

The Horizon of The Publishable in/as
Open Access: From Poethics to Praxis
Kaja Marczewska
Page 6

Design by: Mihai Toma, Nick White
and Sean Worley
Printed by: Rope Press,
Birmingham

The Poethics of Openness
Janneke Adema
Page 16

Diffractive Publishing
Frances McDonald & Whitney Trettien
Page 26

Introduction

Kaja Marczewska tracks in her contribution OA’s development
from a radical and political project driven by experimental
impetus, into a constrained model, limiting publishing in the
service of the neoliberal university. Following Malik, she
argues that OA in its dominant top-down implementation is
determining the horizon of the publishable. Yet a horizon also
suggests conditions of possibility for experimentation and
innovation, which Marczewska locates in a potential OA ethos
of poethics and praxis, in a fusion of attitude and form.

This pamphlet explores ways in which to engage scholars to
further elaborate the poethics of their scholarship. Following
Joan Retallack, who has written extensively about the
responsibility that comes with formulating and performing a
poetics, which she has captured in her concept of poethics
(with an added h), this pamphlet examines what connects
the 'doing' of scholarship with the ethical components of
research. Here, in order to remain ethical we are not able to
determine in advance what being ethical would look like, yet, at
the same time, ethical decisions need to be made and are being
made as part of our publishing practices: where we publish
and with whom, in an open way or not, in what form and shape
and in which formats. Should we then consider the poethics
of scholarship as a poetics of/as change, or as Retallack calls
it, a poetics of the swerve (clinamen), which continuously
unsettles our familiar notions?
This pamphlet considers how, along with discussions about
the contents of our scholarship, and about the different
methodologies, theories and politics that we use to give
meaning and structure to our research, we should have similar
deliberations about the way we do research. This involves
paying more attention to the crafting of our own aesthetics
and poetics as scholars, including a focus on the medial forms,
the formats, and the graphic spaces in and through which we
communicate and perform scholarship (and the discourses
that surround these), as well as the structures and institutions
that shape and determine our scholarly practices.

4

Janneke Adema explores in her paper the relationship between
openness and experimentation in scholarly publishing, outlining
how open access in specific has enabled a reimagining of its
forms and practices. Whilst Adema emphasises that this
relationship is far from guaranteed, through the concept
of scholarly poethics she speculates on how we can forge a
connection between the doing of scholarship and its political,
ethical and aesthetical elements.
In the final contribution to this pamphlet Whitney Trettien and
Frances McDonald ask a pertinent question: ‘how can we build
scholarly infrastructures that foster diffractive reading and
writing?’. To address this question, they reflect on their own
experiences of editing an experimental digital zine: thresholds,
which brings the creative affordances of the split screen, of
the gutter, to scholarship. By transforming materially how
we publish, how we read and write together, McDonald and
Trettien explore the potential of thresholds as a model for
digital publishing more attuned to the ethics of entanglement.

Post Office Press

5

The Horizon of
The Publishable
in/as Open
Access: From
Poethics to
Praxis

maintain by contributing to it for the sake of career progression
and a regular salary. This transgression is unlikely to be noticed
by my publisher (who probably does not care anyway).1 It is a
small and safe act of resistance, but it gestures towards the
centrality of thinking about the poethics—the ethics and the
aesthetics—of any act of making work public that is so crucial
to all discussions of open access (OA) publishing.

Kaja
Marczewska

I am writing this piece having just uploaded a PDF of my recent
book to aaaarg; a book published by Bloomsbury as a hardback
academic monograph retailing at £86—and that is after the
generous 10% discount offered on the publisher’s website. The
book focuses on copying and reproduction as perhaps the most
prominent forms of contemporary cultural production. Given
this focus, it seemed fitting to make the material available via
this guerrilla library, to enable its different circulation and less
controlled iterations. My decision to publish with Bloomsbury
was a pragmatic one. As an early career academic working
within UK higher education, I had little choice but to publish
with an established press if I wanted to continue in the privileged
position I currently find myself in. As someone interested in
economies of cultural production, forms of publishing and
self-organisation, the decision to breach my contract with the
publisher offered a welcome and necessary respite from the
discomfort I felt every time I saw my unaffordable (and perhaps
as a result, unreadable) book for sale. It served as a way of acting
(po)ethically within the system of which I am part. It was both a
gesture of sharing, of making my book more widely available to
a community that might otherwise be unable to access it, and
a selfish act, enabling my ongoing existence within a system I

6

Kaja Marczewska

I open with this personal reflection because I see my participation
inside-outside of academic publishing as pertinent to thinking
about the nature of OA today. Since its inception, OA publishing
has rapidly transformed from a radical, disruptive project of
sharing, making public, and community building, into one that
under the guise of ‘openness’ and ‘access’ maintains the system
that limits the possibilities of both. That is, OA has moved away
from the politically motivated initiative that it once was, opening
up spaces for publishing experimentation, to instead become a
constrained and constraining model of publishing in the service
of the neoliberal university. With this transformation of OA also
come limitations on the forms of publication. The introduction of
the OA requirement as one of the key criteria of REF-ability was
one of the factors contributing to the loss of the experimental
impetus that once informed the drive towards the OA model.
My home institution, for example, requires its staff to deposit
all our REF-able publications in a commercial, Elsevier-owned
repository, as PDFs—even if they have been published in OA
journals on custom-built platforms. The death-by-PDF that
such institutionalised forms of OA bring about, inevitably limits
the potential for pushing the boundaries of form that working
in digital spaces makes possible.
While conventional academic publishers are driven by market
demands and the value of the academic book as a commodity in
their decisions as to what to publish, mainstream OA publishing
practices tend to be motivated by questions on how to publish
a REF-able output, i.e. for all the wrong reasons. This tension
between content and form, and a characteristic commitment
to the latter that publishing OA makes necessary, is the central
focus of my paper. As I will argue, this is perhaps the greatest
paradox of OA: that in its fixation on issues of openness, it is

The Horizon of The Publishable

7

increasingly open only to the kinds of publications that can be
effortlessly slotted into the next institutional REF submission.
But, by doing so, OA publishing as we have come to know it
introduces significant constraints on the forms of publication
possible in academic publishing. In this paper, I consider OA as
a limit to what can be published in academia today, or what I will
refer to here, after Rachel Malik, as a horizon of the publishable.
‘Publishing,’ writes Malik, ‘or rather the horizon of the
publishable, precedes and constitutes both what can be written
and read. […] the horizon of the publishable governs what is
thinkable to publish within a particular historical moment […]
the horizon denotes […] a boundary or limit’ (2015, 709, 72021). Malik suggests that a number of distinct horizons can be
identified and argues that the limits of all writing are based on
generic conventions, i.e. crime fiction, biography, or children’s
picture books, for example, are all delimited by a different
set of categories and practices—by a different horizon. Her
understanding of publishing foregrounds the multiplicity of
processes and relations between them as well as the role
of institutions: commercial, legal, educational, political, and
cultural. It is the conjunction of practices and their contexts
that always constitutes, according to Malik, various horizons
of the publishable. For Malik, then, there is no singular concept
of publishing and no single horizon but rather a multiplicity of
practices and a diversity of horizons.
Open access could be added to Malik’s list as another practice
defined by its unique horizon. Following Malik, it would be
very easy to identify what the horizon of OA might be—what
processes, practices, and institutions define and confine what
can be published OA. But I would like to suggest here that
thinking about OA in the context of Malik’s argument does more
than offer tools for thinking about the limits of OA. I suggest
that it invites a rethinking of the place of OA in publishing today
and, more broadly, of the changing nature of publishing in HE.
That is, I propose that today OA assumes the role of a horizon
in its own right; that it defines and delimits the possibilities of
what can be made public in academia. If seen as such, OA is more
than just one of the practices of publishing; it has become the

8

Kaja Marczewska

horizon of the publishable in academic publishing in the UK today.
The new horizon in academic publishing seems increasingly to
only allow certain accepted forms of OA (such as the PDF or
the postprint) which under the guise of openness, sharing and
access, replicate the familiar and problematic models of our
knowledge economy. The promise of OA as a response to these
fixed forms of publishing seems to have given way to a peculiar
openness that favours metrics and monitoring. Where OA was
originally imagined to shift the perception of the established
horizon, it has now become that very horizon.
Here I want to posit that we should understand poethics as a
commitment to the kind of publishing that recognises the agency
of the forms in which we distribute and circulate published
material and acknowledges that these are always, inevitably
ideological. In her notion of poethics, Joan Retallack (2003)
gestures towards a writing that in form and content questions
what language does and how it works—to ‘the what’ and ‘the
how’ of writing. Similarly, the project of imagining OA as a
poethics is an attempt at thinking about publishing that forces a
reconsideration of both. However, I suggest, that with an often
thoughtless and technodeterministic push towards ‘access’ and
‘openness’, ‘the what’ gets obscured at the cost of ‘the how.’ This
attitude manifests itself most prominently in the proliferation
of OA platforms, similar to Coventry University’s depository
mentioned earlier here, that fit the parameters of REF. But
platforms, as Nick Srnicek (2017) warns us, are problematic. In
their design and modes of operation, they hold out the promise
of freedom, openness, flexibility and entrepreneurial success,
while maintaining the proprietary regimes and modes of capital
accumulation that contribute to new forms of exploitation and
new monopolies. The kind of publishing that mainstream OA
has become (what Sarah Kember describes as a top-down,
policy-driven OA)2 is more akin to this platform capitalism than
a publishing model which evokes the philosophy of openness
and access. In a shift away from a diversity of forms of OA
towards standardised OA platforms, OA has become inherently
antithetical to the politics of OA publishing.

