Chapter 1: Collectivities and Methods

It should be Chapter 1: Being Book

Pad for working https://ctp.cc.au.dk/pad/p/servpub_methods

Collectivities and Working Methods

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What does it mean to publish? Put simply, publishing means making something public (from the Latin publicare, ‘make public’) but there’s 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 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 devices. In other words, publishing entails understanding the wider political-economic forces, structures and 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 experiemntal 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's 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) still provides a 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 wants to maximise its reach and use, as well as enable re-use within a broader and expandible community. What FLOSS and experimental publishing have in common is the need to address the intersection of technology and sociality, and support communities to constitute themselves as publics not simply in terms of the ability to speak and act in public, but through being able to construct their own platforms, what Christopher M. Kelty has referred to as a "recursive public."

For the most part, distribution of academic publications is still largely organised behind pay-walls and through reputation or prestige economies, dominated by major commercial publishers in the Global North. When open access is adopted, for the most part it remains controlled by a select few companies that operate oligopolistic structures to protect their profit margins and positions in the markeplace. As such it is not suprising to realise that the widespread adoption of open access principles in academic publishing, once intended to democratize knowledge, have become a new profit engine for publishers. In these hands, open access provides as a smokescreen for business as usual, much like greenwashing for the environment.

This book is an attempt to draw some red lines here concerning the historical and material conditions for their production and distribution, while offering an alternative model -- and one that is less extractive in terms of resources and labour power. Our approach is grounded in collective working practices and shared values that push back against dominant big tech infrastructures and the drive toward seamless interfaces and scale-up efficiency. To repeat, our concern lies in the disjunction between the critical rigour of academic texts and the use of conventional modes through which they are produced that lack criticality. By criticality, we mean to go beyond a criticism of conventional publishing and to further acknowledge the ways in which we are implicated at all levels in the choices we make when we engage 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, within, and through which, they operate. It is this kind of reflexivity that has guided our approach throughout the project: moving beyond the notion of the book as a discrete object and instead conceiving of it as a relational assemblage in which its constituent parts mutually depend on and transform one another in practice.

Infrastructure

We have adopted the phrase "publishing as collective infrastructure" as our title because we want to stress these wider relational properties and how power is distributed, as part of the hidden substrate that includes 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 its workings but also acquire the necessary skills -- both technical and conceptual -- to be able to make infrastructures otherwise.

The argument of Easterling, and others, recognises that infrastructure has become a medium of information and mode of governance, exercised through actions that determine how objects and content are organised and circulated. Susan Leigh Star is another who 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. 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 on which they are dependent. If we are to reinvent academic publishing, this must occur at every layer and scale -- what we might call a 'full-stack' transformation -- which includes the social and cultural aspects that technology influences and is influenced by. Here we make reference to 'full stack feminism' which calls for a rethinking of how digital systems are developed, applying the principles of intersectional feminism -- itself an infrastructural critique of method -- to critically engage with all layers of implementation.

Backround-foreground

In summary, the book you are reading is a book about publishing a book, a tool for thinking and making one differently, drawing attention to these 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 ccontinue to find it perverse that academic books are still predominantly written by individual authors and distributed by publishers as fixed objects in time and space. It would surely be more in keeping with the affordances of the technology to stress collaborative authorship, community peer review and annotation, as well as other messy realities of production. This would allow for the development of versions over time, as Janneke Adema has argued, "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, and within which the divisions of labour between writers, editors, designers, software developers could become entangled in non-linear workflows and interactions. Through the sharing of resources and their open modification, generative possibilities emerge that break out of protectionist conventions perpetuated by tired academic procedures (and tired academics) that assume knowledge to be produced in standardised ways, and imparted through the reductive logic of input/output.

