Notes

1 Franco Moretti, “Style, Inc.: Reflections on 7,000 Titles (British Novels, 1740–1850),” in Distant Reading (London: Verso, 2013), 181.

2 For further details about this 2006 artwork by Paolo Cirio, Alessandro Ludovico, and Ubermorgen, see http://www.amazon-noir.com/. The political, technological, and aesthetic dimensions of the project are critically considered in Michael Dieter, “Amazon Noir: Piracy, Distribution, Control,” M/C Journal 10, no. 5 (2007), http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0710/07-dieter.php.

3 Saree Makdisi, William Blake and the Impossible History of the 1790s (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 8. William Blake, Visions of the Daughters of Albion, cited in ibid., 152. My gesture toward Blake’s political aesthetics of the book is indebted to Saree Makdisi’s wonderful writing on the theme. See also his Reading William Blake (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), where he describes Blake’s illuminated books as “un-books.”

4 William Blake, Europe, cited in Makdisi, William Blake, 41. William Blake, “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell,” in The Complete Illuminated Manuscripts (London: Thames and Hudson, 2000), 414.

5 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 4.

6 Leah Price, How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2012), 35–36.

7 Guy Debord and Gil J. Wolman, “Methods of Détournement,” in Situationist International Anthology, ed. and trans. Ken Knabb (Berkeley, Calif.: Bureau of Public Secrets, 1981), 11.

1 Andrew Murphie, “Ghosted Publics: The ‘Unacknowledged Collective’ in the Contemporary Transformation of the Circulation of Ideas,” in The Mag.net Reader 3 (London: Mute Publications, 2008), 102.

2 Lisa Gitelman, Paper Knowledge: Toward a History of Documents (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2014), 3.

3 N. Katherine Hayles, How We Think: Digital Media and Contemporary Technogenesis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 2.

4 Michele Zappavigna, “Ambient Affiliation: A Linguistic Perspective on Twitter,” New Media and Society 13, no. 5 (2011): 788–806.

5 Kenneth Goldsmith, Uncreative Writing: Managing Language in the Digital Age (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 25.

6 Michele Moylan and Lane Stiles, eds., Reading Books: Essays on the Material Text and Literature in America (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1996), 12.

7 See Ann Burdick, Johanna Drucker, Peter Lunenfeld, Todd Presner, and Jeffrey Schnapp, Digital_Humanities (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2012).

8 N. Katherine Hayles, “Translating Media: Why We Should Rethink Textuality,” Yale Journal of Criticism 16, no. 2 (2003): 276.

9 N. Katherine Hayles, Writing Machines (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2002), 25.

10 Ibid.

11 Ibid., 33.

12 I discuss the role of the reader at certain points, but not to a great extent, so allow me to contribute to this dimension of a book’s materiality in a different way, and in this open to the extratextual dimensions of the readership of material text. Anti-Book is still a book, all too much of a book, so I invite readers to perform an anti-book operation with it, upon it, against it. Should you be willing to send me the new artifact or some form of documentation, I will endeavor to respond in kind. I can be contacted at my work address.

13 Roger Chartier, “Languages, Books, and Reading from the Printed Word to the Digital Text,” Critical Inquiry 31 (2004): 133–52.

14 For a compelling example, see Hanna Kuusela, “On the Materiality of Contemporary Reading Formations: The Case of Jari Tervo’s Layla,” New Formations 78 (2013): 65–82.

15 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. ed. (New York: Verso, 2006). Robert Darnton, The Forbidden Best-Sellers of Pre-Revolutionary France (London: HarperCollins, 1996).

16 Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, The Printing Press as Agent of Change (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980).

17 Daniel Selcer, Philosophy and the Book: Early Modern Figures of Material Inscription (London: Continuum, 2010), 13–14.

18 Ibid., 15.

19 Regarding the specifically technical aspects of fixity, Johns notes that the “first book reputed to have been printed without any errors appeared only in 1760.” Adrian Johns, The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 31. It is an appealing confluence that the theoretical self-identity of the book qua commodity became true to its word at about the time William Blake’s “illuminated books” introduced error or variability into the production process as an intrinsic feature of the practical overcoming of that commodity.

20 Ibid., 2–3.

21 Ibid., 28.

22 Johanna Drucker, The Century of Artists’ Books (New York: Granary, 2004), 2.

23 Clive Phillpot, Booktrek: Selected Essays on Artists’ Books (1972–2010) (Zurich: JRP Ringier and Les presses du reel, 2012), 148. Before this aesthetic field arrived at a name, Phillpot remarks that he would describe the earliest instances he encountered in the late 1960s as “odd pamphlets,” a term I rather wish had stuck. Ibid., 12.

24 Rosalind E. Krauss, “A Voyage on the North Sea”: Art in the Age of the Post-Medium Condition (London: Thames and Hudson, 1999). Rosalind E. Krauss, Under Blue Cup (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2011).

25 Krauss, Voyage on the North Sea, 7.

26 A self-differing medium can hence displace and cut across any particular material support. For instance, the “medium” of work by Ed Ruscha, whose Twenty Six Gasoline Stations (1962) is usually taken as the founding instance of the artists’ book, is for Krauss not the book as such but the automobile. See Krauss, Under Blue Cup, 20, 73–78.

27 Ulises Carrión, “The New Art of Making Books,” in Book Art: A Critical Anthology and Sourcebook, ed. Joan Lyons (Rochester, N.Y.: Visual Studies Workshop Press, 1985), 31, 32, 40, emphasis added. I would downplay the place of artists’ intention at the end of Carrión’s sentence, for the agency here is complex and emergent.

28 Félix Guattari, Schizoanalytic Cartographies, trans. Andrew Goffey (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 253, 255.

29 Richard Kostelanetz, “Why Assembling,” 1973, http://www.richardkostelanetz.com/examples/whyassem.html.

30 Richard Kostelanetz, “Book Art,” in Lyons, Book Art, 27, 29.

31 Lucy R. Lippard, Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972 (London: Studio Vista, 1973).

32 Lucy R. Lippard, “Conspicuous Consumption: New Artists’ Books,” in Lyons, Book Art, 50.

33 Krauss, Under Blue Cup, 32. Alexander Alberro, Conceptual Art and the Politics of Publicity (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2003). Many thanks for this point to Stephen Zepke and one of the anonymous readers of this book in manuscript.

34 Gwen Allen, Artists’ Magazines: An Alternative Space for Art (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2011), 219.

35 For more on the political dimensions of the artists’ book, see Janneke Adema and Gary Hall, “The Political Nature of the Book: On Artists’ Books and Radical Open Access,” New Formations 78 (2013): 138–56.

36 See Drucker, Century of Artists’ Books, chapter 11.

37 Lippard, “Conspicuous Consumption,” 50.

38 Phillpot, Booktrek, 5, 22.

39 Michael Hampton, THEARTISTSBOOKANEWHISTORY (London: Banner Repeater, 2011). Kostelanetz makes a related point with regard to the accepted nomination for this genre of work as “artists’ books.” It focuses attention on the artist rather than the object (whereas the “art at hand is books, no matter who did them”) and serves to isolate them as “artworks” from other media forms (“the term ‘artists’ books’ incorporates the suggestion that such work should be set aside in a space separate from writers’ books”). Kostelanetz, “Book Art,” 29–30.

40 Allen, Artists’ Magazines, 241.

41 Richard Kostelanetz, “Why Assembling.”

42 Allen, Artists’ Magazines, 241. Richard Kostelanetz, “Why Assembling.”

43 Richard Kostelanetz, “Assembling,” http://www.poetrymagazines.org.uk/magazine/record.asp?id=18202.

44 Karl Young, “Foreword to Assembling 12,” http://www.spunk.org/texts/art/sp000177.html.

45 Richard Kostelanetz, “Why A Critical Assembling,” in A Critical (Ninth) Assembling (Precisely: 6789), ed. Richard Kostelanetz (New York: Assembling Press, 1979).

46 Young, “Foreword to Assembling 12.”

47 Richard Kostelanetz, “Why A Critical Assembling.”

48 Kostelanetz, cited in Allen, Artists’ Magazines, 241.

49 I take the formulation, with thanks, from one of the anonymous readers of this book in manuscript.

50 Régis Debray, “Socialism: A Life-Cycle,” New Left Review 46 (2007): 5. The essay is extracted from his 1991 work, Cours de médiologie générale.

51 Ibid., 5.

52 Ibid., 6.

53 V. I. Lenin, “The ‘Plan’ for an All-Russian Political Newspaper,” in What Is to Be Done? Burning Questions of Our Movement, 149–74 (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1973).

54 Debray, “Socialism: A Life-Cycle,” 8.

55 Vilém Flusser, Does Writing Have a Future?, trans. Nancy Ann Roth (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), 40.

56 Ibid., 26.

57 Troploin [Gilles Dauvé and Karl Nesic], “What’s It All About? Questions and Answers,” Troploin Newsletter, no. 4, April 2007, 2, http://libcom.org/library/whats-it-all-about-questions-answers-troploin.

58 Kevin Gilmartin, Print Politics: The Press and Radical Opposition in Early Nineteenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 65.

59 James Vernon, Politics and the People: A Study in English Political Culture, c. 1815–1867 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 105.

60 Ibid.

61 Ibid., 106.

62 Iain McCalman, Radical Underworld: Prophets, Revolutionaries, and Pornographers in London, 1795–1840 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), 152.

63 “We can and must immediately set about founding the Party organ—and, it follows, the Party itself—and putting them on a sound footing.” V. I. Lenin, “An Urgent Question,” in Lenin Collected Works (Moscow: Progress, 1964), 4:221.

