Chapter 1: Collectivities and Methods

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

Coordinator: Winnie & Geoff
Contributors: In-grid, CC, Systerserver, Winnie & Geoff, Christian and Pablo

Collectivities and Working Methods

What does it mean to publish? Publishing is the act of sharing and passing on knowledge, creating a dynamic relationship between authors/writers/producers and readers. It makes space for others to tune in a particular theme or topic, shaped by a specific medium, format, approach, structure and content. At its core, publishing is inherently a social and political process—it builds communities, invites action, and inspires new ways of thinking. To put simply, publishing means making something public, but in this apparently simple act, there’s a lot at stake, not simply what we publish, but how. The process involves mindful and reflexive thinking of resources, tools, people, technology and infrastructures. In other words, publishing also entails recognizing the post-digital landscape and understanding the political and economic forces that shape the practice.

This book is an intervention in these ongoing debates, emerging out of a particular history and practice of experimental publishingand shaped by the collaborative efforts of various art-tech collectives, operating both within and beyond academic contexts, who are all invested in how to make things public and find ways to publish outside of commercial and institutional norms. Crucially, the ethics of Free/Libre and Open Source Software (FLOSS), particular its emphasis on the freedom to study, modify and share, operate as one of our core principles in working on this book, enabling possibilities for modification and versioning with a broader community in mind. What links these traditions is the need to address the social relationsthat experimental publishing can help to expose and activate differently.

Our working premise is that despite the trend towards open access, relatively little has changed in academic publishing and scholars still seek to distribute their work through enclosures and based on lumpen workflows that still follow a model that is largely unchanged since industrialism. This book is an attempt to draw attention to these material conditions for the production of books, and to strengthen the possibility of working alternatives to mainstream publishing. Our concern is that books, and academic books in particular, follow a model of production that belies their criticality. By criticality, we mean to go beyond a criticism of conventional publishing and acknowledge the ways in which we are implicated at all levels in political choices when we engage in how to produce books. It's this kind of reflexivity that has guided our approach.

The book is a kind of a manual to build and think with -- to register the importance of its own coming into being as a book (as an onto-epistemological object if you like). It is produced in a reflexive manner so that the content and the form through which it is produced are recognised as interconnected. [winnie to winnie note: will think more with this and how to talk more about reflexivity]

Background

More pragmatically, the aim is to develop a radical alternative platform and workflow for publishing. We build upon previous projects and collaborations in the field of experimental publishing such as Aesthetic Programming in which the authors developed a book about software as if it were software. All the contents were offered as an open resource, to encourage others to fork copies and customize their own versions of the book. In FLOSS culture, more than one programmer contributes to writing and documenting code. Contributors might be unknown and are able to update or improve the software by forking—making changes and submitting merge requests to incorporate updates—in which the software is built together as part of a community. To merge, in this sense, is to agree to make a change, to approve it as part of a process of collective decision-making and with mutual trust. This is common practice in software development particularly in the case of FLOSS in which developers place versions of their programs in version control repositories (such as GitLab) so that others can download, clone, and fork them. We were curious to explore how the concept of forking in software practice might inspire new practices. By encouraging new versions to be produced by others, the book set out to challenge publishing conventions and make effective use of the technical infrastructures through which we make ideas public. 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.

It is with this in mind that we have tried to engage more fully with the politics of infrastructure that supports the production and distribution of books. In this way we would argue that the project responds to the pressing need for publishing to acknowledge its broader apparatus. This follows both a technical and social protocol, and it is crucially important that this is a collective enterprise, taking further inspiration from "A Transversal Network of Feminist Servers", a collaborative project that builds on selfhosting infrastructural practicies that follow intersectional feminist principles. The aim is to rethink the current landscape of publishing infrastructure and digital knowledge organization, and offer a viable alternative which can support new and existing publishing initiatives. Part of the motivation was the perceived need to develop a community of shared interest around experimental publishing and affective infrastructures in London. We could see similar initiatives elsewhere, in particular in the Netherlands and Belgium, and were envious.

[to be continued...]

Socio-technical form

Importantly, one important principle is not to valorize free and open-source software but to stress how technological and social forms come together, and to encourage reflection on shared organizational processes and social relations. This is what Stevphen Shukaitis and Joanna Figiel have previously clarified in "Publishing to Find Comrades," a neat phrase which they borrow from Andre Breton: “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." Their emphasis is not to publish pre-existing knowledge and communicate this to a fixed reader — as is the case with much academic publishing — but to work towards developing social conditions for the co-production of meaning. As they express it, "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".