The Horizon of The Publishable

9

What follows, then, is that any work that takes advantage of its openness and circulation
in digital spaces to experiment with ‘the how’ of publishing, in the current knowledge
economy inevitably becomes the negative of publishable, i.e. the unpublishable. OA as
platform capitalism is openly hostile to OA’s poethical potential. In other words, the
REF-able version of OA takes little interest in openness and delimits what is at the
heart of the practice itself, i.e. what can be made open to the public (as a colleague
from one of the Russell Group universities tells me, this only includes three or fourstar rated publications in their case, with other works deemed not good enough to
be made available via the University’s website). To imagine OA as a poethical mode of
publishing is to envisage a process of publishing that pushes beyond the horizon set
by OA itself. It invites reading and writing of texts that might be typically thought of
as unreadable, unwriteable, and unpublishable.
The concept of the ‘horizon’ also interest Joan Retallack, who in Poethical Wager
(2003) explores the horizon as a way of thinking about the contemporary. Retallack
identifies two types of horizons: the pseudoserene horizon of time and the dynamic
coastline of historical poesis (14). Reading Retallack in the context of OA, I would
like to suggest that similarly two models of OA can be identified today: OA as a
pseudoserene horizon and OA as a cultural coastline. One is predictable, static, and
limiting, i.e. designed to satisfy the managerial class of the contemporary university;
the other works towards a poethics of OA, with all its unpredictability, complexity,
and openness. OA publishing which operates within the confines of the pseudoserene
horizon is representative of what happens when we become complacent in the way we
think about the work of publishing. Conversely, OA seen as a dynamic coastline–the
model that Radical Open Access (ROA) collective works to advance–is a space where
publishing is always in process and makes possible a rethinking of the experience of
publishing. Seen as such, ROA is an exposition of the forms of publishing that we
increasingly take for granted, and in doing so mirrors the ethos of poethics. The role
of ROA, then, is to highlight the importance of searching for new models of OA, if
OA is to enact its function as a swerve in attitudes towards knowledge production
and consumption.
But anything new is ugly, Retallack suggests, via Picasso: ‘This is always a by-product
of a truly experimental aesthetics, to move into unaestheticized territory. Definitions
of the beautiful are tied to previous forms’ (Retallack 2003, 28). OA, as it has evolved
in recent years, has not allowed the messiness of the ugly. It has not been messy enough
because it has been co-opted, too quickly and unquestionably, by the agendas of
the contemporary university. OA has become too ‘beautiful’ to enact its disruptive
potential.3 In its drive for legitimisation and recognition, the project of OA has been
motivated by the desire to make this form of publishing too immediately familiar, and

10

Kaja Marczewska

too willingly PDF-able. The consequences of this attitude are
significant. The constraints on the methods and forms of OA
publishing that the institutionalisation of OA have brought
about, inevitably limit the content that is published. As a result,
what is delivered openly to the public is the familiar and the
beautiful. The new, radical, and ugly remains out of sight; not
recognised as a formal REF-able publication, the new lies beyond
the horizon of the OA publication as we know it. In order to enact
a poethics of openness and access, OA requires a more complex
understanding of the notion of openness itself. To be truly ‘open’,
OA publishing need not make as its sole objective a commitment
to openness as a mode of making publications open for the
public, i.e. circulated without a paywall, but instead should also
be driven by an openness to ambiguity, experimentation, and ‘a
delight in complex possibility’ (Retallack 2003, 221) that the
dominant models of OA are unable to accommodate.
To accuse OA of fixing in place the horizon of academic
publishing is to suggest that ‘a certain poetics of responsibility’
(Retallack 2003, 3) seems to have been lost in the bigger
project of OA, responsibility to the community of writers and
readers, and responsibility to the project of publishing. OA as
a ‘poethical attitude’ (Retallack 2003, 3) rather than rampant
technodeterminism, need not be a project which we have to
conform to under the guidelines of the current REF, but can
rather be a practice we choose to engage and engage with,
under conditions that make the poethics of OA possible. What a
re-thinking of OA as a poethics offers, is a way of acknowledging
the need for publishing that models how we want to participate
in academia. Exploring OA as a horizon of academic publishing
is one possible way of addressing this challenge. Although by
nature limiting, the horizon is also, Malik suggests, ‘a condition
of possibility’ (721). The task of OA as poethics is predicated on
the potential of moving away from the horizon as a boundary or a
limit and towards the horizon as a possibility of experimentation
and innovation. I want to conclude with another proposition,
which gestures towards such rethinking of OA as a more open
iteration of the horizon.

The Horizon of The Publishable

11

I have referred to OA publishing as a practice a number of
times in this paper. A decision to use this term was a conscious
attempt at framing OA as praxis. A shift away from poiesis–or
making–and towards the discourse of praxis–action or doing–
has been shaping the debates in the visual arts for some time
now. Art seen as praxis emerges out of a desire for social life
shaped by collective, transformative action. Praxis is a means of
reformulating life and art into a new fusion of critical thought,
creative production, and political activity. This approach grows
out of Aristotle’s understanding of praxis as action which is
always valuable in itself, as opposed to poiesis, i.e. actions aimed
at making or creation. Aristotelean praxis is always implicitly
ethical–always informed by and informing decisions as to how to
live–and political, concerned with forms of living with others. My
understanding of OA as praxis here is informed by such thinking
about ethical action as absolutely necessary for OA to enact
its potential for experimentation and change.

process of producing OA publications, a never-ending flow of
new PDFs and platforms. Instead, open accessing is a mode
of being in academia through the project of publishing as an
ongoing intervention. OA as platform capitalism gives little
consideration to the bigger project of OA as praxis, and as a
result fails to acknowledge the significance of the relationship
between the form of OA, the content published OA, and the
political project that informs both. Approaching OA as praxis,
then, is a tool for reshaping what constitutes the work of
publishing. What a commitment to open accessing, as opposed
to open access, makes possible, is a collective work against OA
as a tool of the neoliberal university and for OA as a poethical
form of publication: a fusion of making and doing, of OA as an
attitude and OA as form. But for poethical OA to become a
possibility, OA as praxis needs to emerge first.

To think about OA as praxis is to invite a conceptual shift
away from making publications OA and towards ‘doing OA’
as a complete project. OA seen as such ceases to exist as yet
another platform and emerges as an attitude that has the
potential to translate into forms of publishing best suited to
communicate it. This is not to suggest that OA should move
away from its preoccupation with the form and medium of
publishing altogether–the emergence of the so called postmedium condition in the arts, the glorification of generalised
‘doing’, and more recently, the popularity of related forms of
‘entrepreneurship’, all have their own problems. Rather, this
move towards praxis is an attempt at drawing attention to a
necessary relationship between making and doing, forms and
attitudes, that seems to be lacking in a lot of OA publishing. OA
as praxis offers a way out of what seems to be the end game
of academic publishing today; it is an invitation to participate
collectively and ethically in the process of making public the
work of scholarship.
Doing OA–open accessing–implies a way of thinking about
what producing various forms of knowledge should stand for.
In other words, open accessing does not suggest a continuous

12

Kaja Marczewska

The Horizon of The Publishable

13

References

¹ For a discussion of the effects of similar
practices of academic book sharing
on publishers, see Janneke Adema,
“Scanners, Collectors and Aggregators. On
the ‘underground movement’ of (pirated)
theory text sharing,” Open Reflections, 20
September 2009, https://openreflections.
wordpress.com/2009/09/20/scannerscollectors-and-aggregators-on-the‘underground-movement’-of-piratedtheory-text-sharing/.

Adema, Janneke. 2009. “Scanners, Collectors and Aggregators. On the ‘underground
movement’ of (pirated) theory text sharing.” Open Reflections. Accessed 15 May
2018. https://openreflections.wordpress.com/2009/09/20/scanners-collectors-andaggregators-on-the-‘underground-movement’-of-pirated-theory-text-sharing/.
Adema, Janneke. 2014. “Embracing Messiness: Open access offers the chance to
creatively experiment with scholarly publishing.” LSE Impact Blog. Accessed 15
May 2018. http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2014/11/18/embracingmessiness-adema-pdsc14/.
Kember, Sarah. 2014. “Opening Out from Open Access: Writing and Publishing in Response
to Neoliberalism.” Ada: A Journal of Gender, New Media, and Technology 4.
doi:10.7264/N31C1V51.
Malik, Rachel. 2017. “Horizons of the Publishable: Publishing in/as Literary Studies.” ELH 75
(3): 707-735.
Retallack, Joan. 2003. The Poethical Wager. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Srnicek, Nick. 2017. Platform Capitalism. Cambridge: Polity Press.

² see: Sarah Kember, “Opening Out from
Open Access: Writing and Publishing in
Response to Neoliberalism,” Ada: A Journal
of Gender, New Media, and Technology 4
(2014): doi:10.7264/N31C1V51.

³ see also: Janneke Adema, “Embracing
Messiness: Open access offers the
chance to creatively experiment with
scholarly publishing,” LSE Impact Blog,
18 November 2014, http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/
impactofsocialsciences/2014/11/18/
embracing-messiness-adema-pdsc14/.