Our approach is clearly not new. It draws on multiple influences, from the radical publishing tradition of small independent presses and artist books as well as other experimental attempts to make interventions into research cultures and pedagogy. We might immodestly point to some of our own previous work in this connection, including Aesthetic Programming, a book about software, imagined as if software. It draws upon the practice of forking in 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 practices of writing by offering all contents as an open resource, with an invitation for other researchers to fork a copy and customise their own versions of the book, with new references and reflections, even additional chapters, all aspects open for modification and re-use. By encouraging new versions to be produced by others in this way, we aim to challenge publishing conventions and exploit the technical affordances of the technologies we use that encourage collectivity. Clearly wider infrastructures are especially important to understand how alternatives emerge from the need to configure and maintain more sustainable and equitable networks for publishing, and that remain sensitive to all that contribute to the shared effort (concerning readers, writers and programmers alike). All this goes against academic conventions that require books to be fixed in time and follow narrow conventions of attribution and copyright.

The collaborative workshops co-organised by the Digital Aesthetics Research Center at Aarhus University and transmediale festival for art and digital culture based in Berlin provide a further example of this in practice. Since 2012, these workshops have attempted to make interventions into how academic research is conducted and disseminated. Those taking part are encouraged to not only engage with 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 Minor Tech workshop from 2023 made these concerns explicit, setting out to address alternatives to big (or major) tech by drawing attention to the institutional hosting, both at the in-person event and online. In this way, the publishing platform developed for the workshop can be understood to have a pedagogic function in itself, allowing for thinking and learning to take place as part of the wider socio-technical infrastructure. Building on this, the subsequent workshop Content/Form further developed this approach, working in collaboration with Systerserver and In-grid. Using the ServPub project as a technical infrastructure on which to ground the pedagogy, we were able to exempify how the tools and practices used for our writing shape it, whether acknowledged or not. The process of setting up the server is described in subsequent chapters, but for now it is important to register how its presence in the same space as the workshop helped to place emphasis on the material conditions for collective working and autonomous publishing -- for publishing as collective infrastructure.

Self-hosted servers

The server needs be set up but also requires care, but rather differently to the ways care has become weaponised in mainstream institutions. As Nishant Shah describes, care has become something that institutions purport to do, with endless policies and promises for well-being and support, but without threatening the structures of power that produce the need in the first place.In our case, we would argue for something more along the lines of "pirate care," in which the coming together of care and technology can question "the ideology of private property, work and metrics." Care in this sense 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, wherein practices of care and maintenance are understood as acts of collective responsibility. It is with this in mind that we have tried to engage more fully with affective infrastructures that are underpinned by intersectional and feminist methodologies. Systerserver, for instance, operate as a feminist, queer, and anti-patriarchal network, which prioritises care and maintenance, offers services and hosting to its community, and acts as a space to learn system administration skills and inspire others to do the same. Our further inspiration is "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. For now, it is worth adding that the project responded to 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 of shared interest around experimental publishing and affective infrastructures in London.

Socio-technical forms

We hope it is clear by now that our intention for this publication is not to valorize feminist servers or free and open-source culture as such but to stress how technological and social forms come together to expose power relations. This comes close to the position that Stevphen Shukaitis and Joanna Figiel have elaborated in "Publishing to Find Comrades," a phrase which they borrow from the Surrealist André Breton. Their emphasis is not to publish pre-existing knowledge and communicate this to a fixed reader but to work towards developing the appropriate 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 the contents but to invent organisational forms with wider social and political purpose. Can something similar be said of the ServPub project and our book? Maybe. Attention to infrastructure is significant here, as well as the affordances of the tools we use, in allowing for reflection on divisions of labour, the conditions of production, the dependencies of support networks, and 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 and their rejection is necessary for genuine change in publishing practices. Here we paraphrase Audre Lorde of course.