That one publishes to establish new social relations aligns with what Fred Moten and Stefano Harney have described as the "logisticality of the undercommons", in contrast to the proliferation of capitalist logics exercised through the management of pedagogy and research publishing. The publishing project of Minor Compositions follows such an approach, perhaps unsurprisingly so, as the publisher of Moten and Harney's work (and our book of course) and the involvement of Stevphen Shukaitis who has coordinated and edited Minor Compositions since its inception in 2009 as an imprint of Autonomedia. In an interview published on their website, explicit connection is made to avant-garde aesthetics but also autonomist thinking and practice, which builds on the notion of collective intelligence, or what Marx referred to, in "Fragment on Machines", as general (or mass) intellect. General intellect is a useful reference as it describes the coming together of technological expertise and social intellect, or general social knowledge, and although the introduction of machine under capitalism broadly oppress workers, they also offer potential liberation from these conditions. Something similar can be argued in the case of publishing, extending its potential beyond the functionary role to make books and generate surplus value for publishers, and instead engage with how thinking is developed with others as part of social relations. To quote from the interview, "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')." We'd like to think that our book is similarly motivated, not to just publish our work or develop academic careers or generate value for publishers or Universities, but to exert more autonomy over the publishing process and engage more fully with publishing infrastructures that operate under specific socio-technical conditions.

Research content/form

The naming of 'minor compositions' resonates with this, alluding to Deleuze and Guattari's book on Kafka, the subtitle of which is "Towards a Minor Literature". We have previously used this reference for our 'minor tech' workshop, held at transmediale in Berlin in 2023, to question 'big tech' and to follow 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 content, the approach was to implement these political principles in practice. This approach 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 publications that came out of the workshop and the shared principle to challenge the divisions of labour and workflows associated with academic publishing.

There's a longer history of these collaborative workshops co-organised by the Digital Aesthetics Research Center at Aarhus University and transmediale festival for art and digital culture based in Berlin. Since 2012, yearly workshops have attempted to make interventions how research is conducted and made public. In brief, an annual open call is released based loosely on the festival theme of that year, targeting researchers from different positionalities and diverse geographical spread. All accepted participants are asked to share a short essay of 1000 words, and upload it to a wiki, and respond online using a linked pad, as well as in person at a research workshop, at which they offer feedback and reduce their texts to 500 words for publication in a “newspaper” that is presented and launched at the festival. Lastly, the participants are invited to submit full length articles of approximately 5000 words for the online open access journal APRJA. The down/up scaling of the text is part of the pedagogy, condensing the argument to identify key arguments and then expanding it once more to substantiate claims. The final stage of the review process ensures that all articles adhere to conventional academic standards for scholarship such as double-blind review.

Workshop participants are encouraged to not only engage with research questions and offer critical feedback to each other, through an embodied peer review process, but also with the conditions for producing and disseminating their research. As already mentioned, Minor Tech in 2023 made this explicit, setting out to address alternatives to major (or big) tech by drawing attention to the institutional hosting, both in person and online. In this way, the publishing platform developed for the workshop and its publications can be understood to take on a pedagogic function allowing for an iterative approach to thinking and learning together as part of a network of connected socio-technical organisational practices. The 2024 workshop Content/Form, further developed this approach using small, cheap, portable (raspberry pi) computers that acted as a server and ran the wiki-to-print software to exert more autonomy and to stress the material conditions. Both technological and social forms are brought together as part of an affective infrastructure for collective research.

In contrast to the approaches to research described above, it remains an oddity that academic books in the arts and humanities are still predominantly produced as fixed objects written by individual authors and traditional publishers. Experimental practices such as the ones described so far expand upon the processual character of research, and incorporate practices such as collaborative authorship, community peer review and annotation, updating and iterative processes of developing a set of versions over time, thus offering “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 allows for other possibilities that draw publishing and research closer together, and withing which the divisions of labor between writers, editors, designers, software developers are brought closer together in ways in a non-linear publishing workflow where form and content unfold at the same time, allowing one to shape the other. Put simply, our point is that by focussing on experimental publishing activities, the sharing of resources, modification of texts and versioning, other possibilities emerge for research practice that break out of old models constituted by tired academic procedures (and tired academics) that assume knowledge to be produced and imparted in particular ways.

.......

Research publication // Academic book futures: more from Christian, Geoff

Smth on how ServPub relates to a longer history of making PhD workshops, "building" (rendering) research, and the institutional or other challenges of this + peer review process

1. Structure

The book charts the development of a bespoke publishing infrastructure that draws together previously separated processes such as writing, editing, peer review, design, print, distribution. Each chapter unpacks practical steps alongside a discussion of some of the poltical implications of our approach.

[go on to describe each chapter in detail]

2. Collectivities

- short semi-structured interviews with each collective

.......0. What characterizes your collective as collective?  

.......1. What are your approaches in working together as a group and working with others?

.......2. How does your group work with infrastructure?

.......3. What do you want to work on Servpub?

.......4. How do social relations become transformed?

[minor composition]

2a. social relations meets tech

....... and minor compositions here

2b. ideas of the commons and autonomia/anarchism

3. Methods

Feminist, intersectionality, queer, radical referencing

doing and making and thinking

development of tools perhaps too

artistic practice/research/artivist approach

end chapter with idea of Book as reflexive practice - reiteratung this point - book about its own making.