64 Debray, “Socialism: A Life-Cycle,” 14, 18, 15.

65 Ibid., 22.

66 Ibid., 24.

67 Ibid., 9.

68 Ibid., 5.

69 Théorie Communiste, “Much Ado about Nothing,” Endnotes 1 (2008): 155.

70 Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, “The Holy Family; or Critique of Critical Criticism,” in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels Collected Works (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1975), 4:36.

71 Moishe Postone, Time, Labor, and Social Domination: A Reinterpretation of Marx’s Critical Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 8.

72 Ibid., 9.

73 Théorie Communiste, “Much Ado about Nothing,” 156.

74 Ibid., 174.

75 Ibid., 157.

76 Gilles Dauvé, “Leninism and the Ultra-Left,” in The Eclipse and Re-Emergence of the Communist Movement, rev. ed., by Gilles Dauvé and François Martin, 63–75 (London: Antagonism Press, 1997).

77 “Afterword,” Endnotes 1 (2008): 214.

78 Endnotes, “What Are We to Do?,” in Communization and Its Discontents: Contestation, Critique, and Contemporary Struggles, ed. Benjamin Noyes (New York: Minor Compositions, n.d.), 29.

79 Ibid., 28.

80 Comité [Maurice Blanchot], “[Communism without Heirs],” in Maurice Blanchot, Political Writings, 1953–1993, trans. Zakir Paul (New York: Fordham University Press, 2003), 93.

81 Eric Hobsbawm, “The Communist Manifesto in Perspective,” http://www.transform-network.net/journal/issue-112012/news/detail/Journal/the-communist-manifesto-in-perspective.html.

82 Martin Puchner, Poetry of the Revolution: Marx, Manifestos, and the Avant-Gardes (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2006).

83 I have approached the question of the manifesto’s subject in relation to the subject of modern revolution, but the manifesto has a broader and intrinsic relation to the emergence and self-representations of the bourgeois subject of the modern nation-state, a point well made by Janet Lyon, Manifestoes: Provocations of the Modern (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1991).

84 Alain Badiou, The Century, trans. Alberto Toscano (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007), 139, 138, emphasis added.

85 Badiou quotes Mallarmé to illustrate this convulsive conjunction of “action” with “undoing”: “the drama takes place all at once, just in time to show its undoing, which unfolds like lightning.” Ibid., 136.

86 Ibid., 140, 139, 136, 139.

87 Guy Debord, “Document beyond Debate,” trans. Ken Knabb and Not Bored!, http://www.notbored.org/orientation36.html.

88 Gilles Deleuze, “One Manifesto Less,” trans. Alan Orenstein, in The Deleuze Reader, ed. Constantin V. Boundas, 204–22 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993). Deleuze uses this formulation to describe Carmello Bene’s subtractive approach to theater, where constants of character, subject, and text—that which orchestrates and dominates the narrative and performative field—are subtracted to allow a-subjective dimensions and conditions of expression to emerge, what he calls “minor” theater.

89 Kathi Weeks, “The Critical Manifesto: Marx and Engels, Haraway, and Utopian Politics,” Utopian Studies 24, no. 2 (2013): 216–31. Lyon, Manifestoes.

90 Valerie Solanas, SCUM Manifesto (1967), 1. This passage includes scare quotes around “Life” and “society” that were removed in the Olympia Press edition. I quote from the copy held by the Dobkin Family Collection of Feminism, with thanks.

91 Melissa D. Deem, “From Bobbitt to SCUM: Re-memberment, Scatological Rhetorics, and Feminist Strategies in the Contemporary United States,” Public Culture 9 (1996): 527.

92 Solanas, SCUM Manifesto, 13. Deem, “From Bobbitt to SCUM,” 531.

93 Lyon, Manifestoes, 175.

94 The defaced edition was discovered by Laura Winkiel.

95 Laura Winkiel, “The ‘Sweet Assassin’ and the Performative Politics of SCUM Manifesto,” in The Queer Sixties, ed. Patricia Juliana Smith (New York: Routledge, 1999), 74.

96 Sara Warner and Mary Jo Watts, “Hide and Go Seek: Child’s Play as Archival Act in Valerie Solanas’s SCUM Manifesto,” TDR: The Drama Review 58, no. 4 (2014): 91. I am grateful to Sara Warner for answering my questions about the finer points of Solanas’s publishing practices.

97 Ibid.

98 Warner and Watts argue that Solanas’s very first references to something called the “SCUM Manifesto” were actually to a different text, titled “SCUM (Society for Cutting Up Men),” a one-page A4 flier comprising only two paragraphs and a notice for a SCUM Forum. This time it included an image, though nothing like a reader-seducing face, but a pen-line sketch of a hand flipping the middle finger, which Solanas had also used as the cover art to Up Your Ass. A reproduction of this proto-edition is included in Warner and Watts, “Hide and Go Seek,” 81.

99 Mary Harron, cited in Dana Heller, “Shooting Solanas: Radical Feminist History and the Technology of Failure,” Feminist Studies 27, no. 1 (2001): 171.

100 Ibid., 175, 171.

101 Ibid., 186.

102 Sara Warner, Acts of Gaiety: LGBT Performance and the Politics of Pleasure (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2012), 66.

103 “SCUM will become members of the unwork force, the fuck-up force; they will get jobs of various kinds and unwork.” Solanas, SCUM Manifesto, 17.

104 Warner, Acts of Gaiety.

105 Girodias advanced Solanas $500 for an autobiographical novel, with the promise of a further $1,500. When the novel failed to appear, he accepted Solanas’s manuscript of “SCUM Manifesto” in its place.

106 Valerie Solanas, cited in Breanne Fahs, Valerie Solanas: The Defiant Life of the Woman Who Wrote SCUM (and Shot Andy Warhol) (New York: Feminist Press, 2014), 299, 297.

107 Solanas’s copyright applications are detailed in Warner, Acts of Gaiety.

108 Ibid., 52.

109 Solanas, cited in ibid., 35.

110 Valerie Solanas, cited in Mary Harron, “Introduction: On Valerie Solanas,” in Mary Harron and Daniel Minahan, I Shot Andy Warhol (London: Bloomsbury, 1996), xxvi.

111 Lyon, Manifestoes, 10.

112 See Nick Mirzoeff, “On Hardt and Negri’s ‘Declaration,’” http://www.nicholasmirzoeff.com/O2012/2012/05/09/on-hardt-and-negris-declaration/. Jason Reed, “Revolution in Theory/Theorizing Revolution: On Hardt and Negri’s Declaration,” http://www.unemployednegativity.com/2012/05/revolution-in-theorytheorizing.html. A print edition of Declaration, at a more typical price, was issued at a later date.

113 This echoes the design of Quaderni rossi, a journal foundational to the Italian Operaismo movement with which Negri was of course closely associated. As Mario Tronti recalls: “Quaderni rossi was a beautiful title for a journal, with an evocative simplicity, eloquent in itself. ‘Notebooks’ expressed the will for research, analysis and study. The red of the cover was the sign of a decision, a commitment to be this. To start the writing, and therefore the reading, on the front cover—black on red—was a brilliant idea on Panzieri’s part.” Mario Tronti, “Our Operaismo,” trans. Eleanor Chiari, New Left Review 73 (2012): 123. For discussion of the materiality of publishing in Operaismo, see the excellent essay by Steve Wright, “‘I Came Like the Thunder and I Vanish Like the Wind’: Exploring Genre Repertoire and Document Work in the Assemblea Operai e Studenti of 1969,” Archival Science 12, no. 4 (2012): 411–36.

114 Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Declaration (n.p.: Argo Navis Author Services, 2012).

115 Ibid.

116 Paul Mason, “Why Israel Is Losing the Social Media War over Gaza,” http://blogs.channel4.com/paul-mason-blog/impact-social-media-israelgaza-conflict/1182.

117 I have discussed this in Nicholas Thoburn, “Vacuoles of Noncommunication: Minor Politics, Communist Style, and the Multitude,” in Deleuze and the Contemporary World, ed. Ian Buchanan and Adrian Parr, 42–56 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006).

118 Gilles Deleuze, Negotiations 1972–1990, trans. Martin Joughin (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 175.

119 Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (London: Athlone Books, 1989), 269.

120 Ibid., 262.

121 Deleuze, Negotiations, 129.

122 Jodi Dean, Blog Theory: Feedback and Capture in the Circuits of Drive (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2010), 95.

123 Jodi Dean, “Communicative Capitalism and Class Struggle,” Spheres 1 (2014): 6.

124 Dean, Blog Theory, 95.

125 Beverley Skeggs and Simon Yuill, “Capital Experimentation with Person/a Formation: How Facebook’s Monetization Refigures the Relationship between Property, Personhood and Protest,” Information, Communication, and Society 19, no. 3 (2016).

126 Robert W. Gehl, “The Archive and the Processor: The Internal Logic of Web 2.0,” New Media and Society 13, no. 8 (2011): 1232.

127 Skeggs and Yuill, “Capital Experimentation with Person/a Formation,” 5.

128 Ibid. Ippolita, The Facebook Aquarium: The Resistible Rise of Anarcho-Capitalism, trans. Patrice Riemens and Cecile Landman (Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures, 2015).

129 Dean, “Communicative Capitalism and Class Struggle,” 9, emphasis added.

130 Jodi Dean, Publicity’s Secret: How Technoculture Capitalizes on Democracy (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2002). Dean, “Communicative Capitalism and Class Struggle.”

