Thoburn 2016

Thoburn, Nicholas. Anti-Book (2016)

Exploiting this function, Amazon Noir comprised a software script that would obtain a book’s entire text via repeated searches, substituting the last words of one search for the first words of the next.

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Amazon Noir served to articulate the inequity of the privatization of the nonscarce resource of digital text, while taking advantage of the means by which the technological affordances of digital text are mobilized to excite consumer desire.

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What is a communism of writing and publishing that is concerned not only with the content and meaning of text but also with

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the media forms and social relations by which text is produced, circulated, and consumed? More simply, what is a communism of textual matter?

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…if we do want to bring content and form together in a textual politics that is a weave of the two, as is the aim of the experimental works explored in Anti-Book, such a politics needs to be attentive to two aspects of this relation. First, it must reflexively attend to aspects of a work’s material conditions that it is not able to critically refashion, where content comes into relation with media form as critical opposition. Second, in instances when content and form come into a generative and political relation of codetermination, we should attend to the specificities of a text’s media forms, the ways that its conceptual registers and political aims are extended, interrogated, swallowed up, or exceeded in the specific sociomaterial relations and forms by which it is manifest in the world.

xiii 1. One Manifesto Less: Material Text and the Anti- Book

Anti-Book, rather, is a critique of the book that is immanent to its medium or to the forms of textual media more broadly conceived.

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An anti-book is a work of writing and publishing that critically inter- rogates its media form. That is to say, it is a self-reflexive textual work. But reflexivity here is not confined to the domain of text and literary form. Anti-books test, problematize, and push to the limits their full materiality, or significant aspects thereof, where the materiality of a book comprises the dynamic interplay of textual content and media form, a critical and generative relation operative at scales both concrete and abstract.

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Anti-books articulate the encounter between communist thought and experimental practices of writing and publishing, where these encounters are not contained within social move- ments but emerge—albeit in a fragmentary and occasional fashion—across the terrain of textual media, a terrain where the commodity form plays a role no less commanding than it does for the audi…

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As to the sociohistorical context of the concept, the anti-book might be said to have troubled textual media since the invention of the Gutenberg let- terpress and the generalization of print, but it comes to the fore and takes on particular qualities in the digital media environment, as anxiety about the “future of the book” and the proliferation of communication platforms impress on collective consciousness the material specificities of text.

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If there is a shared ground to these different disciplines and perspec- tives, it is that any written work is a product of the interplay between textual content (the words, concepts, rhetorical structures, literary forms, etc., that are read in the work) and medium (the affordances, qualities, and constraints of its physical materialization and structure as artifact, technology, and social and institutional form).

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The anti-book is not a distinct body of practices and works but the experimental condition of communist publishing, where communist publishing is not a circumscribed field of social movement media but designates a potential—a potential charged with conflict and politics, certainly—of all textual production.

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…self- differing medium, I would like to provide an illustration with Kostelanetz’s irregular serial publication Assembling (1970–87), which he founded with Henry James Korn as something of a hybrid of magazine and book (they use both terms to describe it).

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…a commitment to publish all and any submis- sions the editors received, following each issue’s invitation to writers and artists to submit, ready for publication, “otherwise unpublishable” works on paper (for the first issue: up to four sheets of 8.5" × 11" in multiples of one thousand for an edition of the same number, one of which was Ed Ruscha’s “Chocolate,” a thousand sheets of paper marked with a smudge of that confection). 42In this way the contributors were compelled to take on many of the practical and design functions previously the preserve of the publisher, so becoming their own self-publishers as they learned the reproduction methods most conducive to their work.

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With these characteristics in mind, we might understand Assembling as a work that held together simultaneously the processes of assembly and disassembly. Contributions were pulled into each bound issue, while the concentrating functions of editorial, publishing infrastructure, and copy- right were pushed out or distributed to contributors and the unity of form and content was found in the magazine’s very disunity,…

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If I seek to fashion an anti orientation and sensibility from the domain of the bookwork, it is to draw out and develop the bookwork of communism—though I make this point with the strong proviso that the conjunction contains an impulse toward nonidentity.