14

Kaja Marczewska

The Horizon of The Publishable

15

The
Poethics
Of
Openness

I won’t imply here that openness is the sole or even main reason/motivator/
enabler behind any kind of reimagining in this context; openness has always been
part of a constellation of material-discursive factors—including most importantly
perhaps, the digital, in addition to various other socio-cultural elements—which
have together created (potential) conditions for change in publishing. Yet, within
this constellation I would like to explore how open access, applied and valued in
certain specific, e.g. radical open access, ways—where in other implementations it
has actually inhibited experimentation, but I will return to that later—has been an
instrumental condition for ethico-aesthetic experimentation to take place.

Janneke
Adema

Potential for Experimentation

Last year from the 23rd until the 29th of October the annual Open Access
Week took place, an international advocacy event focused on open access and
related topics. The theme of 2017’s Open Access week was ‘open in order to…’,
prompting participants to explore the concrete, tangible benefits of openness
for scholarly communication and inviting them to reflect on how openness can
make things possible. Behind this prompt, however, lies a wider discussion on
whether openness is a value that is an end in itself, that is intrinsically good, or
whether it predominantly has instrumental value as a means to achieve a certain
end. I will focus on the latter and will start from the presumption that openness
has no intrinsic value, it functions as a floating or empty signifier (Laclau 2005,
129–55; Adema 2014) with no ethics or politics of its own, only in relation to how it
is applied or positioned.1 It is therefore in discussions on the instrumental value of
openness that our politics and ethics in relation to openness come to the fore (for
example, do we value open in order to… ‘grow the commons’ or ‘increase return on
investments and contribute to economic growth’?). In this paper I want to explore
ways in which openness has contributed to and advanced a specific ‘end’: how has
it enabled experimentation with the material forms and relations that underlie and
structure scholarly publishing? Here, I am thinking of both the formats (e.g. print,
digital) we use to communicate our research, and the systems, roles, models and
practices that have evolved around them (e.g. notions of authorship, the book and
publication, publishing models). How has open access facilitated an exploration of
new practices, structures and institutions, questioning the system of academic
publishing as currently set up?

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Janneke Adema

What is clear foremost, is that the open availability of research content has
been an important material condition for scholars and publishers to explore new
formats and new forms of interaction around publications. In order to remix and
re-use content, do large scale text and data-mining, experiment with open peer
review and emerging genres such as living books, wiki-publications, versionings and
multimodal adaptations, both the scholarly materials and platforms that lie at the
basis of these publishing gestures strongly benefit from being open. To enable new
forms of processual scholarship, communal authorship and public engagement with
texts online, open access is essential; it is no surprise therefore that many of the
ground-breaking experimental journals and projects in the HSS, such as Kairos,
Vectors and Inflexions, have been purposefully open access from the start.
Yet openness as a specific practice of publishing materials online has also influenced
how publishing itself is perceived. Making content openly available on blogs and
personal websites, or via institutional repositories and shadow libraries, has
enabled scholars to bypass legacy publishers, intermediaries and other traditional
gatekeepers, to publish their research and connect to other researchers in more
direct ways. This development has led to various reimaginings of the system of
scholarly publishing and the roles and structures that have traditionally buttressed
the publishing value chain in a print-based environment (which still predominantly
echoes Robert Darnton’s communication circuit, modelled on the 18th century
publishing history of Voltaire's Questions sur l'Encyclopédie (Darnton 1982)).
But next to this rethinking of the value chain, this more direct and open (self-)
publishing also enabled a proliferation of new publication forms, from blogposts to
podcasts and Twitter feeds.
Fuelled on by the open access movement, scholars, libraries and universities are
increasingly making use of open source platforms and software such as OJS to

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17

take the process of publishing itself back into their own hands, setting up their
own formal publication outlets, from journals to presses and repositories. The open
access movement has played an important role in making a case against the high
profits sustaining the commercial publishing industry. This situation has created
serious access issues (e.g. the monograph crisis) due to the toxic combination
of market-driven publication decisions and increasingly depleted library funds,
affecting the availability of specialised and niche content (Fitzpatrick 2011; Hall
2008). This frustration in particular, next to the lack of uptake of open access
and multimodal publishing by the legacy presses, has motivated the rise of not-forprofit scholar- and library-led presses (Adema and Stone 2017). To that effect,
open access has stimulated a new ecosystem of publishing models and communities
to emerge.
Additionally, the iterative publishing of research-in-process, disseminating content
and eliciting community feedback during and as part of a project’s development,
has strengthened a vision of publishing in which it is perceived as an integral part of
the research process. The open science and notebook movements have simulated
this kind of processual publishing and helped imagine a different definition
of what publishing is and what purposes it fulfils. One of the more contentious
arguments I want to make here is that this potential to publish our research-inprogress has strengthened our agency as scholars with respect to how and when
we communicate our research. With that, our responsibility towards the specific
ways in which we produce it, from the formats (digital, multi-modal, processual), to
the material platforms and relations that support its production and dissemination,
is further extended. Yet, on the other hand, it has also highlighted the plurality of
material and discursive agencies involved in knowledge production, complicating
the centrality of liberal authorial agency. The closed and fixed codex-format, the
book as object, is what is being complicated and experimented with through preand post-publication feedback and interactions, from annotations in the margins
to open peer review and communal forms of knowledge production. The publication
as endpoint, as commodity, is what is being reconsidered here; but also our
author-function, when, through forms of open notebook science the roles of our
collaborators, of the communities involved in knowledge production, become even
more visible. I would like to end this section by highlighting the ways in which mainly
scholar-led projects within the open access landscape have played an important
role in carving out a different (ethical) framework for publishing too, one focused
on an ethics of care and communality, one in which publishing itself is perceived as
a form of care, acknowledging and supporting the various agencies involved in the
publishing process instead of being focused solely on its outcomes.

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Janneke Adema

Impediment to Change
The above analysis of how openness and open access more
specifically has enabled experimentation, focuses mainly
on how it has the potential to do so. Yet there are similarly
many ways in which it has been inhibiting experimentation,
further strengthening existing publishing models and
established print-based formats. Think for example of how
most openly available scholarly publications are either
made available as PDFs or through Google Books limited
preview, both mimicking closed print formats online; of how
many open licences don’t allow for re-use and adaptations;
of how the open access movement has strategically been
more committed to gratis than to libre openness; of how
commercial publishers
are increasingly adopting open
access as just another profitable business model, retaining
and further exploiting existing relations instead of disrupting
them; of how new commercial intermediaries and gatekeepers
parasitical on open forms of communication are mining
and selling the data around our content to further their
own pockets—e.g. commercial SSRNs such as Academia.
edu and ResearchGate. In addition to all this, open access
can do very little to further experimentation if it is met by
a strong conservatism from scholars, their communities
and institutions, involving fears about the integrity of
scholarly content, and historical preferences for established
institutions and brands, and for the printed monograph and
codex format in assessment exercises—these are just a few
examples of how openness does not necessarily warrant
progressive change and can even effect further closures.
Openness itself does not guarantee experimentation, but
openness has and can be instrumentalised in such a way as
to enable experimenting to take place. It is here that I would
like to introduce a new concept to think and speculate with,
the concept of poethics. I use poethics in Derridean terms, as
a ‘nonself-identical’ concept (Derrida 1973), one that is both
constituted by and alters and adapts itself in intra-action
with the concepts I am connecting it to here: openness and
experimentation. I will posit that as a term poethics can

The Poethics of Openness

19

function in a connecting role as a bridging concept, outlining
the speculative relationship between the two. I borrowed the
concept of poethics (with an added h) from the poet, essayist,
and scholar Joan Retallack, where it has been further taken
on by the artist and critical racial and postcolonial studies
scholar Denise Ferreira da Silva; but in my exploration of
the term, I will also draw on the specific forms of feminist
poetics developed by literary theorist Terry Threadgold. I
will weave these concepts together and adapt them to start
speculating what a specific scholarly poethics might be. I
will argue in what follows that a scholarly poethics connects
the doing of scholarship, with both its political, ethical and
aesthetical elements. In this respect, I want to explore how
in our engagement as scholars with openness, a specific
scholarly poethics can arise, one that enables and creates
conditions for the continual reimagining and reperforming of
the forms and relations of knowledge production.
A Poethics of Scholarship
Poetics is commonly perceived as the theory of readymade textual and literary forms—it presumes structure and
fixed literary objects. Threadgold juxtaposes this theory of
poetics with the more dynamic concept of poiesis, the act of
making or performing in language, which, she argues, better
reflects and accommodates cultural and semiotic processes
and with that the writing process itself (Threadgold 1997, 3).
For Threadgold, feminist writings in particular have examined
this concept of poiesis, rather than poetics, of textuality by
focusing on the process of text creation and the multiple
identities and positions from which meaning is derived. This
is especially visible in forms of feminist rewriting, e.g. of
patriarchal knowledges, theories and narratives, which ‘reveal
their gaps and fissures and the binary logic which structures
them’ (Threadgold 1997, 16). A poetics of rewriting then goes
beyond a passive analysis of texts as autonomous artefacts,
where the engagement with and appraisal of a text is
actively performed, becoming performative, becoming itself
a poiesis, a making; the ‘analyst’ is embodied, becoming part
of the complex socio-cultural context of meaning-making