131 For extensive critique of activist use of social media, see Lina Dencik and Oliver Leistert, eds., Critical Perspectives on Social Media Protest: Between Control and Emancipation (London: Rowman and Littlefield, 2015), and Natalie Fenton, “Left Out? Digital Media, Radical Politics and Social Change,” Information, Communication, and Society 19, no. 3 (2016): 346–61.

132 For a communist critique of this body of work, see Nicholas Thoburn, “Do Not Be Afraid, Join Us, Come Back? On the ‘Idea of Communism’ in Our Time,” Cultural Critique 84 (2013): 1–34.

133 Jodi Dean, The Communist Horizon (London: Verso, 2012).

134 Dean, Blog Theory, 126.

135 Ibid., 1, 3.

136 Dean, “Communicative Capitalism and Class Struggle,” 11.

137 Dean, Blog Theory, 3.

138 Ted Striphas, The Late Age of Print: Everyday Book Culture from Consumerism to Control (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), 6.

139 For an excellent recent account of the neoliberal uses of “culture” and “creativity” with regard to governance and literature, see Sarah Brouillette, Literature and the Creative Economy (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2014).

140 “Culture is bound to the book. The book as a repository and a receptacle of knowledge becomes identified with knowledge.” Maurice Blanchot, “The Absence of the Book,” in The Infinite Conversation, trans. Susan Hanson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 423.

141 Trish Travis, “Ideas and Commodities: The Image of the Book,” MIT Communications Forum, 1999, http://web.mit.edu/comm-forum/papers/travis.html.

142 Laura J. Miller, Reluctant Capitalists: Bookselling and the Culture of Consumption (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 28.

143 Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin, The Coming of the Book, trans. David Gerard (London: Verso, 1997), 109.

144 Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1962), 125. Anderson, Imagined Communities, 34.

145 Abbott Payson Usher, History of Mechanical Inventions, cited in McLuhan, Gutenberg Galaxy, 124.

146 Ibid., 132.

147 D. F. McKenzie, “Printers of the Mind: Some Notes on Bibliographical Theories and Printing-House Practices,” Studies in Bibliography 22 (1969): 1–75. I take this reference from Gitelman, Paper Knowledge, 85.

148 See Makdisi, William Blake and the Impossible History of the 1790s, 146.

149 Febvre and Martin, Coming of the Book, 248, 350.

150 Tim Ingold, Lines: A Brief History (London: Routledge, 2007), 127, 128.

151 Ibid.

152 Ibid.

153 Febvre and Martin, Coming of the Book, 22, 29.

154 Luther’s works represented approximately one-third of all German-language books sold between 1518 and 1525. He was “the first writer who could ‘sell’ his new books on the basis of his name.” Anderson, Imagined Communities, 39.

155 N. N. Feltes, Modes of Production of Victorian Novels (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 7.

156 Ibid., 8.

157 Pierre Macherey, A Theory of Literary Production, cited in ibid., 8.

158 Miller, Reluctant Capitalists. Claire Squires, Marketing Literature: The Making of Contemporary Writing in Britain (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). Striphas, Late Age of Print.

159 Striphas, Late Age of Print, 8, 102.

160 Ibid., 43.

161 George Steiner, “After the Book?,” in On Difficulty and Other Essays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), 188–89.

162 See Hayles, How We Think, 55–79.

163 Janet Duitsman Cornelius, When I Can Read My Title Clear: Literacy, Slavery, and Religion in the Antebellum South (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1991).

164 James Thompson, Models of Value: Eighteenth-Century Political Economy and the Novel (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1996).

165 Ibid., 7.

166 Walter Mignolo, “Signs and Their Transmission: The Question of the Book in the New World,” in Writing without Words: Alternative Literacies in Mesoamerica and the Andes, ed. Elizabeth Hill Boone and Walter D. Mignolo (London: Duke University Press, 1994), 233.

167 Ibid., 234.

168 D. F. McKenzie, Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 41.

169 David Jay Bolter, Writing Space: The Computer, Hypertext, and the History of Writing (Hillside, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1991), 4.

170 Ibid., 116.

171 Ibid., 117.

172 Ibid., 2.

173 Striphas, Late Age of Print, 2.

174 Ibid., 3. Hayles, How We Think, 2.

175 In August 2012, Amazon reported that e-book sales outstripped hardback and paperback books combined, at a ratio of 114 to 100. See http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/aug/06/amazon-kindle-ebook-sales-overtake-print.

176 Kim Cascone, cited in Florian Cramer, afterword to Post-Digital Print: The Mutation of Publishing since 1894, by Alessandro Ludovico (Eindhoven, Netherlands: Onomatopee, 2012), 162. Cramer credits Cascone with coining the term post-digital, with regard to glitch aesthetics in electronic music.

177 Florian Cramer, “What Is Post-Digital?,” Post-Digital Research 3, no. 1 (2014), http://www.aprja.net/?p=1318.

178 Florian Cramer, “Post-Digital Writing,” Electronic Book Review, 2012, http://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/electropoetics/postal.

179 Murphie, “Ghosted Publics,” 105.

180 Nina Power, A Pamphlet about a Book about a Blog (London: Banner Repeater, 2012).

181 Simon Worthington, “Danger: Contains Books,” in I Read Where I Am: Exploring New Information Cultures, ed. Mieke Gerritzen, Geert Lovink, and Minke Kampman (Amsterdam: Valiz, 2011), 174. In keeping with the critical sensibility of the post-digital, the purpose of Worthington’s intervention here is to break with the distracting and disabling talk of the book’s imminent demise and to tip instead into critical engagement with the more pertinent question of the political economy of corporate and small press publishing.

182 Jacques Derrida, Paper Machine, trans. Rachel Bowlby (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2005), 17.

183 Johanna Drucker, SpecLab: Digital Aesthetics and Projects in Speculative Computing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 166.

184 Jerome McGann, Radiant Textuality: Literature after the World Wide Web (New York: Palgrave, 2001), 184.

185 See, among other works, Johanna Drucker, “Diagrammatic Writing,” New Formations 78 (2013): 83–101, and Drucker, SpecLab.

186 Gary Hall, “The Unbound Book: Academic Publishing in the Age of the Infinite Archive,” Journal of Visual Culture 12, no. 3 (2013): 497. See also Joost Kircz and Adriaan van der Weel, eds., The Unbound Book (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1994).

187 http://p-dpa.net.

188 Silvio Lorusso, Post-Digital Publishing Archive, https://ia600509.us.archive.org/15/items/p-dpa_booklet/p-dpa_booklet.pdf.

189 Cramer, “What Is Post-Digital?”

190 Cramer, “Post-Digital Writing.”

191 These fairs and institutions have all been established since 2000, with the exception of the London Anarchist Bookfair, first held in 1983; Book Works, established in 1984; Franklin Furnace, established by Martha Wilson in 1976; and Printed Matter, founded by Lucy Lippard, Sol LeWitt, and others in 1976.

192 “AND About,” http://www.andpublishing.org/events/coming-soon/.

193 Simon Reynolds, Retromania: Pop Culture’s Addiction to Its Own Past (London: Faber and Faber, 2012). Jess Baines, “Radical Print Revolution? Objects under Capitalism,” STRIKE! 8 (2014): 20–21.

194 Derrida, Paper Machine, 47.

195 Hayles, Writing Machines, 29–34.

196 Christina Kiaer, Imagine No Possessions: The Socialist Objects of Russian Constructivism (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2005).

197 Deleuze, Cinema 2, 150. Gilles Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical, trans. Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 118.

1 Guy Debord to Ivan Chtcheglov, April 30, 1963, http://www.notbored.org/debord-30April1963.html. In a later text written at the time of the demise of the Situationist International, Debord’s ambivalence about the journal form extends also to its role of “holding on to a base,” where its periodicity is tied to conservative habits of consumption. Ending the journal has the merit, as he sees it, of “interrupt[ing] the conditioned reflex of a spectator crowd . . . who had awaited the next number of the review which it had picked up the habit of consuming, so as to bring to light its ‘knowledge’ and its dreamed of orthodoxy.” “It seemed to us . . . better to cease the publication of a review which was beginning to enjoy a too routinish success. Other forms of situationist expression are more suitable to the new epoch.” Unattributed [Guy Debord], “Notes to Serve towards the History of the S.I. from 1969–1971,” in The Veritable Split in the International, by Situationist International (London: B. M. Chronos, 1985), 73, 74.

2 Jean-Luc Nancy, The Inoperative Community, trans. Peter Connor et al. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991).

3 Jacques Rancière, The Nights of Labor: The Workers’ Dream in the Nineteenth Century, trans. John Drury (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989), 8.

4 Ibid.

5 Ibid.

6 Rancière, cited in Donald Reid, “Introduction,” ibid., xxxi.

7 Ibid., xxxv.

8 Jacques Rancière, Mute Speech: Literature, Critical Theory, and Politics (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 58–59.

9 Ibid., 59.

10 Kiaer, Imagine No Possessions, 33.

11 Rodchenko, in ibid., 1. While the casual way that Rodchenko deploys slavery for metaphoric effect is objectionable, the relation he names contains the appalling truth that the social form of slavery reduced people to a-social and alienable units of property, precisely to the form of commodity object. Also problematic is his identification here of the racial trope of blackness with passivity (the sorry state of the “black and mournful”), though blackness figures later in the letter in a more critical manner, as the “black work” of “reprisal against [the commodity’s] oppressors.” Aleksandr Rodchenko, Experiments of the Future: Diaries, Essays, Letters, and Other Writings, ed. Alexander N. Lavrentiev, trans. Jamey Gambrell (New York: MoMA, 2005), 169.

