Chapter 1: Collectivities and Methods

Being Book

What does it mean to publish? Put simply, publishing means making something public (from the Latin publicare) but there is a lot more at stake, not simply concerning what we publish and for whom, but how we publish. It is inherently a social and political process, and builds on wider infrastructures that involve various communities and publics, and as such requires reflexive thinking about the socio-technical systems we use to facilitate production and distribution, including the choice of specific tools and platforms. In other words, publishing entails understanding the wider infrastructures that shape it as a practice and cultural form.

This book is an intervention into these concerns, emerging out of a particular history and experimental practice often associated with collective struggle. It is shaped by the collaborative efforts of various collectives involved in experimental publishing, operating both within and beyond academic contexts (and hopefully serving to undermine the distinction between them), all invested in the process of how to publish outside of the mainstream commercial and institutional norms. So-called "predatory publishing" has become the default business model for much academic publishing, designed to lure prospective and career-minded researchers into a restrictive model that profits from the payment of fees for low quality services. For the most part, academics are unthinkingly complicit, compelled by a research culture that values metrics and demands productivity above all else, and tend not to consider the means of publishing as intimately connected to the argument of their papers. As a result there is often a disjunction between form and content.

Public-ation

Despite its apparent recuperation by the mainstream, the ethics of Free/Libre and Open Source Software (FLOSS) provides the foundation for our approach, as it places emphasis on the freedom to study, modify, and share information. These remain core values for any publishing project that seeks to maximise its reach and use while enabling re-use within broader, expandable communities. FLOSS and experimental publishing alike address the intersection of technology and sociality, enabling communities to constitute themselves as publics – not only through speaking and acting in public, but by constructing their own platforms, what Christopher M. Kelty has referred to as a "recursive public."

By and large, distribution of academic publications remains organised behind paywalls and through reputation or prestige economies, dominated by major commercial publishers in the Global North. When adopted, open access often remains controlled by select companies operating oligopolies to safeguard profit margins and market dominance. Unsurprisingly, the widespread adoption of open access principles in academic publishing – once intended to democratize knowledge – has become a new profit engine for publishers. In their hands, open access serves as a smokescreen for business as usual, much like greenwashing for the environment.

This book offers a different approach to publishing production and distribution – one less extractive in its use of resources. Our approach is grounded in collective working practices and shared values that push back against dominant big tech/corporations and the drive toward seamless interfaces and scale-up efficiency. Crucially, it addresses the disjunction between the critical rigour of academic texts and and the uncritical production modes that sustain them By criticality, we mean going beyond a criticism of conventional publishing to acknowledge the ways in which we are implicated at all levels in the choices we make when engaging with publishing practices. This includes not only the tools we use – to design, write, review, and edit – but also the broader infrastructures such as the platforms and servers through which they operate. This reflexivity has guided our approach throughout the project: moving beyond the notion of the book as a discrete object toward conceiving it as a relational assemblage in which its constituent parts mutually depend on and transform one another in practice.

We have adopted the phrase "publishing as collective infrastructure" as our title to stress these wider relational properties and how power is distributed as part of the hidden substrate – including tools and devices but also logistical operations, shared standards, and laws, as Keller Easterling has put it. Infrastructure allows information to invade public space, she argues – interestingly, just as architecture was killed by the book with the introduction of the Gutenberg printing press. This is why we consider it important to not only expose infrastructure's workings but also to acquire the necessary technical and conceptual skills to build infrastructures differently.

