I. THE LIFE-WORK
This + That + Some-thing Else = What?
How do authors and artists (and artist-scholars) build agency across and through projects — with bespoke projects leading to the proverbial life-work? Can they even “play” with the agency of such events (bespoke works) in anticipation of the emergence of the life-work? And what is the “life-work”?
In most cases, “It” just happens. In other cases, “It” is that dance with ultra-contingency observed by authors that makes the difference. Sometimes it proceeds consciously, and at other times it proceeds pre-consciously (which is not the same thing as unconsciously or half-consciously).
There is a quality of wild abandon at times — for authors — as works take off in directions that were unforeseen and/or unexpected. That is the wild ride insofar as authors generally are only shepherds of/for works, once they realize that works have an independent agency that appears internal to works, to authors, and, therefore, inscrutable for authors.
II. NEW WILD WEST
Print + Web (OA + Paywall) = What?
The currently available opportunities for authors to make their work “discoverable” include traditional print (books and journals) and digital (web-based platforms). The “digital” is still in the category of “the new Wild West,” with the protocols (rules and modalities) shifting continuously. Those publishers offering academic authors a chance to make their work “discoverable” range from classic usurious (including OA options and APCs) to outright parasitical (with invitations rolling in via email once authors publish with the so-called reputable publishers such as Springer Nature or Routledge/Taylor & Francis). There can be, truth be known, actually “good” reasons for dancing with the mainstream octopus squids of academic publishing, such as “planting lotuses in fire.” The (in)famous Beall’s List is used by most emerging authors to determine if a publisher is parasitical or not. ERC (European Research Council) and other academic standards are also often referenced for publisher rankings — for both books and journals.
The conventional print publication also comes with the problems of the ebook, wherein publishers offer a print-on-demand physical book (ranging in quality from good to decrepit) plus an ebook. The ebook may or may not come out at the same time (i.e., simultaneously) as the print edition. The ebook may also end up “rented” to libraries versus sold. Royalties, in almost all cases, are “non-existent.” Authors publish for prestige, choosing the most prominent presses available to their “profile” (the cachet of their CV and their institutional affiliation). A de facto censorship exists in terms of who or what might be published by the major academic presses. The attendant game of peer review is used to filter out anything and anyone not playing by the prevailing conventions, or anything or anyone not meeting the current litmus tests of the “academic market.” The trade press (a very different ecosystem than academic presses) tends to serve rapidly shifting trends and/or re-issue works that have been re-discovered, many often having gone “out of copyright.” Peer review in the case of journals is also exceptionally gamed in terms of who is in the game, with publishers generally milking their stable of authors to service the publisher’s aspirations to build a catalogue of marketable wares meeting but rarely exceeding the standards of their model.
III. MEANWHILE
Meanwhile, we have those authors who do not wish to play by the game, or those who have played by the game and are tired of the game. What options do they have? There are, for example, the relatively new “disruptive” platforms such as Medium (est. 2012) and Substack (est. 2017). The intention in such cases is to offer authors a chance to build an audience and to enter into a community of authors. This proceeds exceedingly slowly and requires a vigilance bordering on religious zeal for “writing,” in whatever form that might take. Epistolary, literary, journalistic, scholarly are but four options, with no clear lines separating the modalities. It is all rather mysterious in its premises — meaning, what is the real justification for doing so. Is it to earn plaudits? Is it to earn money? Is it to simply be heard? Could it also be one “channel” in a polyvalent, polyphonic conversation across works and across platforms. Could authors experiment accordingly through such platforms to produce new works by re-mix and re-play, or by linking disparate works parked “here and there” to create a type of multi-platform rabbit hole for readers to disappear into? Why not? What harm is there in building a mad mathesis of affects and effects, across works, in search of the proverbial “miraculous” — with the “miraculous” being in this case the quantum functions of the emergent life-work.