12 Kiaer, Imagine No Possessions, 7.

13 Boris Arvatov, “Everyday Life and the Culture of the Thing (toward the Formulation of the Question),” trans. Christina Kiaer, October 81 (1997): 120.

14 Ibid., 121, 126.

15 Ibid., 123.

16 Ibid., 123, 124.

17 Karl Marx, “Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts,” in Early Writings, trans. trans. Rodney Livingstone and Gregor Benton, 279–400 (Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin, 1975), 352.

18 Arvatov, “Everyday Life and the Culture of the Thing,” 122.

19 Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, trans. Ben Fowkes (Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin, 1976), 1:165.

20 Ibid.

21 “Communisation and Value-Form Theory,” Endnotes 2 (2010): 79.

22 Peter Stallybrass, “Marx’s Coat,” in Border Fetishisms: Material Objects in Unstable Spaces, ed. Patricia Spyer (New York: Routledge, 1998), 184. Whether Marx was fully aware of the joke he had made here or was using fetishism in a more conventional fashion to name a social illusion and, by way of analogy, undermine the pretensions to rationality of capitalist modernity is a moot point. For an exploration of the many dimensions of Marx’s use of the anthropological concept of fetishism in currency at the time, see William Pietz, “Fetishism and Materialism: The Limits of Theory in Marx,” in Fetishism as Cultural Discourse, ed. Emily Apter and William Pietz, 119–51 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1993).

23 Arvatov, “Everyday Life and the Culture of the Thing,” 121, 124.

24 Marx, “Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts,” 352.

25 Ibid., 352, 390. As Peter Pels remarks, this passage does not at all exclude the possibility that “to be sensuous is ‘to be subjected to the actions of another thing.’” Pels, “The Spirit of Matter: On Fetish, Rarity, Fact, and Fancy,” in Spyer, Border Fetishisms, 101.

26 Arvatov, “Everyday Life and the Culture of the Thing,” 126.

27 Boris Arvatov, “From Art and Class (1923),” in The Tradition of Constructivism, ed. Stephen Bann (London: Thames and Hudson, 1974), 45, 46.

28 Cited in Kiaer, Imagine No Possessions, 49.

29 Arvatov, “Everyday Life and the Culture of the Thing,” 127. I should note that Arvatov’s argument also contains a more conventional understanding of the conquest and mastery of nature.

30 Ibid., 128.

31 Ibid., 48, 47.

32 Lenin’s proselytizing for Taylorism and labor discipline and Trotsky’s championing of the “militarization of labor” are the overt expressions of this problem. See Thoburn, “Do Not Be Afraid.”

33 Marx, “Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts,” 351. Quotation of this passage from Marx can be found on two consecutive pages of the Arcades Project, one of which is the occasion for Benjamin to “deduce” the political import of the collector’s critique of use. Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002), 209, 210.

34 Marx, “Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts,” 352.

35 Ibid., 209, emphasis added. Theodor W. Adorno, “Exchange with Theodor W. Adorno on the Essay: ‘Paris, the Capital of the Nineteenth Century,’” in Walter Benjamin, Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings. Vol. 3, 1935–1938, ed. Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002), 61.

36 Benjamin, Arcades Project, 9.

37 Ibid., 205, 206.

38 Esther Leslie, “Telescoping the Microscopic Object: Benjamin the Collector,” in The Optic of Walter Benjamin, ed. Alex Coles (London: Black Dog, 2001), 80. Benjamin, Arcades Project, 206.

39 Benjamin, “Unpacking My Library,” in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 2007), 60.

40 For Benjamin’s critique of work, see Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Benjamin, Illuminations, 259.

41 Benjamin, Arcades Project, 475, 204. Stephen Zepke has shown that a related formulation can be found in Mikhail Bakhtin’s understanding of the work of art, which “emerges from a process that first of all ‘isolates’ something from its self-evidence in the world, giving it an ‘active indetermination’ within reality.” Zepke, “From Aesthetic Autonomy to Autonomist Aesthetics: Art and Life in Guattari,” in The Guattari Effect, ed. Éric Alliez and Andrew Goffey (New York: Continuum Books, 2011), 209.

42 Cesare Casarino, Modernity at Sea: Melville, Marx, Conrad in Crisis (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), xxvii.

43 Ibid.

44 Benjamin, “Unpacking My Library,” 60. N. A. Basbanes, A Gentle Madness: Bibliophiles, Bibliomanes, and the Eternal Passion for Books (New York: Henry Holt, 1999).

45 Benjamin, “Thesis on the Philosophy of History,” 261, 262.

46 Benjamin, cited in Erdmut Wizisla, preface to Walter Benjamin’s Archive: Images, Texts, Signs, ed. Ursula Marx, trans. Esther Leslie (London: Verso, 2007), 5.

47 Benjamin, “Unpacking My Library,” 67.

48 Benjamin, cited in Ackbar Abbas, “Walter Benjamin’s Collector: The Fate of Modern Experience,” in Modernity and the Text: Revisions of German Modernism, ed. Andreas Huyssen and David Bathrick (New York: Columbia University Press 1989), 216.

49 Benjamin, “Unpacking My Library,” 67. Douglas Crimp, On the Museum’s Ruins (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1993), 204.

50 Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism, trans. Harry Zohn (London: Verso, 1983), 181, 182.

51 André Breton, Mad Love, trans. Mary Ann Caws (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1988), 126.

52 Ibid., 28, 36.

53 Romy Golan, “Triangulating the Surrealist Fetish,” Visual Anthropology Review 10, no. 1 (1994): 50–65.

54 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, “Balance-Sheet Program for Desiring Machines,” in Félix Guattari, Chaosophy, ed. Sylvère Lotringer (New York: Semiotext(e), 1995), 135.

55 Denis Hollier, “The Use-Value of the Impossible,” trans. Liesl Ollman, October 60 (1992): 20.

56 Georges Bataille, in ibid., 22.

57 Pels, “Spirit of Matter,” 99.

58 William Pietz, “The Problem of the Fetish, I,” Res 9 (1985): 5, 7.

59 Pels, “Spirit of Matter,” 98.

60 Ibid.

61 Bakker’s Untitled Project: Commodity [Capital] was exhibited at The Irresistible Force at London’s Tate Modern in 2007 and was temporarily available for mail order at the same price as the Penguin edition.

62 Trish Travis, “Ideas and Commodities: The Image of the Book,” http://web.mit.edu/comm-forum/papers/travis.html.

63 William Everson, “From the Poem as Icon—Reflections on Printing as a Fine Art,” in A Book of the Book: Some Work and Projections about the Book and Writing, ed. Jerome Rothenberg and Steven Clay (New York: Granary Books, 2000), 50.

64 Benjamin, “Unpacking My Library,” 66.

65 Walter Benjamin, “One-Way Street (Selection),” in Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York: Schocken Books, 1978), 61.

66 Agnes Blaha, “Tackling Tactility—What Is It That Makes Theorists Shy Away from the Haptic Domain?,” in NO-ISBN: On Self-Publishing, ed. Bernhard Cella, Leo Findeisen, and Agnes Blaha, 277–84 (Cologne, Germany: Buchhandlung Walther König, 2015), 281.

67 Philip Dormer Stanhope, cited in Price, How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain, 3.

68 Benjamin, “Unpacking My Library,” 62.

69 Theodor W. Adorno, “Bibliographical Musings,” in Notes to Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), 2:21.

70 Ibid., 2:23.

71 Ibid., 2:20.

72 Ibid., 2:28.

73 Ibid., 2:21.

74 Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life, trans. E. F. N. Jephcott (New York: Verso, 2005), 80, 101.

75 Adorno, “Bibliographical Musings,” 2:25.

76 Ibid., 2:26

77 Ibid., 2:25.

78 Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form: Twentieth Century Dialectical Theories of Literature (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1971), 7.

79 Adorno, “Bibliographic Musings,” 2:30.

80 Ibid.

81 Ibid.

82 Ibid.

83 Ibid.

84 Ibid.

85 Ibid.

86 Ibid., 2:29.

87 Jameson, Marxism and Form, 8.

88 Adorno, “Bibliographical Musings,” 2:31.

89 Ibid., 2:23.

90 I am not suggesting a historically continuous object over this period. As a mutable assemblage of changing technical skills, printing practices and conventions, materials, financial paradigms, reading habits, political constituencies, distribution circuits, and so on, the nature of the pamphlet has been a highly various object over time and place.

91 Drucker, Century of Artists’ Books, 358, 8.

92 Price, How to Do Things with Books, 13.

93 Iain Sinclair, Lights Out for the Territory: 9 Excursions in the Secret History of London (London: Granta Books, 1997), 25.

94 Jason Skeet and Mark Pawson, Counter Intelligence: Catalogue of Self-Published and Autonomous Print-Creations (London, 1995).

95 See http://www.guest-room.net/.

96 Stéphane Mallarmé, “The Book: A Spiritual Instrument,” trans. Bradford Cook, in Critical Theory since Plato, ed. Hazard Adams (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1971), 690, 691.

97 Gilles Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, trans. Tom Conley (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 31. Gilles Deleuze, Proust and Signs, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Braziller, 1972), 98, 103.

98 Deleuze, The Fold, 31.

99 Adorno, “Bibliographic Musings,” 20.

100 Ibid., 27.

101 Deleuze, Proust and Signs, 100.

102 Ibid., 109, 101.

103 Deleuze, The Fold, 31.

104 Ibid., 86.

105 Beni Memorial Library, “The ‘On Organization’ Pamphlet—A Bibliographical Dissection,” 1976, one A4 page.

106 Ibid.

107 Drucker, Century of Artists’ Books, 358.

108 Henriette Heise and Jakob Jakobsen, “Info 2,” http://infocentre.antipool.org/. The collaborative practice at Infopool included a number of people, most especially Anthony Davies, Emma Hedditch, and Howard Slater.