Easterling and others recognise that infrastructure has become a medium of information and a mode of governance exercised through actions that determine how objects and content are organised and circulated. Susan Leigh Star has also emphasised that "infrastructure is a fundamentally relational concept," operationalised through practices and wider ecologies. Put simply, infrastructures involve "boring things," and the trick of the tech industry is to make these operations barely noticeable – so in this sense, they are ideological, as the underlying structures seem natural. Tools such as word processors, for example, do not just allow us to produce content but also organise it into particular forms and styles, auto-correcting our expression through the epistemic norms encoded in the software. The infrastructures of publishing are powerful in this way, as they distribute information on the page through words and, at the same time, through the wider operating systems that shape how we write and read. If we are to reinvent academic publishing, this must occur at every layer and scale – what we might call a "full-stack" transformation – and must include the social and cultural aspects that technology both influences and is influenced by. Here we reference "full stack feminism," which calls for rethinking how digital systems are developed by applying the principles of intersectional feminism – itself an infrastructural critique of method – to critically engage with all layers of implementation.

Background-foreground

In summary, the book you are reading is a book about publishing a book, a tool for thinking and making one differently that draws attention to wider structures and recursions. It sets out to acknowledge and register its own process of coming into being – as an onto-epistemological object so to speak – and to highlight the interconnectedness of its contents and the multiple processes and forms through which it takes shape in becoming book.

Given these concerns, we find it perverse that academic books remain predominantly written by individual authors and distributed by publishers as fixed objects in time and space. It would be more in keeping with technological affordances to stress collaborative authorship, community peer review and annotation, and other messy realities of production. This would allow versions to develop over time, as Janneke Adema argues, "an opportunity to reflect critically on the way the research and publishing workflow is currently (teleologically and hierarchically) set up, and how it has been fully integrated within certain institutional and commercial settings." An iterative approach would suggest other possibilities that draw publishing and research processes closer together, entangling the divisions of labour between writers, editors, designers, and software developers in non-linear workflows and interactions. Through the sharing of resources and their open modification, generative possibilities emerge that break protectionist conventions perpetuated by tired academic procedures (and equally tired academics) assuming standardised knowledge production imparted with reductive input/output logic.

Our approach is clearly not new. It draws on multiple influences – from the radical publishing tradition of small independent presses and artist books to other experimental interventions into research cultures and pedagogy. We might immodestly point to some of our own previous work, including Aesthetic Programming – a book about software, imagined as software itself. It draws upon the practice of forking, through which programmers are able to make changes and submit merge requests to incorporate updates to software using version control repositories such as GitLab. The book explores how the concept of forking can inspire new writing practices by offering all content as an open resource, inviting other researchers to fork copies, customise versions with new references, reflections, and even additional chapters – all open for modification and re-use. By encouraging others to produce new versions in this way, we aim to challenge publishing conventions and harness digital technologies' collective affordances. Wider infrastructures prove crucial for understanding how alternatives emerge from the need to configure and maintain more sustainable and equitable publishing networks sensitive to all contributors (readers, writers, and programmers alike). All this opposes academic conventions that require books to remain fixed in time, bound by narrow attribution and copyright rules.

The collaborative workshops co-organised by the Digital Aesthetics Research Center at Aarhus University and the Berlin-based Transmediale festival for art and digital culture provide a further example of how this approach plays out in practice. Since 2012, these workshops have attempted interventions into how academic research is conducted and disseminated. Participants are encouraged not only to share their research questions and offer critical feedback to each other through an embodied peer review process, but also to engage with the conditions for producing and disseminating their research as a shared intellectual resource.

The 2023 Minor Tech workshop made these concerns explicit, exploring alternatives to big (or major) tech by highlighting institutional hosting at both the in-person event and online. Thus, the publishing platform developed for the workshop served a pedagogic function, enabling thinking and learning within the wider socio-technical infrastructure. Building on this, the subsequent Content/Form workshop further developed this approach, working in collaboration with Systerserver and In-grid. Using the ServPub project as a technical infrastructure grounding the pedagogy, we were able to exemplify how tools and practices shape our writing, whether acknowledged or not. Subsequent chapters detail the process of setting up the server, but for now it is important to note how its presence in the space of the workshop helped emphasise the material conditions for collective working and autonomous publishing – for publishing as collective infrastructure.