IV. RABBIT HOLES
For a previously existing rabbit hole (LANY Archive-Grotto), enter here …
https://medium.com/@agencex/rapport-lany-9eb6d94d4ade
For a rabbit hole currently under construction (OOI-MTA+++), enter here …
https://medium.com/@agencex/ooi-mta-4ae3e848d57b
V. POSTSCRIPT
Regarding actually existing books, I was recently browsing two bookstores to see which books might speak to me. One was a used bookstore. The other was a college bookstore — i.e., new-ish books or re-released books based on whatever criteria the small bookstore used to stock the shelves. In the case of the college bookstore, the books on display included all of the fast-heading-for-remaindered-status tomes (many ghost-authored) by the influencers of the times. In the former case, the used bookstore, I was actually looking for Thoreau. He said (quietly), “Sorry, I am not here.” But in perusing the shelves I found several books that wanted to bite my hand and persuade me to purchase them. One was by Kierkegaard. The other two were by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. I was sympathetic to Kierkegaard, but not Teilhard de Chardin. I had no interest in going down the Bergsonian-Christian vitalist garden path. I had been there before. It ends in a dark wood, with Dante. My sense of works-based agency has never been vitalist in spirit, though I realize that it often attempts to default to vitalism at times, but only to re-calculate its prospects in dark times toward escaping the dark wood.
The other book that tempted me was at the college bookstore, in the Sociology/Political Science section. It was Revolutionary Suicide, by Huey P. Newton, the Black Panther, and a Penguin-Random House edition from 2009 or so. Why it was there was a mystery. No doubt it was on the reading list of one program or another at the fairly posh liberal arts college that ran the bookstore. Not being in the textbook section of the store could have been incidental. The algorithm for all sections no doubt included “professorial imput.”
How does an utterly radical book of the nature of Revolutionary Suicide (first published in 1973) end up re-printed by a trade press in 2009 and, for sale, in a bookstore at a very nice, PC liberal arts college in Western Massachusetts? There is no obvious answer. It is what it is, says “It.” “It” is the elemental datum of the works-based agency model. Lean in and listen to “It.” Books go where they wish to, which does not cue vitalism. In the case of used-book or second-hand bookstores, the books are like orphans looking for a home. And that is why they often jump off the shelf into your arms, or bite your hand as you reach for them.
Yet, the question here is how works survive time and return — often with a vengeance. I always recall that Kleist expected his works to take at least 100 years to find readers. Foremost, in that category, was his “On the Marionette Theater” (an essay written in 1810, a year before he shot himself), in which we all, in search of the backdoor to Eden, become (voluntary) re-animate marionettes. “Re-animate marionettes” may be the best description of what is involved in abdicating authorial privileges in favor of works-based agency and the inevitable “return” of an absolute respect for prior art and its other-worldly origins. After all, the modern ego is only — technically — 500–600 years old. Subjectivity is, notoriously, expansive and/or a knot of self-engendered intrigue. It can register universes or petty little worlds of self-interest. Notably, it can appear “free,” while it is utterly locked away in chains and serving Power. I suspect that this was Rousseau’s point, in The Social Contract, midway along the trajectory of the Modernist-Capitalist putsch.
In a last wrinkle in time, in terms of authorial privileges, it is libraries and archives that safeguard works, with works becoming the primary focus, versus authors or publishers. And it is librarians who are the shepherds and shepherdesses for works, well after the author is gone, and well after the publisher has moved on to the latest fashion statement in intellectual inquiry or literary-artistic merit. Thus, the current battles between libraries and archives with the great octopus squids of publishing and attempts by publishers to maintain control over works, primarily on behalf of themselves. The entire fracas is related to the fact that the 500-600-year-old “history” of copyright is timing out and that digital circulation has displaced print circulation of works. The greater irony is that AI has arrived to further disrupt this process of copyright timing out, and it is oddly up to authors (and librarians) to protect works from misappropriation.