109 Infopool, “Operation Re-appropriation: Infopool @ Tate Modern, 9.2.2001,” http://infopool.antipool.org/tate.htm.

110 Ibid.

111 Ibid.

112 Jakob Jakobsen, interview with the author, July 16, 2007.

113 Arvatov, cited in Kiaer, Imagine No Possessions, 68.

114 Infopool, “Operation Re-appropriation.”

115 Derrida, Paper Machine, 42.

116 Joad Raymond, Pamphlets and Pamphleteering in Early Modern Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).

117 Ibid., 38, 39.

118 Ibid., 10.

119 Fabian Tompsett, interview with the author, September 8, 2013.

120 Drucker, Century of Artists’ Books, 197.

121 Jakobsen, interview.

122 Jakob Jakobsen, “A New Table, Which Might Not Be Understood as Clean in Modern Terms,” http://infopool.antipool.org/table.htm. This is one of two or three moments in Anti-Book that indicate possible contributions to an environmental politics of media. The ravaging effects of the energy-guzzling server farms, upgrade imperatives, precious metal mines, electronic waste, and so forth, that accompany the not-so-immaterial flow of digital information make a socioenvironmental politics of media materialities all too urgent. See Richard Maxwell and Toby Miller, Greening the Media (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).

123 Benjamin, “Unpacking My Library,” 68.

124 Adorno, Minima Moralia, 50. The words in the first quotation are by Joel Burges, from his “Adorno’s Mimeograph: The Uses of Obsolescence in Minima Moralia,” New German Critique 40, no. 1 (2013): 72.

125 Adorno, Minima Moralia, 51.

126 It is worth underscoring how different Adorno’s appreciation of the outmoded is to a fixation on the past: “The quest for an age past not only fails to indicate the way home but forfeits all consistency; the arbitrary conservation of the obsolete compromises what it wants to conserve, and with a bad conscience it obdurately opposes whatever is new.” Adorno, Philosophy of New Music, cited in Burges, “Adorno’s Mimeograph,” 68.

127 See Burges, ibid. James Schmidt, “Language, Mythology, and Enlightenment: Historical Notes on Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment,” Social Research 65, no. 4 (1998): 807–38.

128 Schmidt, “Language, Mythology, and Enlightenment,” 811.

129 Ibid.

130 Cited in Raymond, Pamphlets and Pamphleteering, 5.

131 See http://www.56a.org.uk/archive.html.

132 Chris, interview with the author, July 12, 2007.

133 Ibid.

134 Ibid.

135 Ibid.

136 Adorno, “Bibliographic Musings,” 24.

137 Ibid., 29.

138 Ibid.

139 Chris, interview.

140 Leslie, “Telescoping the Microscopic Object,” 68.

141 Ibid.

142 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, trans. Graham Burchell and Hugh Tomlinson (London: Verso, 1994), 167–68, 176–77.

143 Hollier, “Use-Value of the Impossible,” 23.

144 Ibid.

145 Andrew Feenberg and Jim Freedman, eds., When Poetry Ruled the Streets: The French May Events of 1968 (New York: State University of New York, 2001).

146 Atelier Populaire, Posters from the Revolution: Paris, May 1968 (London: Dobson Books, 1969), emphasis added.

147 This quotation from Judge Achille Gallucci’s 1979 warrant is cited in the introduction to Antonio Negri, Books for Burning: Between Civil War and Democracy in 1970s Italy, ed. Timothy S. Murphy, trans. Arianna Bove et al. (New York: Verso, 2005), xiii.

148 Raymond, Pamphlets and Pamphleteering, 7.

149 For an introduction to the history and politics of U.K. cooperative print shops, see Jess Baines, “Free Radicals,” Afterall, http://www.afterall.org/online/radical.printmaking/#.VbCwzYudLzI.

150 Ibid.

151 Ār. Im. Jūnz, Tajrubīyāt-i Kumītah’hā-yi Kār’garī dar Inqilāb-i Rūsīyah, trans. Kāvah (London: Unpopular Books, 1979). Jean Barrot [Gilles Dauvé], What Is Communism (London: Unpopular Books, 1983).

152 Fabian Tompsett, interview with the author, June 5, 2007.

153 Karl Marx to Wilhelm Blos, November 10, 1877, cited in Jacques Camatte and Gianni Collu, “About the Organisation,” in Jacques Camatte, Capital and Community: The Results of the Immediate Process of Production and the Economic Work of Marx, trans. David Brown (London: Unpopular Books, 1988), https://www.marxists.org/archive/camatte/capcom/index.htm.

154 Unpopular Books, preface to What Is Situationism: Critique of the Situationist International, by Jean Barrot (London: Unpopular Books, 1987), 2.

155 Jørgen Nash, cited in Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen and Jakob Jakobsen, eds., Expect Anything Fear Nothing: The Situationist Movement in Scandinavia and Elsewhere (Copenhagen: Nebula, 2011), 223.

156 The text is taken from a photograph of a Popular Book Centre.

157 Asger Jorn, cited in Simon Crook, “Moving Mountains: ‘Shamanic’ Rock Art and the International of Experimental Artists,” Transgressions: A Journal of Urban Exploration 4 (1998): 42. This split in the Situationist International, pertaining among other things to dispute concerning the revolutionary role of “art,” is addressed in the first book published by Unpopular Books. See Stewart Home, The Assault on Culture: Utopian Currents from Lettrisme to Class War (London: Aporia Press/Unpopular Books, 1988).

158 “kArt Boo,” unattributed, unpublished, and undated four-page typed manuscript by Fabian Tompsett, [1994].

159 Ibid., 2.

160 Ibid., 1.

161 Ibid.

162 Ibid. The title of kArt Boo seeks to foreground this, and Tompsett mentions, as an example, uneven exposure of text during platemaking and the insertion of ordinary typing into otherwise beautifully typeset pages, though my personal favorite is the typographic destabilization of the Poplar locale of Unpopular Books in the colophon to Daniel Lux, The Camden Parasites (London: Unpoplar Books, 1999).

163 Tompsett, interview, June 5, 2007.

164 I make this point hesitantly, because Tompsett has shown little sympathy for Marxist critiques that are weighted too heavily on the causality of the abstract, critiques that “sweep the real world—i.e. the sensuous world which we move around in—into the dustbin of history, so that we are met by simple abstract forces.” It is only through concrete mediation that the abstract exists, and it is in such mediation where politics lies, not in a metaphysical struggle between abstract categories. F. T. [Fabian Tompsett], “Hegel on Acid: Response to ‘Marxists and the So-Called Problem of Imperialism,’” [1988], http://libcom.org/library/hegel-on-acid-a-response-to-marxists-and-the-so-called-problem-of-imperialism.

165 “kArt Boo.”

166 Asger Jorn, Open Creation and Its Enemies, trans. Fabian Tompsett (London: Unpopular Books, 1994), 47.

167 Raymond, Pamphlets and Pamphleteering.

168 McLuhan, Gutenberg Galaxy, 125.

169 Tompsett, interview, June 5, 2007. One cover places the pamphlet in relation to Jorn’s wayfaring habits, with an image of a lithograph of Jorn astride a BSA motorcycle in front of the Eiffel Tower; the other indicates Jorn’s interests in material form that I am pursuing here, with its image of the somewhat talismanic memorial stone he fabricated for his syndicalist friend Christian Christensen.

170 Tompsett, interview, June 5, 2007.

171 Walter Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism, trans. Harry Zohn (London: Verso, 1983), 55.

172 Stéphane Mallarmé, cited in Maurice Blanchot, The Book to Come, trans. Charlotte Mandell (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2002), 229.

173 Jorn, Open Creation, 32.

1 Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, The Printing Press as Agent of Change (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980). Darnton, Forbidden Best-Sellers. Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin, The Coming of the Book: The Impact of Printing 1450–1800, trans. David Gerard (New York: Verso Books, 1997).

2 Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974), 18.

3 John Mowitt, Text: The Geneaology of an Antidisciplinary Object (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1992), 101.

4 For a materialist critique of Derrida’s earlier formulations of the book, as well as one of the few engagements with Deleuze and Guattari’s typology of the book, see Daniel Selcer’s fascinating work Philosophy and the Book (London: Continuum, 2010), 6–10, 194–202.

5 Maurice Blanchot, “The Absence of the Book,” in The Infinite Conversation, trans. Susan Hanson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 424.

6 “We are writing this book as a rhizome. It is composed of plateaus. . . . To attain the multiple, one must have a method that effectively constructs it.” Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 22.

7 At one point, they assess Artaud’s spell for Hitler as a “BwO intensity map” of thresholds and waves, but only with regard to its textual content. Ibid., 164.

8 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Kafka: Towards a Minor Literature, trans. Dana Polan (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1986), 96.

9 Félix Guattari, The Anti-Oedipus Papers, ed. Stéphane Nadaud, trans. Kélina Gotman (Los Angeles, Calif.: Semiotext(e), 2006), 400.

10 Ibid., 343–44, 352, 371.

11 Deleuze, Negotiations, 144. Foucault, in Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia Volume 1, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), xiii.

12 Selcer, Philosophy and the Book, 199.

13 Ernst Robert Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1953), 310.

14 Francis Bacon, The Advancement of Learning (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1885).

15 Walter Mignolo, “From Signs and Their Transmission: The Question of the Book in the New World,” in A Book of the Book, ed. Jerome Rothenberg and Steven Clay (New York: Granary Books, 2000), 351.