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Janneke Adema

(Threadgold 1997, 85). Yet Threadgold emphasises that both
terms complement and denote each other, they are two sides
of the same coin; poetics forms the necessary static counterpoint to the dynamism of poiesis.
Joan Retallack moves beyond any opposition of poetics and
poiesis in her work, bringing them together in her concept of
poethics, which captures the responsibility that comes with
the formulating and performing of a poetics. This, Retallack
points out, always involves a wager, a staking of something
that matters on an uncertain outcome—what Mouffe and
Laclau have described as taking a decision in an undecideable
terrain (Mouffe 2013, 15). For Retallack a poethical attitude
thus necessarily comes with the ‘courage of the swerve’,
where, ‘swerves (like antiromantic modernisms, the civil rights
movement, feminism, postcolonialist critiques) are necessary
to dislodge us from reactionary allegiances and nostalgias’
(Retallack 2004, 3). In other words, they allow change to
take place in already determined situations. A poetics of the
swerve, of change, thus continuously unsettles our familiar
routes and notions; it is a poetics of conscious risk, of letting
go of control, of placing our inherited conceptions of ethics
and politics at risk, and of questioning them, experimenting
with them. For Retallack taking such a wager as a writer or
an artist, is necessary to connect our aesthetic registers to
the ‘character of our time’, acknowledging the complexities
and changing qualities of life and the world. Retallack initially
coined the term poethics to characterise John Cage’s
aesthetic framework, seeing it as focused on ‘making art
that models how we want to live’ (Retallack 2004, 44). The
principle of poethics then implies a practice in which ethics
and aesthetics can come together to reflect upon and
perform life’s changing experiences, whilst insisting upon our
responsibility (in interaction with the world) to guide this
change the best way we can, and to keep it in motion.
Denise Ferreira da Silva takes the concept of poethics
further to consider a new kind of speculative thinking—a
black feminist poethics—which rejects the linear and rational,
one-dimensional thought that characterises Western

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21

European philosophy and theory in favour of a fractal or fourdimensional thinking, which better captures the complexity
of our world. Complicating linear conceptions of history and
memory as being reductive, Ferreira da Silva emphasises
how they are active elements, actively performing our past,
present and future. As such, she points out how slavery and
colonialism, often misconstrued in linear thinking as bygone
remnants of our past, are actively performed in and through
our present, grounded in that past, a past foundational to
our consciousness. Using fractal thinking as a poethical tool,
Ferreira da Silva hopes to break through the formalisations
of linear thought, by mapping blackness, and modes of
colonialism and racial violence not only on time, but on various
forms of space and place, exploring them explicitly from a
four-dimensional perspective (Bradley 2016). As such, she
explains, poethical thinking, ‘deployed as a creative (fractal)
imaging to address colonial and racial subjugation, aims to
interrupt the repetition characteristic of fractal patterns’
(Ferreira da Silva 2016) and refuses ‘to reduce what exists—
anyone and everything—to the register of the object, the
other, and the commodity’ (Ferreira da Silva 2014).

(such as the closed print-based book, single authorship, linear thought, copyright,
exploitative publishing relationships) or succumb to the closures that its own
implementation (e.g. through commercial adaptations) and institutionalisation (e.g.
as part of top-down policy mandates) of necessity also implies and brings with it.
It involves an awareness that publishing in an open way directly impacts on what
research is, what authorship is, and with that what publishing is. It asks us to take
responsibility for how we engage with open access, to take a position in towards
it—towards publishing more broadly—and towards the goals we want it to serve
(which I and others have done through the concept and project of radical open
access, for example). Through open publishing we can take in a critical position,
and we can explore new formats, practices and institutions, we just have to risk it.

These three different but complementary perspectives
from the point of view of literary scholarship and practice,
albeit themselves specific and contextual, map well onto
what I would perceive a ‘scholarly poethics’ to be: a form
of doing scholarship that pays specific attention to the
relation between context and content, ethics and aesthetics;
between the methods and theories informing our scholarship
and the media formats and graphic spaces we communicate
through. It involves scholars taking responsibility for the
practices and systems they are part of and often uncritically
repeat, but also for the potential they have to perform them
differently; to take risks, to take a wager on exploring other
communication forms and practices, or on a thinking that
breaks through formalisations of thought. Especially if as part
of our intra-actions with the world and today’s society we
can better reflect and perform its complexities. A scholarly
poethics, conceptualised as such, would include forms of
openness that do not simply repeat either established forms

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The Poethics of Openness

23

References

This doesn’t mean that as part of
discussions on openness and open access,
openness has not often been perceived as
an intrinsic good, something we want to
achieve exactly because it is perceived as
an a priori good in itself, an ideal to strife
for in opposition to closedness (Tkacz
2014). A variant of this also exists, where
openness is simply perceived as ‘good’
because it opens up access to information,
without further exploring or considering why
this is necessarily a good thing, or simply
assuming that other benefits and change
will derive from there, at the moment
universal access is achieved (Harnad 2012).
1

24

Adema, Janneke. 2014. “Open Access”. In Critical Keywords for the Digital Humanities.
Lueneburg: Centre for Digital Cultures (CDC).
Adema, Janneke, and Graham Stone. 2017. “Changing Publishing Ecologies: A Landscape
Study of New University Presses and Academic-Led Publishing”. London: Jisc. http://
repository.jisc.ac.uk/6666/.
Bradley, Rizvana. 2016. “Poethics of the Open Boat (In Response to Denise Ferreira Da
Silva)”. ACCeSsions, no. 2.
Darnton, Robert. 1982. “What Is the History of Books?” Daedalus 111 (3): 65–83.
Derrida, Jacques. 1973. Speech and Phenomena, and Other Essays on Husserl’s Theory of
Signs. Northwestern University Press.
Ferreira da Silva, Denise. 2014. “Toward a Black Feminist Poethics”. The Black Scholar 44
(2): 81–97. https://doi.org/10.1080/00064246.2014.11413690.
———. 2016. ‘Fractal Thinking’. ACCeSsions, no. 2.
Fitzpatrick, Kathleen. 2011. Planned Obsolescence: Publishing, Technology, and the Future
of the Academy. NYU Press.
Hall, Gary. 2008. Digitize This Book! The Politics of New Media, or Why We Need Open
Access Now. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Harnad, Stevan. 2012. “Open Access: Gratis and Libre”. Open Access Archivangelism
(blog). 3 May 2012. http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/885-OpenAccess-Gratis-and-Libre.html.
Laclau, Ernesto. 2005. On Populist Reason. Verso.
McPherson, Tara. 2010. “Scaling Vectors: Thoughts on the Future of Scholarly
Communication”. Journal of Electronic Publishing 13 (2). http://dx.doi.org/
10.3998/3336451.0013.208.
Mouffe, Chantal. 2013. Agonistics: Thinking the World Politically. London; New York: Verso
Books.
Retallack, Joan. 2004. The Poethical Wager. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Threadgold, Terry. 1997. Feminist Poetics Poiesis, Performance, Histories. London; New
York: Routledge.
Tkacz, Nathaniel. 2014. Wikipedia and the Politics of Openness. Chicago; London:
University of Chicago Press.

Janneke Adema

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25

entangled with it—a verb rooted in the Old Norse word for
seaweed, thongull, that undulating biomass that ensnares
and is ensnared by oars and fishing nets; by hydrophones and
deep-sea internet cables; by coral and other forms of marine
life. Adapting another fragment from Haraway, we ask: ‘What
forms of life survive and flourish in these dense, imploded
zones?’ (Haraway 1994, 62).

Diffractive
Publishing
Frances
McDonald
&
Whitney
Trettien

Haraway’s ‘regenerative project’—which now extends far beyond her early work—
has been to craft a critical consciousness based on a different optical metaphor:
diffraction. In physics, a diffraction pattern is the bending of waves, especially
light and sound waves, around obstacles and through apertures. It is, Haraway
writes, ‘the production of difference patterns in the world, not just of the same
reflected—displaced—elsewhere’ (268). If reflective reading forever inscribes the
reader’s identity onto whatever text she touches, then diffractive reading sees
the intimate touching of text and reader as a contingent, dynamic unfolding of
mutually transformative affinities. To engage diffractively with an idea is to become

This question remains not only relevant but is today
increasingly urgent. When Haraway began writing about
diffraction in the late 80s and early 90s, the web was nascent;
it would be several years before Mozilla would launch its
Mosaic browser, bringing the full throttle of connectivity to
a broader public. Today, we wash in the wake of the changes
brought by these new technologies, swirling in the morass of
social media, email, Amazon, e-books, and pirated PDF libraries
that constitute our current textual ecology. Much lies at
stake in how we imagine and practise the work of swimming
through these changing tides. For Karen Barad, a friend
and colleague of Haraway’s and an advocate of diffractive
scholarship, reading and writing are ‘ethical practices’ that
must be reimagined according to an ‘ethics not of externality
but rather entanglement’ (Barad 2012). To Barad’s list of
reading and writing we here add publishing. If entanglement
has an ethics, then it behooves us as scholars to not just
describe and debate it but to transform materially the ways
we see ourselves as reading and writing together. Adding our
voices to a rising chorus that includes Janneke Adema (2015),
Kathleen Fitzpatrick (2018), Eileen Joy (2017), Sarah Kember
(2016), Tara McPherson (2018), Gary Hall (2016), Iris van der
Tuin (2014), and others working at the intersection of digital
humanities, scholarly publishing, and feminist methodologies,
we ask: how can we build scholarly infrastructures that foster
diffractive reading and writing? What kind of publishing
model might be best suited to expressing and emboldening
diffractive practices? These are big questions that must be
collectively addressed; in this short piece, we offer our own
experiences designing thresholds, an experimental digital zine,
as one potential model for digital publishing that is attuned to
the ethics of entanglement.