Self-hosted servers

The server needs to be set up but also requires care, quite differently to how care has become weaponised in mainstream institutions. As Nishant Shah describes, care has become something that institutions purport to provide through endless policies and promises of well-being and support, but without threatening the structures of power producing these needs in the first place. In our case, we would argue for something closer to "pirate care," in which the coming together of care and technology can question "the ideology of private property, work and metrics." In this sense, care comes closer to the work of feminist scholars such as Maria Puig de La Bellacasa, who draws attention to relations that "maintain and repair a world so that humans and non-humans can live in it as well as possible in a complex life-sustaining web."

Feminist servers follow these principles, where practices of care and maintenance are understood as acts of collective responsibility. With this in mind, we engage more fully with affective infrastructures underpinned by intersectional and feminist methodologies. Systerserver, for instance, operates as a feminist, queer, and anti-patriarchal network that prioritises care and maintenance, offers services and hosting to its community, and acts as a space to learn system administration skills while inspiring others to do the same. Our further inspiration comes from "A Transversal Network of Feminist Servers" (ATNOFS), a project formed around intersectional, feminist, ecological servers whose communities exchanged ideas and practices through a series of meetings in 2022. The publication that emerged from these meetings was released in a manner that reflects the collective ethos of the project. A limited number of copies were printed and distributed through the networks of participants and designed to be easily printed and assembled at home, thus reinforcing commitment to collaboration and access. More on this project is included in the following chapter, but it is worth noting that the project adressed the need for federated support for self-hosted and self-organised computational infrastructures across Europe although the UK was notably absent. Indeed, part of our motivation for ServPub is to address the perceived need to develop a parallel community around experimental publishing and affective infrastructures in London.

We hope it is clear by now that our intention for this publication is not to valorise feminist servers or free and open-source culture, but to stress how technological and social forms converge to expose power relations. This aligns with the position that Stevphen Shukaitis and Joanna Figiel elaborate in "Publishing to Find Comrades," a phrase which they borrow from Surrealist André Breton. They emphasise not publishing pre-existing knowledge for fixed readers, but working towards developing social conditions for the co-production of meaning and action.

The openness of open publishing is thus not to be found with the properties of digital tools and methods, whether new or otherwise, but in how those tools are taken up and utilized within various social milieus. [...]

Thus, publishing is not something that occurs at the end of a process of thought, a bringing forth of artistic and intellectual labor, but rather establishes a social process where this may further develop and unfold.

In this sense, the organization of the productive process of publishing could itself be thought to be as important as what is produced.

We agree. The process of making a book is not merely a way to communicate contents but to invent organisational forms with wider social and political purpose. Can the same be said of the ServPub project and our book? That's our hope. Attention to infrastructure proves significant here – as do the affordances of our tools – enabling reflection on divisions of labour, the conditions of production, the dependencies of support networks, and the sustainability of our practice as academics and/or cultural workers. Moreover, the political impulse for our work draws upon the view that the tools of oppression offer limited scope to examine that oppression, making their rejection essential for genuine change in publishing practices. Here, of course, we paraphrase Audre Lorde.

Caption: A screenshot of Etherpad

As for the specific tools for this book, we have used Etherpad for drafting our texts, a free and open source writing software which allows us to collaborate and write together asynchronously. As an alternative to established proprietary writing platforms that harvest data, a pad allows for a different paradigm for the organisation and development of projects and other related research tasks. To explore the public nature of writing, Etherpad makes the writing process visible, as anyone of us can see how the text evolves through additions, deletions, modifications, and reordering. One of its features is the timeline function (called Timeslider in the top menu bar), which allows users to track version history and re-enact the process performatively. This transparency over the sociality and temporality of form not only shapes interaction among writers but also potentially engages unknown readers in accessing the process, before and after the book itself. Another feature of a pad is that authors are identifiable through colours, usernames are optional and writing is anonymous by default. Martino Morandi has described this as "organisational writing," quoting Michel Callon’s description of "writing devices that put organisation-in-action into words," and how writing in this way collectively "involves conflict and leads to intense negotiation; and such collective work is never concluded."