16 Jacques Verger, cited in Alain Boureau, “Franciscan Piety and Voracity: Uses and Strategems in the Hagiographic Pamphlet,” in The Culture of Print: Power and the Uses of Print in Early Modern Europe, ed. Roger Chartier, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1989), 17.

17 James Kearney, The Incarnate Text: Imagining the Book in Reformation England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009), 17.

18 Martin Luther, cited in ibid., 24.

19 Kearney, Incarnate Text, 24.

20 Ibid., 38.

21 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 127.

22 Ibid., 123.

23 Ibid., 124.

24 Ibid., 131.

25 For further discussion of the semiopolitics of monomania, see Nicholas Thoburn, “Weatherman, the Militant Diagram, and the Problem of Political Passion,” New Formations 68 (2010): 125–42.

26 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 122.

27 Ibid., 127.

28 Kearney, Incarnate Text, 10.

29 See ibid., 10–11.

30 Ibid., 11.

31 Pierre Bersuire, Dictionarium seu reportorium morale, [1355], cited in ibid., 14.

32 John Fisher, “Sermon . . . preached vpon a good Friday” [1531–34], cited in Kearney, Incarnate Text, 5.

33 Thomas Müntzer, cited in ibid., 23.

34 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 127.

35 Mallarmé, “The Book: A Spiritual Instrument,” 690.

36 For Marx and Engels, Max Stirner’s The Ego and Its Own functions as “the perfect book, the Holy Book.” It posits “the history of the kingdom of the unique [that] follows a wise plan fixed from eternity,” a plan based on the egoists “delirious fantasy,” in Stirner’s words, of “the world as it is for me.” Marx and Engels, Collected Works, 5:117, 126.

37 Daniel Leese, “A Single Spark: Origins and Spread of the Little Red Book,” in Mao’s Little Red Book: A Global History, ed. Alexander C. Cook (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 23. Roderick MacFarquhar and Michael Schoenhals, Mao’s Last Revolution (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006), 240. The Bible is estimated at 5–6 billion copies published and the Qur’an at 800 million. Carl Wilkinson, The Observer Book of Books (Reading, U.K.: Observer Books, 2008), 29.

38 Mao himself remarked on the power of Quotations, writing in a 1966 letter to his wife, Jiang Qing, “I have never believed . . . that those little books of mine could have such fantastic magic, yet he [Lin Biao] blew them up, and the whole country followed.” Mao, cited in Ross Terrill, Mao: A Biography (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1999), 370. Many thanks to Chung Yan Priscilla Kam for translating some of these and other posters from the Cultural Revolution.

39 Slavoj Žižek, “Mao Tse-Tung, the Marxist Lord of Misrule,” in Mao Tse-Tung, Slavoj Žižek Presents Mao on Practice and Contradiction (London: Verso Books, 2007), 10.

40 Mao Tse-tung, “Analysis of the Classes in Chinese Society” (1926), in Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1965), 1:22; Mao Tse-Tung, Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1966), 214.

41 Mao Zedong, “Talk on Questions of Philosophy” (1964), cited in Žižek, “Mao Tse-tung, the Marxist Lord of Misrule,” 9.

42 Robert Jay Lifton, Revolutionary Immortality: Mao Tse-tung and the Chinese Cultural Revolution (Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin, 1970), 49.

43 Mao, Quotations, 260.

44 Mao in 1958, cited in Stuart Schram, The Thought of Mao Tse-tung (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 128.

45 Cited in Lifton, Revolutionary Immortality, 72.

46 Mao, Quotations, 174.

47 Lifton, Revolutionary Immortality, 67.

48 Mao, Quotations, 201.

49 Ibid., 202.

50 Cited in Stuart Schram, Mao Tse-Tung (Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin, 1966), 295.

51 Lin Biao, cited in Alexander C. Cook, “Introduction: The Spiritual Atom Bomb and Its Global Fallout,” in Cook, Mao’s Little Red Book, 8.

52 Estimates of the death toll in eleven leading texts are tabulated in the Wikipedia entry for the Great Leap Forward, between 23 and 46 million people. The slogan quoted here is taken from Henry Yuhuai He, Dictionary of the Political Thought of the People’s Republic of China (New York: East Gate Books, 2001), 413. For recent documentary analysis of the Great Leap Forward, see Yang Jisheng, Tombstone: The Untold Story of Mao’s Great Famine, trans. Stacy Mosher and Guo Jian (London: Allen Lane, 2012).

53 Mao, cited Jung Chang and Jon Halliday, Mao: The Unknown Story (London: Jonathan Cape, 2007), 505.

54 Mao, Slavoj Žižek Presents Mao on Practice and Contradiction, 44. The source of the second quotation is not given, cited in Lifton, Revolutionary Immortality, 72. This is an opportunity to note that the subjective purity of Mao Zedong Thought is not the same thing as a commitment to principles; Mao, ever the politician, was perfectly capable of sacrificing his principles in the pursuit and maintenance of power, such that the corpus of his Thought in the Selected Works required careful editing and revision, and, unlike the other socialist demagogues, no “complete works” was published. Simon Leys, “Aspects of Mao Zedong,” in The Hall of Uselessness: Collected Essays, 383–88 (New York: New York Review of Books, 2013).

55 For the more specific features of this metaphoric identification of Mao’s Thought with nuclear fission, notably with regard to the energy derived from splitting in Mao’s dialectical schema of “one divides into two,” see Cook, “Introduction: The Spiritual Atom Bomb and Its Global Fallout.”

56 Cited in Xing Lu, Rhetoric of the Chinese Cultural Revolution (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2004), 65.

57 This structure of thematic selections arose not, as one might have assumed, from an effort to condense a larger book, at least not directly so, but from a card file system. The Tianjin Daily had found this means of thematically arranging famous passages from Mao’s Selected Works to be an effective solution to the difficult task of sourcing suitable quotations of Mao’s Thought to accompany each day’s news stories. It is a neat reminder of the contingent and overdetermined nature of sociotechnical invention, as is the fact that the book’s red plastic covers were not as inevitable a choice as they now appear, for two trial bindings of Quotations were made in light and dark blue, and, while the volumes used by PLA brigade teams were covered in red vinyl, in the first edition, high-ranking individual officers received copies in printed paper wrappers. The first trial editions were also of a slightly larger format; it was the need to have them fit neatly into the pockets of military uniforms that caused their unusually diminutive, and now so iconic, format. See Daniel Leese, Mao Cult: Rhetoric and Ritual in the Cultural Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 109–10, 112. Oliver Lei Han, “Sources and Early Printing History of Chairman Mao’s Quotations,” 2004, 4, http://www.bibsocamer.org/BibSite/Han/index.html.

58 Leese, “A Single Spark,” 31. Andrew F. Jones, “Quotation Songs,” in Cook, Mao’s Little Red Book, 46.

59 Cited in Jiaqi Yan and Gao Gao, Turbulent Decade: A History of the Cultural Revolution, trans. Daniel W. Y. Kwok (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1996), 179–80.

60 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 127.

61 In Thomas W. Robinson, ed., The Cultural Revolution in China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 509.

62 Leese, “A Single Spark,” 27–29.

63 Jones, “Quotation Songs,” 46.

64 Rae Yang, cited in Melissa Schrift, Biography of a Chairman Mao Badge (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2001), 79–80.

65 Terrill, Mao, 318. For photographs of Quotations-waving crowds in numerous settings, including Mao’s sunrise audiences with the Red Guards, see Jiang Jiehong, Red: China’s Cultural Revolution (London: Jonathan Cape, 2010).

66 The power of the word is accentuated in Chinese culture by the ideographic form of Chinese characters and the expressive art of calligraphy. The text itself reads, “Study Chairman Mao’s writings, follow his teachings and act according to his instructions.” On the rise and fall of Lin Biao, see Simon Leys, The Burning Forest: Essays on Chinese Culture and Politics (London: Paladin Books, 1988), 138–48.

67 Lu, Rhetoric of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, 132–33.

68 Ibid., 133–34.

69 Cited in MacFarquhar and Schoenhals, Mao’s Last Revolution, 104, 126.

70 Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party, “Decision Concerning the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution,” August 8, 1966, http://www.rrojasdatabank.org/16points.htm.

71 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 130.

72 Lifton, Revolutionary Immortality, 60–62.

73 Simon Leys, The Chairman’s New Clothes: Mao and the Cultural Revolution (London: Allison and Busby, 1977). See also the incisive 1967 text by the SI, which was informed by the Situationist René Viénet’s direct reports from China, Situationist International, “The Explosion Point of Ideology in China,” in Knabb, Situationist International Anthology, 185–94. The publication of Leys’s exposé of the Cultural Revolution, based on his close analysis of events while living in Hong Kong, was encouraged and arranged by Viénet, where it appeared in the latter’s “Bibliothèque asiatique” series at Champ Libre. See Laurent Six, “China: How Pierre Ryckmans Became Simon Leys,” http://www.notbored.org/leys.pdf.

74 Leys, Chairman’s New Clothes, 13.

75 Simon Leys, Chinese Shadows (Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin, 1978), 207–8.

76 Ibid., 191.

77 Chinois, encore un effort pour être révolutionnaires (a.k.a. Peking Duck Soup), dir. René Viénet (1977).

78 Lowell Dittmer, “The Structural Evolution of ‘Criticism and Self-Criticism,’” The China Quarterly 56 (1973): 724.

79 Leese, Mao Cult, 121.

80 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 127.