26

Diffractive Publishing

Over a quarter century ago, Donna Haraway observed that the grounding metaphor
for humanistic inquiry is reflection. We describe the process of interpretation as
reflecting upon an object. To learn from a text, we ask students to write reflection
pieces, which encourages them to paper their own experiences over a text’s dense
weave. For Haraway, reflection is a troubling trope for critical study because it
‘displaces the same elsewhere’—that is, it conceives of reading and writing as
exercises in self-actualisation, with the text serving as a mirrored surface upon
which the scholar might see her own reflection cast back at her, mise en abyme.
‘Reflexivity has been much recommended as a critical practice,’ she writes, ‘but my
suspicion is that reflexivity, like reflection, only displaces the same elsewhere, setting
up the worries about copy and original and the search for the authentic and really
real’ (Haraway 1997, 16).

Frances McDonald & Whitney Trettien

27

⁕ ⁕ ⁕

handwritten sticky notes, highlighted document pages, and
grainy photographs rub against one another, forming dense and shifting
thickets. the blank spaces between once-distinct districts become cluttered and
close. geographically distant realms ache to converge. the bookcase furiously
semaphores toward the far corner of the room. thin lines of coloured paper
arrive to splay across sections. the wall bursts at every seam.

Whether it be real or virtual, every research project has its own ‘wall’: a ‘dense,
imploded zone’ that is populated by the ideas, images, scenes, and sentences
that ‘stick’ to us, to use Lara Farina’s evocative phrase (2014, 33). They are the
‘encounters’ that Gilles Deleuze describes as the impetus toward work, the things
that ‘strike’ us, as Walter Benjamin puts it, like a hammer to unknown inner chords.
Although instrumental to every humanities project, this entangled web of texts and
ideas has a brutally short lifespan. The writer strives to reassert control by whittling
down its massy excesses; indeed, training to be a scholar in the humanities is in large
part learning to compress and contain the wall’s licentious sprawl. We shorten our
focus to a single period, place, or author, excise those fragments that fall outside
the increasingly narrow range of our expertise, and briskly sever any loose ends that
refuse to be tied. These regulatory measures help align our work with the temporal,
geographic, and aesthetic boundaries of our disciplinary arbiters: the journals and
university presses that publish our work, the departments that hire and tenure us.
In an increasingly tight academic marketplace, where the qualified scholars, articles,
and projects far outnumber the available positions, deviation from the standard
model can seem like risky business indeed.

of such distinguished critics as Judith Butler, Homi Bhabha,
and Fredric Jameson for their long-winded impenetrability.
Unlike its prizewinning paragraphs, the Contest’s message
was clear: the opaque abstractions that clogged the arteries
of academic writing were no longer to be tolerated.
The academy’s stylistic strip-down has served to puncture
the unseemly bloat that had disfigured its prose. But its
sweeping injunction against incomprehensibility bears with
it other casualties. As we slim and trim our texts, cutting
any tangents that distract from the argument’s main thrust,
we unwittingly excise writing’s other gaits—those twists,
roils, and scintillating leaps that Eric Hayot, in his recent
rejoinder to academic style guides, so beautifully describes
as ‘gyrations in prose’ (2014, 58). For Hayot, these stylistic
excesses occur when an author’s passion for her subject
becomes so overwhelming that it can no longer be expressed
plainly. The kinetic energy of these gyrations recalls the
dynamism of the wall; one may glimpse its digressiveness in the
meandering aside, its piecemeal architecture in the sentence
fragment, or its vaulting span in the photo quote. These
snags in intelligibility are not evidence of an elitist desire to
exclude, but are precisely the moments in which the decorous
surface of a text cracks open to offer a glimpse of the tangled
expanses beneath. To experience them as such, the reader
must sacrifice her grip on a text’s argument and allow herself
to be swept up in the muddy momentum of its dance. Caught
amidst a piece’s movements, the reader trades intellectual
insight for precarious intimacy, the ungraspable streaming of
one into another.

The institutional imperatives of compression and containment not only dictate the
structural parameters of a work—its scope and trajectory—but the very texture of
our writing. In a bid to render academic texts more comprehensible to their readers,
modern style guides advocate plain prose. Leanness, they remind us, is legibility. This
aversion to ornament was part of a larger mutiny against the scourge of obfuscation
that plagued the humanities in the latter half of the twentieth century. Between
1995 and 1998, the journal Philosophy and Literature ran a Bad Writing Contest
that took this turgid academic prose as its target, and cheerfully skewered the work

By polishing over these openings under the edict of legibility,
plain prose breeds a restrictive form of plain reading, in which
the reader’s role is to digest discrete parcels of information,
rather than move and be moved along with the rollicking
contours of a work. At stake in advocating for a plurality of
readerly and writerly practices is an ethics of criticism. The
institutional apparatuses that shape our critical practices
instruct us to erase all traces of the serendipitous gyrations
that constitute our writing and reading, and erect in their place

28

Diffractive Publishing

Frances McDonald & Whitney Trettien

29

a set of boundaries that keep our work in check. Yet our habits
of critical inquiry are irrefutably subjective and collaborative.
In an effort to move toward such a methodology, we might ask:
What forms of scholarship and knowledge become possible
when we reconceive of the spaces between readers, writers,
and texts as thresholds rather than boundaries, that is, as
contiguous zones of entanglement? How would our critical
apparatus mutate if we ascribed value to the shifting sprawl
of the wall and make public the diffractive processes that
constitute our writing and reading practices?
To put these questions into action, we have created thresholds
(http://openthresholds.org). We solicit work that a traditional
academic journal may deem unfinished, unseemly, or otherwise
unbound, but which discovers precisely in its unboundedness
new and oblique perspectives on art, culture, history, and
philosophy. Along with her piece, the author also submits
the fragments that provoked and surreptitiously steered her
work. We the editors then collaborate closely with the author
to custom-design these pieces for the platform’s split screen
architecture. The result is a more open-ended, processoriented webtext that blooms from, but never fully leaves, the
provocative juxtapositions of the author’s wall.
The split screen design aligns thresholds with a long history
of media that splits content and divides the gaze. In film, the
split screen has long been used to splice together scenes that
are temporally or spatially discontinuous. This divided frame
disrupts the illusion that the camera provides a direct feed of
information and so reveals film to be an authored and infinitely
interpretable object, each scene refracted through others.
The split screen developed under a different name in HTML:
the frame element. Now considered a contrivance due to its
overuse in the late 90s, Netscape Navigator’s development
of the frameset nonetheless marked a major development in
the history of the web. For the first time, designers could load
multiple documents in a single visual field, each with their own
independent actions and scrolling.

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Frances McDonald & Whitney Trettien

Of course, both the cinematic split screen and the HTML
frameset gesture towards a much older material threshold:
the gutter that divides the pages of the codex. Since most of
its content is presented and read linearly, we rarely consider
the book as a split form. However, many writers and poets have
played with the gutter as a signifying space. In Un coup de dés,
a late nineteenth-century poem that inspired much continental
theory and philosophy in the latter half of the twentieth
century, Stéphane Mallarmé famously uses each two-page
spread to rhetorical effect, jumping and twirling the reader’s
eye around and across the gutter. Blaise Cendrars and Sonia
Delaunay in their self-published avant-garde artist’s book La
Prose du Transsiberien (1913) similarly create a ‘simultaneous’
aesthetic that pairs image and text through an accordion
fold. These early instances have more recent cousins in the
textile art of Eve Sedgwick, the extraordinary visual poetry
of Claudia Rankine’s Citizen, and the work of artists like Fred
Hagstrom and Heather Weston, whose multidimensional books
spur new ways of looking at and thinking about texts.
Drawing inspiration from these exemplars, thresholds brings
the creative affordances of the split screen to the web, and
to scholarship. Think of it as an artist’s browser that hearkens
back to the early web; or imagine in its recto/verso design a
speculative future for the post-digital book. Here, the eye
not only flows along (with) the split screen’s vertical scroll,
but also cuts distinctive lateral lines between each piece as
the reader bends left and right through an issue, one halfscreen at a time. How the reader decides to characterize each
threshold—and how the writer and editors collaboratively
design it—determines the interpretive freight its traversal
can bear. In their poem ‘Extraneous,’ published in the first
issue, Charles Bernstein and Ted Greenwald treat it as a lens
through which their collaboratively authored text passes,
darkly. What emerges on the other side is an echo of the
original, where language, newly daubed in hot swaths of
colour, takes on the acoustic materiality of a riotous chorus. In
‘Gesture of Photographing,’ another collaboratively-authored
piece, Carla Nappi and Dominic Pettman use the threshold to
diffract the work of Vilem Flusser. Each sink into his words on

Diffractive Publishing

31

photography and emerge having penned a short creative work
that responds to yet pushes away from his ideas.
As the reader navigates horizontally through an issue,
twisting and bumping from theory to fiction to image to sound,
thresholds invites her to engage with reading and writing as
a way of making waves of difference in the world. That is, the
platform does not divide each contribution taxonomically
but rather produces an entangled line of juxtapositions and
ripples, producing what Haraway calls ‘worldly interference
patterns’ (Haraway 1994, 60). There is a place, thresholds
implicitly argues, for the fragmentary in our collecting and
collective practices; for opacity and disorientation; for the
wall’s sprawl within the more regimented systems that order
our work.
To reach this place, criticism might begin at the threshold.
The threshold is the zone of entanglement that lies betwixt
and between writing and reading, text and reader, and
between texts themselves. It is restless and unruly, its
dimensions under perpetual renegotiation. To begin here
requires that we acknowledge that criticism does not rest on
solid ground; it too is a restless and unruly set of practices
given to proliferation and digression. To begin here is to enter
into a set of generative traversals that forge fragments into
new relations that in turn push against the given limits of our
inherited architectures of knowledge. To begin here is to
relinquish the fantasy that a text or texts may ever be fully,
finally known, and reconceive of our work as a series of partial
engagements and affective encounters that participate in
texts’ constant remaking.