Logistical operations

Apart from writing the book and drawing attention to its organisational form, we are collectively involved in all aspects of its making. The production process – including writing and peer review, copyediting, and design – is reflected in our choice of tools and platforms, well as the constitution of the collectives involved. Using MediaWiki software and web-to-print layout techniques, ServPub circumvents standard academic workflows, conflating traditional roles of writers, editors, reviewers, designers, developers, and publishers alongside with technological affordances. To put it plainly, this means rejecting proprietary software such as Adobe Creative Cloud and designing by other means – as indicated by the ironic naming of Creative Crowds (CC), part of our working group. Indeed, the distributed nature of our endeavour is reflected in the combinations of those involved, directly and indirectly, across different entities (or what we refer to as chosen dependencies) providing the necessary skills and support. This includes building on the work of others developing tools such as various "wiki-to-print" and "wiki2print" iterations, not least involving CC, which In-grid have further adapted as "wiki4print" for this book. The book object is just one output of a complex set of interactions and exchanges of knowledge across time and space.

As mentioned, the divisions of labour are somewhat collapsed, and the activities that make up the publishing pipeline are reinvented in relation to the various tools and the platforms they support. This is inevitably challenging, especially with such a diverse group of people involved, each bringing distinct experiences, positionalities, and life/employment situations. One of the many challenges of this project has been accounting for these differences, including the complexities of unpaid and paid labour. We have tried to address or acknowledge the discomfort associated with the project throughout our meetings. Perhaps this is particularly important when engaging grassroots collectives who often remain suspicious of academia as a zone of privilege without recognising other factors such as cultural differences and rising precarity in the sector.

Discomfort is central to ServPub praxis, emerging as we navigated complex questions related to reputation hierarchies, accreditation, and institutional infrastructures supporting the work. Challenges include uneven access to resources, disparities in institutional support, and the ongoing negotiation of additional labour – which reveal some of the power struggles that individuals/collectives face within their own particular situations, even as they remain committed to the project. All embrace feminist methodologies, though interpretations differ. Language itself is a destabilising factor, as not all contributors are native English speakers, creating subtle miscommunications and moments that demand continuous trust, open communication, and negotiation of meaning. Consensus-building within this diverse project entails balancing diverse expectations and end-goals, from contributing to community and personal research interests to advancing academic careers. Issues are further complicated by the politics of documentation and attribution, as contributors seek fair representation of individual and collective labour while remaining vigilant against replicating extractive academic norms and hierarchies. Rather than gloss over the inevitable contradictions, we have tried to approach them openly, slowing collective decision-making and creating space for open dialogue, to foster solidarity and transform tensions into mutual learning and collective growth.

In Shukaitis and Figiel's article, these tensions emerge as questions of access to resources and reliance on forms of free labour in cultural work – though they are mindful not to reduce everything to financial remuneration. Mirroring common practices in the arts, they highlight how unseen, unpaid labour underpins academic publishing, particularly peer review process, and how certain forms of labour are valorised over others. We must carefully consider the divisions of labour in publishing, attending to how roles and subject positions are shaped by intersectional structures of race, gender, class, and other forms of oppression.

This attentiveness to the social and material relations within publishing – as a means of establishing new social relations and engaging critically with infrastructure – resonates with what Fred Moten and Stefano Harney have described as the "logisticality of the undercommons." In The Undercommons, they show how logistics – the invisible infrastructures that move people, goods, and information – are central to how institutions function under global capitalism. The undercommons refers to spaces or modes of being that exist outside of formal institutions like universities or states. Although we cannot claim to be part of the undercommons, we learn from its ways of knowing, relating, and organising that avoid reproducing existing power structures. This also echoes David Graeber's rejection of academic elitism in favour of embracing lived experience and collective imagination, bringing to mind Jack Halberstam’s articulation of "low theory" in The Queer Art of Failure as a way to rethink failure and critique capitalism and engage theory from the margins, rather than from the rigid and legitimated systems of knowledge often published in academic journals. These ideas help us to reflect on how to share resources, how to circulate our ideas, and how to choose our dependencies without reproducing the structures of power-knowledge associated with academic publishing.