81 Mao, Quotations, 61.

82 The Words of the Chairman, dir. Harun Farocki, http://www.harunfarocki.de/films/1960s/1967/the-words-of-the-chairman.html.

83 Terrill, Mao, 318.

84 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 5.

85 Ibid., 11.

86 Ibid., 4.

87 Deleuze, Negotiations, 8–9.

88 Ibid., 5.

89 Ibid., 21.

90 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 3.

91 Ibid., 9.

92 Ibid., 6.

93 Ibid. The choice of targets here is striking, for these three had great significance for Deleuze and Guattari. Guattari apparently had a lifelong obsession with Joyce, albeit that Beckett’s sobriety with language has the upper hand in Deleuze and Guattari’s work, against Joyce’s overloading of text with illusion and metaphor. Borroughs’s thought and method against “control” is a source of some considerable importance to their critique of “control society” and communication. And the impact of Nietzsche on Deleuze would of course be hard to exaggerate.

94 Ibid., 22.

95 Ibid.

96 Ibid., 22–23.

97 Ibid., 23–24.

98 Ibid., 520.

99 “Absolutment Nécessaire: The Politics of the Book: An Email Conversation between Jöelle de La Casinière and Andrew Bonacina,” http://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/32871722/Exhibitions/2011/Casiniere/Casiniere%20Interview.pdf. See http://www.montfaucon.eu/ for images of a complete edition. I am grateful to Joëlle de La Casinière for sharing with me details of this book.

100 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 4.

101 The most comprehensive account of the movement, one that should not be confused with Italian Futurism, is Vladimir Markov, Russian Futurism: A History (London: University of California Press, 1969). Images of complete editions of a number of Russian Futurist books can be viewed at http://www.getty.edu/research/. The first zaum poem, Aleksei Kruchenykh’s 1920 “Kr dei macelli,” can be heard on YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pu-jrJVIcnk.

102 Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, 167.

103 Kruchenykh, cited in Markov, Russian Futurism, 347. Aleksei Kruchenykh, “Declaration of Transrational Language,” in Russian Futurism through Its Manifestoes, 1912–1928, ed. Anna Lawton, trans. Anna Lawton and Herbert Eagle (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1988), 182–83.

104 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 117.

105 Aleksei Remizov, cited in Nina Gurianova, “A Game in Hell, Hard Work in Heaven: Deconstructing the Cannon in Russian Futurist Books,” in The Russian Avant-Garde Book 1910–1934, ed. Margit Rowell and Deborah Wye (New York: MoMA, 2002), 26.

106 Cited in Gerald Janecek, “Kruchenykh contra Gutenberg,” in Rowell and Wye, Russian Avant-Garde Book, 41.

107 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 9.

108 Ibid., 386.

109 Johanna Drucker, “Pixel Dust: Illusions of Innovation in Scholarly Publishing,” Los Angeles Review of Books, January 16, 2004, https://lareviewofbooks.org/essay/pixel-dust-illusions-innovation-scholarly-publishing/#_ednref2. Peter Stallybrass, “Books and Scrolls: Navigating the Bible,” in Books and Readers in Early Modern England, ed. Jenny Anderson, 42–79 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002).

110 Jared Ash, “Primitivism in Russian Futurist Book Design 1910–14,” in Rowell and Wye, Russian Avant-Garde Book.

111 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 493.

112 Gurianova, “A Game in Hell.” Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 402.

113 Gerald Janecek, The Look of Russian Literature: Avant-Garde Visual Experiments, 1900–1930 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1984), 117.

114 Aleksei Kruchenykh, “New Ways of the Word,” in Lawton, Russian Futurism through Its Manifestoes, 76.

115 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 499.

116 Ibid., 498.

117 Ibid., 494.

118 Ash, “Primitivism in Russian Futurist Book Design,” 37.

119 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 398, 386.

120 The first quotation here is Gurianova’s characterization of the Futurist understanding of the book; the second she takes from advertisements for Futurist editions. Gurianova, “A Game in Hell,” 25, 27.

121 Ibid.

122 Janecek, Look of Russian Literature, 112.

123 Kruchenykh, cited in Markov, Russian Futurism, 130.

124 Kruchenykh, “New Ways of the Word,” 75.

125 Janecek, “Kruchenykh contra Gutenberg.”

126 Janecek, Look of Russian Literature, 109.

127 Terentyev, in Lawton, Russian Futurism through Its Manifestoes, 179.

128 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 4.

129 Gris-gris, the noun Artaud uses for these works, signifies charm, fetish, or amulet.

130 Six of Artaud’s spells are reproduced in Margit Rowell, ed., Antonin Artaud: Works on Paper (New York: MoMA, 1996). As an example of the text, the spell to Roger Blin (Plates 5 and 6) reads in translation, “All those who banded together to prevent me from taking HEROIN, all those who touched Anne Manson because of that Sunday 21 May 1939, I’ll have them pierced alive” (recto) “in a PARIS square and I’ll have their marrows perforated and burned. I am in an Insane Asylum but this dream of a madman will become true and will be implemented by ME. Antonin Artaud” (149).

131 Antonin Artaud, “Letter to Henri Parisot, September 22 1945,” cited in Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, ed. Constantin V. Boundas, trans. Mark Lester and Charles Stivale (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), 84.

132 Deleuze, Logic of Sense, 87. Antonin Artaud, “From The Nerve Meter (1925),” in Antonin Artaud: Selected Writings, ed. Susan Sontag, trans. Helen Weaver (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 87.

133 Deleuze, Logic of Sense, 86–87.

134 Artaud, cited in ibid., 84.

135 Ibid., 88.

136 Antonin Artaud, cited in Stephen Barber, Antonin Artaud: Terminal Curses (London: Solar Books, 2008), 67.

137 Ibid., 54.

138 Antonin Artaud, cited in Christopher Ho, “Antonin Artaud: From Centre to Periphery, Periphery to Centre,” Performing Arts Journal 19, no. 2 (1997): 19. Artaud, in Rowell, Antonin Artaud, 42.

139 Antonin Artaud, cited in Paule Thévenin, “The Search for a Lost World,” in Jacques Derrida and Paule Thévenin, The Secret Art of Antonin Artaud, trans. Mary Ann Caws (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1998), 25.

140 Agnès de la Beaumelle, “Introduction,” trans. Jeanine Herman, in Rowell, Antonin Artaud, 40.

141 Jean Dequeker, cited in Margit Rowell, “Images of Cruelty: The Drawings of Antonin Artaud,” in Rowell, Antonin Artaud, 13.

142 Deleuze, Logic of Sense, 87.

143 Beaumelle, “Introduction,” 39.

144 Thévenin, “Search for a Lost World,” 15, 17.

145 Beaumelle, “Introduction,” 40.

146 Antonin Artaud, “50 Dessins pour assassiner la magie,” trans. Richard Sieburth, in Rowell, Antonin Artaud, 33.

147 Antonin Artaud, “Les figures sur la page inerte . . . ,” trans. Richard Sieburth, in ibid., 42.

148 Guy Debord, “Attestations,” trans. Reuben Keehan, http://www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/postsi/attestations.html.

149 Karen Kurczynski, The Art and Politics of Asger Jorn: The Avant-Garde Won’t Give Up (Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2014), 165–66.

150 For the multitude of sources, see Ian Thompson’s accompanying notes to his facsimile translation of Mémoires, http://isinenglish.com/2015/03/20/memoires-footnotes-and-sources-of-detournements-edited-working-notes/.

151 The remarkable experiment of Fin de Copenhague includes covers comprising the disposable papier-mâché “flong” that molded stereographic plates for cylinder and rotary printing. A paradoxical conjunction of the unique and the mass produced, the flong used in this case, necessarily different for each copy of the book, was taken from conservative Danish dailies. See Thomas Hvid Kromann, “Montages Wrapped in Flong: A Material-Archaeological Investigation of Asger Jorn and Guy Debord’s Fin de Copenhague,” Situationniste Blog, January 2016, https://situationnisteblog.files.wordpress.com/2016/01/kromann_montages_english-summary-1.pdf.

152 Asger Jorn, “Dear Friends,” letter to Permild and Rosengreen, February 15, 1958, October 141 (2012): 70–72. See Christian Nolle, “Books of Warfare: The Collaboration between Guy Debord and Asger Jorn from 1957–1959,” Vector, http://virose.pt/vector/b_13/nolle.html. Jorn and Permild and Rosengreen were to have a long-standing publishing relation, and the publisher’s handsome logo, still in use today, was designed by Jorn.

153 See especially Karen Kurczynski’s book on Jorn, which garners much insight about Mémoires from a method that resists mapping too much of it back to the literal history of Debord’s groups and that accords full weight to the role of Jorn’s “supporting structures.” Kurczynski, Art and Politics of Asger Jorn.

154 Francis Stracey, “Surviving History: A Situationist Archive,” Art History 26, no. 1 (2003): 56–77.

155 Mustapha Khayati, “Captive Words: Preface to a Situationist Dictionary,” in Knabb, Situationist International Anthology, 171. It is significant for my broader argument about communist forms of writing and publishing that the SI also level the critique of the “informationist” mode of language at the orthodox Left. In the same text, Khayati discusses the “Bolshevik order” of the “more or less magical, impersonal expressions,” “inflexible” and “ritual formulas” that work in the image of the state to preserve its “purity” and “substance” in the face of obviously contradictory facts. Ibid., 173.

156 Situationist International, “All the King’s Men,” in Knabb, Situationist International Anthology, 114.

157 Deleuze, Negotiations, 175.

158 Gilles Deleuze, Two Regimes of Madness, ed. David Lapoujade, trans. Ames Hodges and Mike Taormina (New York: Semiotext(e), 2006), 322. Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, 99.