32

Frances McDonald & Whitney Trettien

References
Adema, Janneke. 2015. “Cutting Scholarship Together/Apart: Rethinking the Political
Economy of Scholarly Book Publishing.” In The Routledge Companion to Remix
Studies, ed. By Eduardo Navas, Owen Gallagher, and xtine burrough. London:
Routledge.
Barad, Karen. 2012. “Matter feels, converses, suffers, desires, yearns and remembers”:
Interview with Karen Barad. In New Materialism: Interviews and Cartographies, ed. by
Rick Dolphijn and Iris van der Tuin. Ann Arbor: Open Humanities Press.
Haraway, Donna. 1994. “A Game of Cat's Cradle: Science Studies, Feminist Theory, Cultural
Studies.” Configurations 2.1: 59-71.
Farina, Lara. 2014. “Sticking Together.” In Burn After Reading/The Future We Want, ed. by
Jeffrey J. Cohen, Eileen A. Joy, and Myra Seaman. Brooklyn: Punctum Books:
31-8.
Fitzpatrick, Kathleen. 2018. Generous Thinking. In-progress manuscript posted online at:
https://generousthinking.hcommons.org/.
Hall, Gary. 2016. Pirate Philosophy: For a Digital Posthumanities. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Haraway, Donna. 1997. Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium.FemaleMan_Meets_
OncoMouse: Feminism and Technoscience. London: Routledge.
Hayot, Eric. 2014. "Academic Writing, I Love You. Really, I Do." Critical Inquiry 41, no. 1
(2014): 53-77.
Joy, Eileen. 2017. “Here Be Monsters: A Punctum Publishing Primer.” Posted online: https://
punctumbooks.com/blog/here-be-monsters-a-punctum-publishing-primer/.
Kember, Sarah. 2016. “At Risk? The Humanities and the Future of Academic Publishing,”
Journal of Electronic Publishing 19.2 (Fall). Online: https://quod.lib.umich.edu/j/
jep/3336451.0019.210?view=text;rgn=main.
McPherson, Tara. 2018. Feminist in a Software Lab: Difference + Design. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press.
van der Tuin, Iris. 2014. “Diffraction as a Methodology for Feminist Onto-Epistemology: On
Encountering Chantal Chawaf and Posthuman Interpellation,” Parallax 20:3: 231-244.

Diffractive Publishing

33

34

The
Poethics of
Scholarship


Giorgetta, Nicoletti & Adema
A Conversation on Digital Archiving Practices
2015


# A Conversation on Digital Archiving Practices

A couple of months ago Davide Giorgetta and Valerio Nicoletti (both ISIA
Urbino) did an interview with me for their MA in Design of Publishing. Silvio
Lorusso, was so kind to publish the interview on the fantastic
[p-dpa.net](http://p-dpa.net/a-conversation-on-digital-archiving-practices-
with-janneke-adema/). I am reblogging it here.

* * *

[Davide Giorgetta](http://p-dpa.net/creator/davide-giorgetta/) and [Valerio
Nicoletti](http://p-dpa.net/creator/valerio-nicoletti/) are both students from
[ISIA Urbino](http://www.isiaurbino.net/home/), where they attend the Master
Course in Design for Publishing. They are currently investigating the
independent side of digital archiving practices within the scope of the
publishing world.

As part of their research, they asked some questions to Janneke Adema, who is
Research Fellow in Digital Media at Coventry University, with a PhD in Media
(Coventry University) and a background in History (MA) and Philosophy (MA)
(both University of Groningen) and Book and Digital Media Studies (MA) (Leiden
University). Janneke’s PhD thesis focuses on the future of the scholarly book
in the humanities. She has been conducting research for the
[OAPEN](http://project.oapen.org/index.php/about-oapen) project, and
subsequently the OAPEN foundation, from 2008 until 2013 (including research
for OAPEN-NL and DOAB). Her research for OAPEN focused on user needs and
publishing models concerning Open Access books in the Humanities and Social
Sciences.

**Davide Giorgetta & Valerio Nicoletti: Does a way out from the debate between
publishers and digital independent libraries (Monoskop Log, Ubuweb,
Aaaarg.org) exist, in terms of copyright? An alternative solution able to
solve the issue and to provide equal opportunities to everyone? Would the fear
of publishers of a possible reduction of incomes be legitimized if the access
to their digital publications was open and free?**

Janneke Adema: This is an interesting question, since for many academics this
‘way out’ (at least in so far it concerns scholarly publications) has been
envisioned in or through the open access movement and the use of Creative
Commons licenses. However, the open access movement, a rather plural and
loosely defined group of people, institutions and networks, in its more
moderate instantiations tends to distance itself from piracy and copyright
infringement or copy(far)left practices. Through its use of and favoring of
Creative Commons licenses one could even argue that it has been mainly
concerned with a reform of copyright rather than a radical critique of and
rethinking of the common and the right to copy (Cramer 2013, Hall
2014).1(http://p-dpa.net/a-conversation-on-digital-archiving-practices-
with-janneke-adema/#fn:1 "see footnote") Nonetheless, in its more radical
guises open access can be more closely aligned with the practices associated
with digital pirate libraries such as the ones listed above, for instance
through Aaron Swartz’s notion of [Guerilla Open
Access](https://archive.org/stream/GuerillaOpenAccessManifesto/Goamjuly2008_djvu.txt):

> We need to take information, wherever it is stored, make our copies and
share them with the world. We need to take stuff that’s out of copyright and
add it to the archive. We need to buy secret databases and put them on the
Web. We need to download scientific journals and upload them to file sharing
networks. We need to fight for Guerilla Open Access. (Swartz 2008)

However whatever form or vision of open access you prefer, I do not think it
is a ‘solution’ to any problem—such as copyright/fight—, but I would rather
see it, as I have written
[elsewhere](http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2014/11/18
/embracing-messiness-adema-pdsc14/), ‘as an ongoing processual and critical
engagement with changes in the publishing system, in our scholarly
communication practices and in our media and technologies of communication.’
And in this sense open access practices offer us the possibility to critically
reflect upon the politics of knowledge production, including copyright and
piracy, openness and the commons, indeed, even upon the nature of the book
itself.

With respect to the second part of your question, again, where it concerns
scholarly books, [research by Ronald
Snijder](https://scholar.google.com/citations?view_op=view_citation&hl=en&user=PuDczakAAAAJ&citation_for_view=PuDczakAAAAJ:u-x6o8ySG0sC)
shows no decline in sales or income for publishers once they release their
scholarly books in open access. The open availability does however lead to
more discovery and online consultation, meaning that it actually might lead to
more ‘impact’ for scholarly books (Snijder 2010).

**DG, VN: In which way, if any, are digital archiving practices stimulating
new publishing phenomenons? Are there any innovative outcomes, apart the
obvious relation to p.o.d. tools? (or interesting new projects in this
field)**

JA: Beyond extending access, I am mostly interested in how digital archiving
practices have the potential to stimulate the following practices or phenomena
(which in no way are specific to digital archiving or publishing practices, as
they have always been a potential part of print publications too): reuse and
remix; processual research and iterative publishing; and collaborative forms
of knowledge production. These practices interest me mainly as they have the
potential to critique the way the (printed) book has been commodified and
essentialised over the centuries, in a bound, linear and fixed format, a
practice which is currently being replicated in a digital context. Indeed, the
book has been fixed in this way both discursively and through a system of
material production within publishing and academia—which includes our
institutions and practices of scholarly communication—that prefers book
objects as quantifiable and auditable performance indicators and as marketable
commodities and objects of symbolic value exchange. The practices and
phenomena mentioned above, i.e. remix, versioning and collaboration, have the
potential to help us to reimagine the bound nature of the book and to explore
both a spatial and temporal critique of the book as a fixed object; they can
aid us to examine and experiment with various different incisions that can be
made in our scholarship as part of the informal and formal publishing and
communication of our research that goes beyond the final research commodity.
In this sense I am interested in how these specific digital archiving,
research and publishing practices offer us the possibility to imagine a
different, perhaps more ethical humanities, a humanities that is processual,
contingent, unbound and unfinished. How can these practices aid us in how to
cut well in the ongoing unfolding of our research, how can they help us
explore how to make potentially better interventions? How can we take
responsibility as scholars for our entangled becoming with our research and
publications? (Barad 2007, Kember and Zylinska 2012)

Examples that I find interesting in the realm of the humanities in this
respect include projects that experiment with such a critique of our fixed,
print-based practices and institutions in an affirmative way: for example Mark
Amerika’s [remixthebook](http://www.remixthebook.com/) project; Open
Humanities’ [Living Books about Life](http://www.livingbooksaboutlife.org/)
series; projects such as
[Vectors](http://vectors.usc.edu/issues/index.php?issue=7) and
[Scalar](http://scalar.usc.edu/); and collaborative knowledge production,
archiving and creation projects, from wiki-based research projects to AAAARG.

