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#The Carrier Bag Theory of Non-Fiction
##By Janneke Adema & Gary Hall
This plural-voiced presentation will focus on what publishing does rather than what publishing is. It will intervene in the debate over publishing in the post-truth era by shifting the focus away from a hegemonic modular and object-centered understanding, toward a more relational model of posthumanities publishing. Here research, reading, writing, and the published text are understood as emerging from the intra-actions of a heterogeneous constellation of both human and nonhuman actors, many of which are ignored by existing theories of media. Drawing boundaries – whether it involves conceptualizing information containers via the figure of the net, leaf or carrier bag – is unavoidable from such a posthumanistic perspective. Yet for us, it is a matter of drawing these boundaries differently, in a manner that does not impose on such relational intra-actions a version of capitalism’s old, closed, pre-digital logic.
This presentation will discuss posthumanities publishing experiments that have emphasized different forms of relationality – forms that do not revolve primarily around the published text-as-object, or indeed the individual human author-as-subject. In discussing these publishing experiments it will show how strategizing publishing in terms of urgent and non-urgent, fast and slow can be unhelpful: the art of critique requires its own pace.
Janneke Adema (UK) is a Research Fellow at the Centre for Postdigital Cultures at Coventry University. In her research, she explores the future of scholarly communications and experimental forms of knowledge production, where her work incorporates processual and performative publishing, radical open access, scholarly poethics, media studies, book history, cultural studies, and critical theory. She explores these issues in depth in her various publications, but also by supporting a variety of scholar-led, not-for-profit publishing projects, including the Radical Open Access Collective, Open Humanities Press, and Post Office Press (POP). You can follow her research, as it develops, on openreflections.wordpress.com.
Gary Hall (UK) is Professor of Media in the Faculty of Arts & Humanities at Coventry University, UK, where he directs the Centre for Postdigital Cultures and its research studio The Post Office, which brings together media theorists, practitioners, activists, and artists. Recent publications include The Inhumanist Manifesto (Techne Lab, 2017), Pirate Philosophy (MIT Press, 2016) and The Uberfication of the University (Minnesota UP, 2016). He is currently completing a monograph titled Liberalism Must Be Defeated for the new Media:Art:Write:Now series Joanna Zylinska is editing for Open Humanities Press.