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 "organizational writing," quoting Michel Callon’s description of "writing devices that put organization-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, it is important to register that we are collectively involved in all aspects of its making. The production process -- including writing and peer review, copyediting and design -- is reflected in the choice of other tools and platforms that we are using as well as the constitution of the collectives involved. Using MediaWiki software and web-to-print layout techniques, ServPub is an attempt to circumvent standard academic workflows and instead conflate traditional roles of writers, editors, designers, developers alongside the affordances of the technologies. To put it plainly, this means rejecting proprietary software such as Abode Creative Cloud and designing by other means, as indicated by the ironic naming of Creative Crowds (CC) as part of our working group. Indeed, the distributed nature of our endeavour is reflected in the combinations of those involved, directly and indirectly, across the different entities involved who provide the necessary skills and support for the project's realisation. This includes building on the work of others involved in the development of the tools such as the various iterations of 'wiki-to-print' and 'wiki2print', 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 not without its challenges, especially when such a diverse group of people are involved, each with their own experiences, positionalities, life and employment situations. One of the many challenges of a project like this has been to account for these differences, which include the complexities of unpaid and paid labour. We have tried to address or acknowledge potential 'discomfort' associated with the project throughout our work together in 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 important to the praxis of ServPub, emerging as we navigated complex questions related to reputation hierarchies and accreditation, as well as the nature of the institutional infrastructures that support the work. Challenges include uneven access to resources, disparities in institutional support, and the ongoing negotiation of additional labour which reveals some of the power struggles individuals/collectives face within their own particular situations, even as they remain committed to the project. All embrace feminist methodologies, but this commitment is not without differences of interpretation. Language itself also acts as a destabilizing factor, as not all contributors are native English speakers, leading to subtle miscommunication and moments that demand continuous exercise of trust, open communication and negotiation of meaning. Consensus-building within this diverse project entails negotiating differing 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 strive to fairly represent both individual and collective labour while remaining vigilant against replicating extractive academic norms and hierarchies. Rather than glossing over the inevitable contradictions, we have tried to approach them openly, slowing down the collective decision-making processes, and leaving space for open dialogue, to foster solidarity that allows any tensions to become spaces for mutual learning and collective growth.

In the article by Shukaitis and Figiel, these tensions are characterised as a question of who has access to resources and the reliance on forms of free labour in cultural work, although it should be noted that they are mindful not to reduce everything to the question of financial remuneration. Mirroring what commonly takes place in the arts, they refer to how unseen and unpaid labour is central to academic publishing, in particular we can refer to the peer review process, and how particular kinds of labour are valorised over others. Careful consideration must be given to the divisions of labour in publishing, with sensitivity 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 of publishing — as a means of establishing new social relations and engaging critically with infrastructure — further resonates with what Fred Moten and Stefano Harney have described as the "logisticality of the undercommons". In The Undercommons, they refer to 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 the university or the state. Although we cannot claim to be part of the undercommons, we learn from its ways of knowing, relating, and organising that don't reproduce existing power structures. This also resonates with David Graeber's rejection of academic elitism and instead embraces lived experience and collective imagination. Like Jack Halberstam’s articulation of "low theory" in The Queer Art of Failure, this a way to rethink failure and engage theory from the margins, rather than from rigid and legitimated systems of knowledge often published in academic journals. These ideas help us to reflect on how to share resources, how to organise together, and how to circulate our ideas, without reproducing the structures of power-knowledge associated with academia 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 Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari's book on Kafka, the subtitle of which is "Towards a Minor Literature." As mentioned above, 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 well and its insistence on small scale production, as well as the use of the ServPub infrastructure to prepare the publication and to challenge some of the production models of journals and conference proceedings.

The publishing project of Minor Compositions is explained succinctly by Stevphen Shukaitis 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 aslo makes explicit connection to the post-Marxism of autonomist thinking and practice, 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 coming together 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 in the case with infrastructure as we have tried to argue.

In the case of publishing, our aim has been to extend its potential beyond its functionary role to make books as fixed objects and generate surplus value for publishers, and instead engage with how thinking with others might establish other social relations. In our interview sessions with the organisers of Open Book Futures (our sponsors), we have identified 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 is the case even when the practices of publishing is relatively unknown, as identified by In-grid. Systerserver, on the other hand, build on their experience making zines for technical documentation The combination of our experiences here leads us to speculate on new forms and brings us back to the term 'composition' (or recomposition) inasmuch as it emphasises that power in the form of infrastructure does not transform itself as the result of evolution but from struggles that arise from how labour is technically arranged. Our point is that what we refer to as academic publishing comes with its own set of conventions that tend to go against the grain of radical self-organisation.