**DG, VN: In which way does a digital container influence its content? Does
the same book — if archived on different platforms, such as _Internet Archive_
, _The Pirate Bay_ , _Monoskop Log_ — still remain the same cultural item?**

JA: In short my answer to this question would be ‘no’. Books are embodied
entities, which are materially established through their specific affordances
in relationship to their production, dissemination, reception and
preservation. This means that the specific materiality of the (digital) book
is partly an outcome of these ongoing processes. Katherine Hayles has argued
in this respect that materiality is an emergent property:

> In this view of materiality, it is not merely an inert collection of
physical properties but a dynamic quality that emerges from the interplay
between the text as a physical artifact, its conceptual content, and the
interpretive activities of readers and writers. Materiality thus cannot be
specified in advance; rather, it occupies a borderland— or better, performs as
connective tissue—joining the physical and mental, the artifact and the user.
(2004: 72)

Similarly, Matthew Kirschenbaum points out that the preservation of digital
objects is:

> _logically inseparable_ from the act of their creation’ (…) ‘The lag between
creation and preservation collapses completely, since a digital object may
only ever be said to be preserved _if_ it is accessible, and each individual
access creates the object anew. One can, in a very literal sense, _never_
access the “same” electronic file twice, since each and every access
constitutes a distinct instance of the file that will be addressed and stored
in a unique location in computer memory. (Kirschenbaum 2013)

Every time we access a digital object, we thus duplicate it, we copy it and we
instantiate it. And this is exactly why, in our strategies of conservation,
every time we access a file we also (re)create these objects anew over and
over again. The agency of the archive, of the software and hardware, are also
apparent here, where archives are themselves ‘active ‘‘archaeologists’’ of
knowledge’ (Ernst 2011: 239) and, as Kirschenbaum puts it, ‘the archive writes
itself’ (2013).

In this sense a book can be seen as an apparatus, consisting of an
entanglement of relationships between, among other things, authors, books, the
outside world, readers, the material production and political economy of book
publishing, its preservation and material instantiations, and the discursive
formation of scholarship. Books as apparatuses are thus reality shaping, they
are performative. This relates to Johanna Drucker’s notion of ‘performative
materiality’, where Drucker argues for an extension of what a book _is_ (i.e.
from a focus on its specific properties and affordances), to what a book
_does_ : ‘Performative materiality suggests that what something _is_ has to be
understood in terms of what it _does_ , how it works within machinic,
systemic, and cultural domains.’ For, as Drucker argues, ‘no matter how
detailed a description of material substrates or systems we have, their use is
performative whether this is a reading by an individual, the processing of
code, the transmission of signals through a system, the viewing of a film,
performance of a play, or a musical work and so on. Material conditions
provide an inscriptional base, a score, a point of departure, a provocation,
from which a work is produced as an event’ (Drucker 2013).

So, to come back to your question, these specific digital platforms (Monoskop,
The Pirate Bay etc.) become integral aspects of the apparatus of the book and
each in their own different way participates in the performance and
instantiation of the books in their archives. Not only does a digital book
therefore differ as a material or cultural object from a printed book, a
digital object also has materially distinct properties related to the platform
on which it is made available. Indeed, building further on the theories
described above, a book is a different object every time it is instantiated or
read, be it by a human or machinic entity; they become part of the apparatus
of the book, a performative apparatus. Therefore, as Silvio Lorusso has
stated:

[![The-Post-Digital-Publishing-Archive-An-Inventory-of-Speculative-Strategies
-----Coventry-University-----June-11th-2014-21](https://i2.wp.com/p-dpa.net
/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/The-Post-Digital-Publishing-Archive-An-Inventory-
of-Speculative-Strategies-Coventry-University-June-
11th-2014-21.png)](http://p-dpa.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/The-Post-
Digital-Publishing-Archive-An-Inventory-of-Speculative-Strategies-Coventry-
University-June-11th-2014-21.png)

**DG, VN: In your opinion, can scholarly publishing, in particular self-
archiving practices, constitute a bridge covering the gap between authors and
users in terms of access to knowledge? Could we hope that these practices will
find a broader use, moving from very specific fields (academic papers) to book
publishing in general?**

JA: On the one hand, yes. Self-archiving, or the ‘green road’ to open access,
offers a way for academics to make their research available in a preprint form
via open access repositories in a relatively simple and straightforward way,
making it easily accessible to other academics and more general audiences.
However, it can be argued that as a strategy, the green road doesn’t seem to
be very subversive, where it doesn’t actively rethink, re-imagine, or
experiment with the system of scholarly knowledge production in a more
substantial way, including peer-review and the print-based publication forms
this system continues to promote. With its emphasis on achieving universal,
free, online access to research, a rigorous critical exploration of the form
of the book itself doesn’t seem to be a main priority of green open access
activists. Stevan Harnad, one of the main proponents of green open access and
self-archiving has for instance stated that ‘it’s time to stop letting the
best get in the way of the better: Let’s forget about Libre and Gold OA until
we have managed to mandate Green Gratis OA universally’ (Harnad 2012). This is
where the self-archiving strategy in its current implementation falls short I
think with respect to the ‘breaking-down’ of barriers between authors and
users, where it isn’t necessarily committed to following a libre open access
strategy, which, one could argue, would be more open to adopting and promoting
forms of open access that are designed to make material available for others
to (re) use, copy, reproduce, distribute, transmit, translate, modify, remix
and build upon? Surely this would be a more substantial strategy to bridge the
gap between authors and users with respect to the production, dissemination
and consumption of knowledge?

With respect to the second part of your question, could these practices find a
broader use? I am not sure, mainly because of the specific characteristics of
academia and scholarly publishing, where scholars are directly employed and
paid by their institutions for the research work they do. Hence, self-
archiving this work would not directly lead to any or much loss of income for
academics. In other fields, such as literary publishing for example, this
issue of remuneration can become quite urgent however, even though many [free
culture](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_culture_movement) activists (such
as Lawrence Lessig and Cory Doctorow) have argued that freely sharing cultural
goods online, or even self-publishing, doesn’t necessarily need to lead to any
loss of income for cultural producers. So in this respect I don’t think we can
lift something like open access self-archiving out of its specific context and
apply it to other contexts all that easily, although we should certainly
experiment with this of course in different domains of digital culture.

**DG, VN: After your answers, we would also receive suggestions from you. Do
you notice any unresolved or raising questions in the contemporary context of
digital archiving practices and their relation to the publishing realm?**

JA: So many :). Just to name a few: the politics of search and filtering
related to information overload; the ethics and politics of publishing in
relationship to when, where, how and why we decide to publish our research,
for what reasons and with what underlying motivations; the continued text- and
object-based focus of our archiving and publishing practices and platforms,
where there is a lack of space to publish and develop more multimodal,
iterative, diagrammatic and speculative forms of scholarship; issues of free
labor and the problem or remuneration of intellectual labor in sharing
economies etc.

**Bibliography**

* Adema, J. (2014) ‘Embracing Messiness’. [17 November 2014] available from [17 November 2014]
* Adema, J. and Hall, G. (2013) ‘The Political Nature of the Book: On Artists’ Books and Radical Open Access’. _New Formations_ 78 (1), 138–156
* Barad, K. (2007) _Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning_. Duke University Press
* Cramer, F. (2013) _Anti-Media: Ephemera on Speculative Arts_. Rotterdam : New York, NY: nai010 publishers
* Drucker, J. (2013) _Performative Materiality and Theoretical Approaches to Interface_. [online] 7 (1). available from [4 April 2014]
* Ernst, W. (2011) ‘Media Archaeography: Method and Machine versus History and Narrative of Media’. in _Media Archaeology: Approaches, Applications, and Implications_. ed. by Huhtamo, E. and Parikka, J. University of California Press
* Hall, G. (2014) ‘Copyfight’. in _Critical Keywords for the Digital Humanities_ , [online] Lueneburg: Centre for Digital Cultures (CDC). available from [5 December 2014]
* Harnad, S. (2012) ‘Open Access: Gratis and Libre’. [3 May 2012] available from [4 March 2014]
* Hayles, N.K. (2004) ‘Print Is Flat, Code Is Deep: The Importance of Media-Specific Analysis’. _Poetics Today_ 25 (1), 67–90
* Kember, S. and Zylinska, J. (2012) _Life After New Media: Mediation as a Vital Process_. MIT Press
* Kirschenbaum, M. (2013) ‘The .txtual Condition: Digital Humanities, Born-Digital Archives, and the Future Literary’. _DHQ: Digital Humanities Quarterly_ [online] 7 (1). available from [20 July 2014]
* Lorusso, S. (2014) _The Post-Digital Publishing Archive: An Inventory of Speculative Strategies_. in ‘The Aesthetics of the Humanities: Towards a Poetic Knowledge Production’ [online] held 11 June 2014 at Coventry University. available from [31 May 2015]
* Snijder, R. (2010) ‘The Profits of Free Books: An Experiment to Measure the Impact of Open Access Publishing’. _Learned Publishing_ 23 (4), 293–301
* Swartz, A. (2008) _Guerilla Open Access Manifesto_ [online] available from [31 May 2015]


Medak
Death and Survival of Dead Labor
2016


# Death and Survival of Dead Labor

by Tomislav Medak — Jan 08, 2016

![](https://schloss-post.com/content/uploads/public-
library_wuerttembergischer-kunstverein-600x450.jpg)

»Public Library. Rethinking the Infrastructures of
Knowledge Production«
Exhibition at Württembergischer Kunstverein Stuttgart, 2014

**The present-day social model of authorship is co-substantive with the
normative regime of copyright. Copyright’s avowed role is to triangulate a
balance between the rights of authors, cultural industries, and the public.
Its legal foundation is in the natural right of the author over the products
of intellectual labor. The recurrent claims of the death of the author,
disputing the primacy of the author over the work, have failed to do much to
displace the dominant understanding of the artwork as an extension of the
personality of the author.**

The structuralist criticism positing an impersonal structuring structure
within which the work operates; the hypertexual criticism dissolving
boundaries of work in the arborescent web of referentiality; or the remix
culture’s hypostatisation of the collective and re-appropriative nature of all
creativity – while changing the meaning we ascribe to the works of culture –
have all failed to leave an impact on how the production of works is
normativized and regulated.

