Navas, Gallagher, Burrough 2015

Routledge Companion to Remix Studies (2015)

Janneke Adema, "Cutting Scholarship Together/Apart: Rethinking the Political Economy of Scholarly Book Publishing"

“How can we account for our own ethical entanglements as scholars in the becoming of the book?” (258)

“explores how remix and the cut can be used as part of a posthuman- ist performative framework to question issues of quality, fixity, and authorship/authority— essentialist and inherently humanist notions on which a great deal of the print-based academic institution continues to be based.” (258)

“remix, as a form of ‘differential cutting,’ can be a means to intervene in and rethink humanities knowledge production — with respect to the political economy of book publishing and the commodification of scholarship into knowledge objects — opening up and enabling a potential alternative politics of the book” (258-9)

“scholarly book functions as an apparatus that cuts the processes of scholarly creation and becoming into authors, scholarly objects, and a separate observed world. Drawing atten- tion to the processual and unstable nature of the book instead, this contribution will focus on the book’s critical and political potential to question these cuts and to disturb existing scholarly practices and institutions.” (259)

Naval, distinction between copying and cutting; after mechanical reproduction, sampling became a meta-activity, taking from an archive of representations of the world rather than from the world itself — cultural citation that is strictly conceptual

new materialists would push this beyond “cultural logic operating at the level of representations” and see it “as always already a material practice disturbing the intervening in the world” (259)

“remixes as representations are not just mirrors or allegories of the world but direct interventions in the world. In this respect, both copying and cutting are performative, in the sense that they change the world, they alter and disturb it.” — language and matter are entangled, no separation — so we are responsible for the agential cuts we make, the ways we entangle or cut self and others

“Although not enacted directly by us, but by the larger material arrangement of which we are a part (cuts are made from the inside), we are still accountable to the cuts that we help enact: there are new possibilities and ethical obligations to act (cut) at every moment.” (259)

“How can remix and the cut performatively critique established (humanist) notions such as authorship, authority, quality, and fixity underlying scholarly book publishing?” (263)

“So, how can we make ethical, critical cuts in our scholarship while simultaneously promoting a politics of the book that is open and responsible to change, difference, and exclusions? “ (263)

book as disposition or apparatus

“In what way has the apparatus of the book—consisting of an entanglement of rela- tionships between amongst others authors, books, the outside world, readers, the mate- rial production and political economy of book publishing and the discursive formation of scholarship—executed its power relations through cutting in a certain way? As I will argue, it has mostly operated via a logic of the cut that favors neat separations between books and authors (as human creators) and readers; that cuts out fixed scholarly book objects of an established quality and originality; and that pastes this system together via a system of strict ownership and copyright rules.” (263)

“underscore the need to see and understand the book as a process of becoming, as an entanglement of plural (human and nonhuman) agencies.” (264)