Minor publishing

As the publisher of Harney and Moten's work – and this book – Minor Compositions follows such an approach. Its naming resonates here too, alluding to Deleuze & Guattari's Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature. As mentioned, we previously used this reference for our "minor tech" workshop and followed the three main characteristics identified in Deleuze and Guattari's essay, namely deterritorialization, political immediacy, and collective value. As well as exploring our shared interests and understanding of minor tech in terms of subject matter, we sought to implement these operational principles in practice. This maps onto our book project, with its small scale production and use of ServPub infrastructure to prepare the publication and challenge some of the journal production and conference proceeding models.

Stevphen Shukaitis succinctly explains the Minor Compositions publishing project as deriving "not from a position of ‘producer consciousness’ ('we’re a publisher, we make books') but rather from a position of protagonist consciousness ('we make books because it is part of participating in social movement and struggle')." Aside from the allusion to minor literature, the naming also makes an explicit connection to autonomist post-Marxism, building on the notion of collective intelligence, or what Marx referred to, in "Fragment on Machines," as general (or mass) intellect. The idea of general intellect remains a useful concept for us as it describes the convergence of technological expertise and social intellect, or general social knowledge, and recognition that although the introduction of machines under capitalism broadly oppresses workers, they also offer potential liberation from these conditions. The same holds for infrastructure, as we have argued.

When it comes to publishing, our aim has been to extend its potential beyond producing books as fixed objects generating surplus value for publishers, instead exploring how learning and thinking with others might establish new social relations. Our interviews with Open Book Futures organisers (our sponsors), reveal that working together is a way to learn together, a way to share skills and knowledge, often taken from experience of computational practice and then applied to publishing, trying to think outside of the established conventions of both. This holds even when publishing practices remain relatively unknown, as In-grid identified. Systerserver, on the other hand, build on their experience making zines for technical documentation The combination of our experiences inspires speculation on new forms and brings us back to "composition" (or recomposition) – emphasising that power in the form of infrastructure does transforms not through evolution but through struggles arising from how labour is technically arranged. Our point is that what we refer to as academic publishing comes with a set of conventions that oppose radical self-organisation.

Radical referencing is a good example of this, both addressing the canon and amplifying voices typically excluded from discussion. The book takes this seriously, diverting from reliance on big-name academics – recognising that ideas evolve organically through everyday conversations and encounters. The final chapter explores this in detail, revealing how hierarchies of knowledge are reinforced through referencing and the cultural capital attached to certain fashionable theorists. There, we are introduced to Celia Lury's "epistemic infrastructure" – showing how organisational structures shape processes of knowledge production – and Sara Ahmed’s uncompromising intervention in the politics of referencing, in which they choose to exclude white men to somewhat balance the books. If we are to take an intersectional approach, this requires tactics to address infrastructures that the privilege some names over others.

To continue with a brief overview of the book's structure, we combine practical description with a discussion of the implications of our approach. The “Preface” explains the project's context in more detail – how it arises from shared commitments to open access book publishing. Not least, this situates our work within broader interests that devalue subjective, embodied, community-rooted, and non-Western epistemic traditions. In “Being Book”, we outline our motivations and attention to infrastructure as a means to expose some of the power relations inherent in book production. We hope it’s clear by now that our idea is to reject the conservative impulses of academic publishing and instead work towards what we refer to as autonomous publishing. The chapters that follow unfold how we achieve this and what is at stake.