And yet the nexus author–work–copyright has transformed in fundamental ways,
however in ways opposite to what these openings in our social epistemology
have suggested. The figure of the creator, with the attendant apotheosis of
individual creativity and originality, is nowadays more forcefully than ever
before being mobilized and animated by the efforts to expand the exclusive
realm of exploitation of the work under copyright. The forcefulness though
speaks of a deep-seated neurosis, intimating that the purported balance might
not be what it is claimed to be by the copyright advocates. Much is revealed
as we descend into the hidden abode of production.

## _Of Copyright and Authorship_

Copyright has principally an economic function: to unambiguously establish
individualized property in the products of intellectual labor. Once the legal
title is unambiguously assigned, there is a property holder with whose consent
the contracting, commodification, and marketing of the work can proceed. In
that aspect, copyright is not very different from the requirement of formal
freedom that is granted to the laborer to contract out their own labor power
as a commodity to capital, allowing then the capital to maximize the
productivity and appropriate the products of the worker’s labor – which is in
terms of Marx »dead labor.« In fact, the analogy between the contracting of
labor force and the contracting of intellectual work does not stop there. They
also share a common history.

The liberalism of rights and the commodification of labor have emerged from
the context of waning absolutism and incipient capitalism in Europe of the
seventeenth and the eighteenth century. Before the publishers and authors
could have their monopoly over the exploitation of their publications
instituted in the form of copyright, they had to obtain a privilege to print a
book from royal censors. First printing privileges granted to publishers, for
instance in early seventeenth century Great Britain, came with the burden
placed on publishers to facilitate censorship and control over the
dissemination of the growing body of printed matter in the aftermath of the
invention of movable type printing.

The evolution of regulatory mechanisms of contemporary copyright from the
context of absolutism and early capitalism receives its full relief if one
considers how peer review emerged as a self-censoring mechanism within the
Royal Academy and the Académie des sciences. [1] The internal peer review
process helped the academies maintain the privilege to print the works of
their members, which was given to them only under the condition that the works
they publish limit themselves to matters of science and make no political
statements that could otherwise sour the benevolence of the monarch. Once they
expanded to print in their almanacs, journals, and books the works of authors
outside of the academy ranks, they both expanded their scientific authority
and their regulating function to the entire nascent field of modern science.

The transition from the privilege tied to the publisher to the privilege tied
to the natural person of the author would unfold only later. In Great Britain
this occurred as the guild of printers, Stationers’ Company, failed to secure
the extension of its printing privilege and thus, in order to continue with
the business of printing books, decided to advocate a copyright for the
authors instead, which resulted in the passing of the Copyright Act of 1709,
also known as the Statute of Anne. Thus the author became the central figure
in the regulation of literary and scientific production. Not only did the
author now receive the exclusive rights to the work, the author was also made
– as Foucault has famously analyzed – the identifiable subject of scrutiny,
censorship, and political sanction by the absolutist state or the church.

And yet, although the romantic author now took center stage, copyright
regulation, the economic compensation for the work, would long remain no more
than an honorary one. Until well into the eighteenth century literary writing
and creativity in general were regarded as resulting from the divine
inspiration and not from the individual genius of the author. Money earned in
the growing business with books mostly stayed in the hands of the publishers,
while the author received an honorarium, a flat sum that served as a »token of
esteem.« [2] It was only with the increasingly vocal demand by the authors to
secure material and political independence from the patronage and authority
that they started to make claims for rightful remuneration.

## _Of Compensation and Exploitation
_

The moment of full-blown affirmation of romantic author-function marks a
historic moment of redistribution and establishment of compromise between the
right of publishers to economic exploitation of the works and the right of
authors to rightful compensation for their works. Economically this was made
possible by the expanding market for printed books in the eighteenth and the
nineteenth century, while politically this was catalyzed by the growing desire
for autonomy of scientific and literary production from the system of feudal
patronage and censorship in gradually liberalizing modern capitalist
societies. The autonomy of production was substantially coupled to the
production for the market. However, the irenic balance could not last
unobstructed. Once the production of culture and science was subsumed under
the exigencies of the market, it had to follow the laws of commodification and
competition that no commodity production can escape.

With the development of big corporation and monopoly capitalism, [3] the
purported balance between the author and the publisher, the innovator or
scientist and the company, the labor and the capital, the public circulation
and the pressures of monetization has become unhinged. While the legislative
expansions of protections, court decisions, and multilateral treaties are
legitimated on basis of the rights of creators, they have become the economic
basis for the monopolies dominating the commanding heights of the global
economy to protect their dominant position in the world market. The levels of
concentration in the industries with large portfolios of various forms of
intellectual property rights is staggering. The film industry is a US$88
billion industry dominated by six major studios. The recorded music industry
is an almost US$20 billion industry dominated by three major labels. The
publishing industry is a US$120 billion industry, where the leading ten earn
in revenues more than the next 40 largest publishing groups. Among patent
holding industries, the situation is a little more diversified, but big patent
portfolios in general dictate the dynamics of market power.

Academic publishing in particular draws a stark relief of the state of play.
It is a US$10 billion industry dominated by five publishers, financed up to
75% from the subscriptions of libraries. It is notorious for achieving extreme
year on year profit margins – in the case of Reed Elsevier regularly well over
20%, with Taylor & Francis, Springer, and Wiley-Blackwell only just lagging
behind. [4] Given that the work of contributing authors is not paid, but
financed by their institutions (provided they are employed at an institution)
and that the publications nowadays come mostly in the form of electronic
articles licensed under subscription for temporary use to libraries and no
longer sold as printed copies, the public interest could be served at a much
lower cost by leaving commercial closed-access publishers out of the equation.
However, given the entrenched position of these publishers and their control
over the moral economy of reputation in academia, the public disservice that
they do cannot be addressed within the historic ambit of copyright. It
requires politicization.

## _Of Law and Politics_

When we look back on the history of copyright, before there was legality there
was legitimacy. In the context of an almost completely naturalized and
harmonized global regulation of copyright the political question of legitimacy
seems to be no longer on the table. An illegal copy is an object of exchange
that unsettles the existing economies of cultural production. And yet,
copyright nowadays marks a production model that serves the power of
appropriation from the author and market power of the publishers much more
than the labor of cultural producers. Hence the illegal copy is again an
object begging the question as to what do we do at a rare juncture when a
historic opening presents itself to reorganize how a good, such as knowledge
and culture, is produced and distributed in a society. We are at such a
juncture, a juncture where the regime regulating legality and illegality might
be opened to the questioning of its legitimacy or illegitimacy.

1. Jump Up For a more detailed account of this development, as well as for the history of printing privilege in Great Britain, see Mario Biagioli: »From Book Censorship to Academic Peer Review,« in: _Emergences:_ _Journal for the Study of Media & Composite Cultures _12, no. 1 [2002], pp. 11–45.
2. Jump Up The transition of authorship from honorific to professional is traced back in Martha Woodmansee: _The Author, Art, and the Market: Rereading the History of Aesthetics_. New York 1996.
3. Jump Up When referencing monopoly markets, we do not imply purely monopolistic markets, where one company is the only enterprise selling a product, but rather markets where a small number of companies hold most of the market. In monopolistic competition, oligopolies profit from not competing on prices. Rather »all the main players are large enough to survive a price war, and all it would do is shrink the size of the industry revenue pie that the firms are fighting over. Indeed, the price in an oligopolistic industry will tend to gravitate toward what it would be in a pure monopoly, so the contenders are fighting for slices of the largest possible revenue pie.« Robert W. McChesney: _Digital Disconnect: How Capitalism Is Turning the Internet Against Democracy_. New York 2013, pp. 37f. The immediate effect of monopolistic competition in culture is that the consumption is shaped to conform to the needs of the large enterprise, i.e. to accommodate the economies of scale, narrowing the range of styles, expressions, and artists published and promoted in the public.
4. Jump Up Vincent Larivière, Stefanie Haustein, and Philippe Mongeon: »The Oligopoly of Academic Publishers in the Digital Era,« in: _PLoS ONE_ 10, no. 6 [June 2015]: e0127502, doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0127502.

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[Tomislav Medak](https://schloss-post.com/person/tomislav-medak/),
Zagreb/Croatia — Performing Arts, Solitude fellow 2013–2015

Tomislav Medak is a philosopher with interests in contemporary political
philosophy, media theory and aesthetics. He is coordinating the theory program
and publishing activities of the Multimedia Institute/MAMA (Zagreb/Croatia),
and works in parallel with the Zagreb-based theatre collective BADco.


 

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