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
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?
16
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
The Poethics of Openness
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.
18
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
20
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
The Poethics of Openness
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
22
Janneke Adema
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
The Poethics of Openness
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).
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.
30
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.