“Ambulant Infrastructure” describes how the portability of the server reveals boundaries of the various processes involved in maintaining the technologies that support the project, exposing its materiality and spatial politics. “Feminist Networking” details the technical setup of the network infrastructure and, more importantly, how this requires a shared commitment to reject our dependencies on cis-male dominated extractivist technologies. “FLOSS Design: Frictitious Ecologies” (an interview between In-grid and Creative Crowds) explores design decisions and how technical tools such as wikis merge technical and social aspects of collaborative writing and design. “Praxis Doubling” similarly combines technical documentation with subjective reflection. With updatable online docs and software released via a shared git repository/wiki platform, we hope others will be able to replicate and extend this work.

Further reflection on publishing infrastructures appears in “Angels of Our Better Infrastructure.” Here it becomes evident that we consider our work to be unfinished, formed by the efforts of publics and publishing practices that are always precarious, partial, and provisional. We also acknowledge those whose work shapes our thinking in our “Collective Statement” tracing its provenance. The “Referencing” chapter (mentioned above) supplements conventional references with reflection on how their formation determines what counts as knowledge, challenging the status of sources and their symbolic value. This underscores the social, epistemic, and affective conditions through which knowledge is created, validated, and shared. Our work emerges collectively from multiple meetings and conversations between messy combinations of individuals and collectives. The publication opens this process to others.

Autonomous publishing

The different groups have identified some of the challenges and opportunities in making a book like this. In our interview sessions, they state that working together is a way to express autonomy and choose our dependencies. This relates to the wider issue of consent, according to one In-grid member – a baseline solidarity around shared goals and agreements, part of software development and community support ethics. "We're choosing to be reliant on software's open source practices, drawing upon the work of other communities, and in this sense are not autonomous." Thus, clarifying what we mean by autonomy or autonomous publishing – grounded in solidarity – becomes essential. There is a complex discussion here – beyond the scope of this book – broadly connecting to the idea of artistic autonomy practices undermining art history's formalist discourse. Etymologically, "autos" (self) and "nomos" (law) suggest self-governance, though clearly individuals cannot achieve this in isolation from social context or broader infrastructures. Contemporary cultural practices thus emerge through by self-organised collectives that both critique and navigate institutional, managerial and logistical structures and forms. Our nested formation – a collective of collectives – is no different.

Referencing collective struggle and autonomia highlights our understanding of the value of labour and subjectivity of the worker in this project. While capital relentlessly insists on re-establishing the wage-work relation (even framing housework as unpaid labour), an autonomist approach politicises work and attempts to undermine hierarchies related to qualifications, wage levels, and employment types (from full-time to casual) in ways that resonate with our team. This matters especially in the collective formation of collectives, where some receive a wage and others do not; some occupy early career roles and others established positions. Who gets paid and who does not, and what motivates us, remains variable and contested. As suggested earlier, this matters – but is not the point.

All the same, an anarchist position dismantles some of the centralised (state-like) structures, replacing them with distributed, self-organised forms. Power persist, of course. In our various collectives, this power relation creates inevitable feelings of discomfort as precarities manifest differently according to our personal circumstances. Yet when we recognise the system is broken – subject to market forces and extractive logic – Systerserver remind us that repair is possible, alongside a sense of justice and other nurturing possibilities for change. We would like our book to embody this motivation: a greater autonomy over the publishing process, rather that mere self-gratification, academic careerism, or surplus value for publishers and universities. We seek fuller engagement with publishing infrastructures, recognising that they operate under specific, fluctuating conditions. Ultimately, our aim is to rethink publishing infrastructure and knowledge organisation – to contest their normalised forms and politics – and encourage others to do the same.

This publication emerges from ongoing conversations and collective writing sessions across various communities that shaped our ideas – so thoroughly entangled we no longer know who thought or wrote what. No matter. The book is a by-product of these entanglements and lived relations – open to ongoing transformation and the creation of differences, operating across ever-shifting modes of becoming.

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