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… communism and bookwork does not designate a specific body of works, nor a depoliticized aestheticization of communist publishing, but interference between the two domains toward an expanded understanding of the materiality of communist textual expression.

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…the anti breaks with this mode of political writing that has for so long, and all too easily, been adopted by leftists that it is as if it is the natural form for self-consciously political writing to take. What, then, is this textual form, and what is wrong with it? In its revolutionary or avant-garde mode, the manifesto is a purloined textual form, appropriated from the institutions of state and church where it served as a means to disseminate injunctions backed by force. As with its form in such institutions, the revolutionary manifesto articulates authority, and yet this authority is of a peculiar kind, for it is wholly fabricated, having no basis in existent institutional power.

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The modern manifesto works by constructing a political subject through the diagnosis and presentation of the subject’s historical emer- gence and future actualization. In turn, in a performative loop, this pro- jected future flourishing of the subject lends authority to the text in the present where the subject is lacking. The manifesto works, in other words, in the future perfect; its claim to authority in the present will have been sanctioned by the actualization of its subject in the future. It is a perfor- mance for which a certain theatricality—the staging of the authority that it lacks—is at once necessary and necessarily ever excised.

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…this describes communication as command, the reduction of expression to the linear exchange of unambiguous signals, whereby the signifying field is flooded with clichés and order-words, a “psychomechanics” of automatic response. 120But it also entails a popular compulsion to communicate: “Repressive forces don’t stop people express- ing themselves, but rather force them to express themselves.” 121A dozen years before the rise to dominance of the compulsive communication of social media, this is an impressionistic yet prescient observation. Draw- ing on it, Hardt and Negri argue that the diffusion of social media and its integration with socioeconomic life have created a dominant subjective form of the “mediatized,” a fragmented and distracted capitalist subjec- tivity absorbed in a perpetual present of communication, participation, feedback, and attention.

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In the ever additive pursuit of links, likes, comments, followers, friends, shares, page views, and so on, the act and quantitative volume of communication come to displace what is communicated, a kind of general equivalence of indiscriminate communication…

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The book’s very slowness, she argues, enacts the cut in circuits of compulsive communication that enables thought to emerge, a structure of intervention that she intriguingly associates with the “slow- down,” from the classical repertoire of workplace struggle: “As an object whose form installs delays in sampling and syndication and whose content demands postponed gratification, the book mobilizes the gap of mediacy so as to stimulate thought.”

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…is the medium of the book today really so slow? The intermediation of textual media and the broader communicative patterns of contemporary capitalism are such that books cannot be understood as actually so separate from the compulsions and anxieties of the social media field, the “temporal take-over of theory [which] displaces sustained critical thought, replacing it with the sense that there isn’t time for thinking.”137 Insofar as books, particularly those by writers with high social media pro- files, are reviewed and promoted in social media and marketed through the promotional algorithms of Amazon, Facebook, and the like, the book demands to be understood less as a cut from communicative capitalism than as a particularly effective vehicle for extending it, multiplying con- nectivity, feeding communicative compulsions, and exhausting readers (and authors too, no doubt) in equal measu…

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…the printed book was the first uniform and repeatable mass industrial commodity—not comprising measured quantities of indeterminate volumes, as Benedict Anderson clarifies the point with regard to other early industrial com- modities such as textiles or sugar, but a volume in its own right, a distinct and self-contai…

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…e mechanical press enabled a transformation in the organization of labor as work tasks took on the quality of the assembly line, subdivided according to roles and parts in the production chain, and subject to the dictates of productivity that the conjunction of mechanism and time enforced…

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…it was the copperplate engraving of the printing trade (and not, say, the textile mill) to which Charles Babbage turned to illustrate the logic of modern industrial production (in his theories of mechanical process and the division of labor that informed M…

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