Radical referencing is a good example of this, as a way to address the canon and offering other positions and voices that tend to be left out of the discussion. The book has tried to take this approach seriously, diverting from the reliance on big name academics in recognition that ideas evolve far more organically through conversations and encounters in everyday situations. The last chapter explores this in more detail and it becomes clear that hierarchies of knowledge are reinforced through referencing and the cultural capital attached to certain theorists and theory that comes and goes with academic fashions. In the last chapter, Celia Lury's notion of ‘epistemic infrastructure’ points to how organisational structures shape the processes by which knowledge becomes knowledge. Here we are also introduced to Sara Ahmed’s intervention in the politics of referencing in which they choose to exclude white men from citation to somewhat balance the books. If we are to take an intersectional approach here, then clearly there are other exclusions in addition to gender which we need to engage that relate to the broader project of epistemic justice.

Structure of the book

Each chapter unpacks practical steps alongside a discussion of the implications of our approach.

[go on to describe each chapter in detail]

Autonomous publishing

The different groups have tried to identify 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. For instance, we reached out to Tuxic.nl, a company within the extended network of Systerserver, regarding the domain registration (www.servpub.net) because they provide open-source software and hardware solutions. Members of servpub interviewed Jaap Vermaas, the person behind Tuxic.nl, who shared his frustration with the evolving hacker scene, particularly its lack of diversity (2023). He explained that he used to be a regular visitor at hacker festivals but stopped attending. He stated: "Still, 95% is white male and the DIY spirit has been replaced by either a "get rich quick" or "let's work for security services" attitude, which is why I stopped going".

This relates to the issue of consent according to one of the members of In-grid, and a baseline solidarity about what everyone is working towards and has agreed to, as part of a wider ecology of software development and community. "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." As such, it seems important to clarify what we mean by autonomy or autonomous publishing in this intentional interdependence, grounded in solidarity. There’s a complex discussion here that we simply don’t have space to rehearse in this book but broadly connects to the idea of artistic autonomy and practices to undermine the kinds of autonomy attached to the formalist discourse of art history. One way to understand this better would turn to the etymology of the term which reveals ‘autos’ as self and ‘nomos’ as law, together suggesting the ability to write your own laws or self-govern. But clearly individuals are not able to do this in isolation from social context, and any laws operate in social context too and as part of broader infrastructures. It is no wonder much contemporary cultural practices are performed by self-organised collectives that both critique and follow institutional structures, managerial and logistical forms. No different is our own nested formation of a collective of collectives.

Making reference to collective struggle and autonomia allows us to draw attention to our understanding of the value of labour in our project as well as subjectivity of the worker. Whereas Capital valorises work, and tries to re-establish the wage-work relation at all costs (even when speaking of house work as unpaid), an autonomist approach politicises work and attempts to undermine spurious hierarchies related to qualifications and different wage levels from full-time employment to casualisation in ways that resonate with the different statuses across our team. This has relevance, especially in the collective formation of collectives where some are waged and others not, some positioned as early career researchers and others with established positions. Who and how we get paid or gift our time, and what motivates this effort is variable and contested. As we have suggested earlier, that's important but not really the point.

All the same, an anarchist position is an attempt to dismantle some of the centralised (State-like) structures and replace them with more distributed forms that are self-organised. But this is not to say that power goes away of course. In our various collectives this power relation leads to inevitable feeling of discomfort as our precarities are expressed differently according to the situations in which we find ourselves. Yet when we recognise the system is broken, subject to market forces and extractive logic, Systerserver remind us that repair is possible, along with a sense of justice, other possibilities that are more nurturing of change. We'd like to think that our book is motivated in this way, not to just publish our work to gratify ourselves or develop academic careers or generate surplus value for publishers or Universities, but to exert more autonomy over the publishing process and engage more fully with publishing infrastructures and recognise that they operate under specific conditions that are not immovable. Our aim is to rethink publishing infrastructure and knowledge organization, to contest normalised forms and the politics they support, and to encourage others to do the same.

The publication that has emerged from this process reflects ongoing conversations and collective writing sessions between the various communities that have supported the development of our ideas in such a way that we no longer know who thought what, or who wrote this sentence when reading later. No matter. The book is a by-product of these lived relations, open to ongoing transformation and the creation of differences, and operating across shifting modes of knowing and becoming.

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