159 Guy Debord, cited in Patrick Greaney, Quotational Practices: Repeating the Future in Contemporary Art (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014), 33.

160 Anselm Jappe, Guy Debord, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 96 .

161 Jorn, cited in Situationist International, “Détournement as Negation and Prelude,” in Knabb, Situationist International Anthology, 55.

162 Khayati, “Captive Words,” 175.

163 Situationist International, “Détournement as Negation and Prelude,” 55.

164 Guy Debord and Gil J. Wolman, “A User’s Guide to Détournement,” in Knabb, Situationist International Anthology, 16.

165 Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle (Detroit, Mich.: Black and Red, 1983), §160.

166 Ibid., §204. Guy Debord and Gil J. Wolman, “A User’s Guide to Détournement,” in Knabb, Situationist International Anthology, 11.

167 Tom McDonough, “The Beautiful Language of My Century”: Reinventing the Language of Contestation in Postwar France, 1945–1968 (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2007), 8.

168 Even the degraded photographs of Debord’s comrades and drinking companions are purloined from a photo-novel, Ed van der Elsken’s Love on the Left Bank, which draws much from the scene at the Lettrist haunt Chez Moineau.

169 The translation is from Ian Thompson’s expertly executed facsimile translation of Mémoires, available at https://www.academia.edu/11522988/Memoires_-_Guy_Debord_and_Asger_Jorn_English_Facsimile_.

170 Situationist International, “Détournement as Negation and Prelude,” 56.

171 Kurczynski, Art and Politics of Asger Jorn, 170.

172 Jorn, Open Creation and Its Enemies, 31.

173 Jorn, “Dear Friends,” 71.

174 For discussion of Jorn’s homage and critique of Pollock, see Kurczynski, Art and Politics of Asger Jorn, 149–54.

175 Jorn, “Dear Friends,” 71. It is clear that Jorn considered these to be considerable innovations, declaring in this letter, “I do not know if you realize how close we are coming to an entirely new understanding of the book.”

176 David Banash, “Activist Desire, Cultural Criticism, and the Situationist International,” Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture 1, no. 2 (2002), http://reconstruction.eserver.org/021/Activist.htm.

177 Regarding which, the SI defines the dérive thus: “A mode of experimental behavior linked to the conditions of urban society: a technique of transient passage through varied ambiances. Also used to designate a specific period of continuous dériving.” Situationist International, “Definitions,” in Knabb, Situationist International Anthology, 45.

178 This is not to say that the SI was unresponsive to the gender dimensions of French consumer culture at this time. For discussion of which, see Jen Kennedy, “Charming Monsters: The Spectacle of Femininity in Postwar France,” Grey Room 39 (2012): 56–79.

179 Greaney, Quotational Practices, 35–37, quoting in translation a line from Debord, Mémoires.

180 Striphas, Late Age of Print.

181 McLuhan suggests that the vector of influence might also go in the opposite direction, whereby the printed book’s nature as a manufactured mass commodity—an apparently autonomous entity, tending toward homogeneity across each copy—conferred a “subliminal faith” in the validity of the printed Bible as an independent source, bypassing the oral mediation and authority of the Church and of scholarship, “as if print, uniform and repeatable commodity that it was, had the power of creating a new hypnotic superstition of the book as independent of and uncontaminated by human agency.” McLuhan, Gutenberg Galaxy, 144.

182 Travis, “Ideas and Commodities.”

183 Anderson, Imagined Communities. Febvre and Martin, Coming of the Book. Striphas, Late Age of Print.

184 Kurczynski, Art and Politics of Asger Jorn, 162.

185 Jørgen Nash, from the Danish press release of Mémoires, trans. Jakob Jakobsen, cited in Jakob Jakobsen, “The Artistic Revolution: On the Situationists, Gangsters and Falsifiers from Drakabygget,” in Rasmussen and Jakobsen, Expect Everything Fear Nothing, 223.

186 Debord, “Attestations.” The commercial republication of Mémoires raises questions I am unable to address here, but I take it as given that the reprints are very different entities to the 1959 work discussed in this chapter.

187 Guy Debord, “Potlatch (1954–57),” trans. NOT BORED!, http://www.notbored.org/potlatch.html.

188 Grail Marcus, Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century (London: Picador, 1997), 391.

189 Guy Debord, “The Role of Potlatch, Then and Now,” from Potlatch 30 (July 15, 1959), cited in Jappe, Guy Debord, 148.

190 In a letter to the German Situationist Uwe Lausen, Debord proposes that Lausen sell copies of Mémoires to fund the publication of Der Deutsche Gedanke, noting that its “full price . . . is very high.” Guy Debord, “Letter to Uwe Lausen, 9 September 1962,” trans. NOT BORED!, http://www.notbored.org/debord-9September1962.html. On the contradictions involved in financing the SI, see SI, “Questionnaire,” in Knabb, Situationist International Anthology, 142, 373–74. For discussion of the affective politics of the gift, see McDonough, Beautiful Language of My Century, 148–54.

191 Marcel Mauss, The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies, trans. W. D. Halls (London: Routledge, 1990).

192 McKenzie Wark, “The Secretary,” in Guy Debord, Correspondence: The Foundation of the Situationist International (June 1957–August 1960), trans. Stewart Kendall and John McHale (Los Angeles, Calif.: Semiotext(e), 2009).

193 See Georges Bataille, “The Notion of Expenditure,” in Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927–1939, ed. Allan Stoekl, trans. Allan Stoekl with Carl R. Lovitt and Donald M. Leslie, 116–29 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985).

194 Debord, “Attestations.”

195 Banash, “Activist Desire.”

196 Guy Debord, “Letter to Thomas Levin, 1 September 1989,” trans. NOT BORED!, http://www.notbored.org/debord-1September1989.html.

197 Guy Debord, “The Hamburg Theses of September 1961 (Note to Serve in the History of the Situationist International),” letter to Thomas Levin, November 1989, trans. NOT BORED!, http://www.notbored.org/debord-November1989.html.

198 For the developing political orientations and tensions of the SI at this time, see the reports “The Fourth SI Conference in London” (held September 1960), http://www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/si/goteborg.html, and “The Fifth SI Conference in Göteborg” (held August 1961), http://www.bopsecrets.org/SI/5.conf4.htm. For documents relating to the split and the subsequent development of Scandinavian Situationist practice, see Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen and Jakob Jakobsen, eds., Cosmonauts of the Future: Texts from the Situationist Movement in Scandinavia and Elsewhere (Copenhagen: Nebula, 2015).

199 Debord, “Hamburg Theses.”

200 Guy Debord, “Letter to Raoul Vaneigem,” February 15, 1962, trans. NOT BORED!, http://www.notbored.org/debord-15February1962.html.

201 Ibid.

202 Jacques Camatte, in Camatte and Gianni Collu, “On Organization,” trans. Edizioni International, in This World We Must Leave and Other Essays, ed. Alex Trotter (New York: Autonomedia, 1995), 20.

203 Attila Kotànyi, “The Next Step,” from Der Deutsche Gedanke 1 (April 1963), trans. Reuben Keehan, http://www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/si/nextstep.html.

204 Anthony Hayes, “Toward the Realisation of Philosophy: The Situationist International between 1957 and 1960,” http://thesinisterquarter.wordpress.com/2014/01/06/toward-the-realisation-of-philosophy/.

205 Karl Marx, “A Contribution to Hegel’s Philosophy of Right: Introduction,” in Early Writings, 250.

206 In a more specific sense, this marks a separation from the historical workers’ movement and the milieu of revolutionary groups that were nurturing its particular structures of antagonism and its conceptual field beyond their sociohistorical pertinence. The reference to Marx “signified that one must no longer give the least importance to the conceptions of any of the revolutionary groups that still existed as inheritors of the old social emancipation movement that was destroyed in the first half of our century.” Debord, “Hamburg Theses.”

207 Ibid., 256.

208 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, “The Holy Family, or, Critique of Critical Criticism,” in Collected Works, 4:36.

209 Marx, “A Contribution to Hegel’s Philosophy of Right,” 256.

210 Howard Slater, “Divided We Stand: An Outline of Scandinavian Situationism,” Infopool, no. 4 (London: Infopool, 2001).

211 Key SI texts about the practice of art after the split are René Viénet, “The Situationists and the New Forms of Action against Politics and Art,” 1967, in Knabb, Situationist International Anthology, and Guy Debord, “The Situationists and the New Forms of Action in Politics or Art,” 1963, in Elisabeth Sussman, On the Passage of a Few People through a Rather Brief Moment in Time: The Situationist International 1957–1972 (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1991).

212 Rumney’s report was intended for the first issue of Internationale situationniste, its late arrival famously precipitating his expulsion from the SI. The filoform tract is described in Guy Debord, “To [Pinot] Gallizio,” January 13, 1958, in Debord, Correspondence, 74. For details of the Censor scandal, see Gianfranco Sanguinetti, “The Doge: A Recollection,” http://www.notbored.org/The-Doge.pdf.

213 For example, “What kind of metallic cover can we obtain in Holland? That is, continuing with the range of our covers, what can we find? / In France—the country is poor in this regard—we have just about exhausted everything with gold and silver. / Keeping in mind that it must have a thickness equal to n° 3, what colors can one find? (We would like copper red if possible.)” Guy Debord, “To Constant [Nieuwenhuys],” 26 January 1960, Debord, Correspondence, 324. Regarding the SI’s taste in page aesthetics, see the amusing retort to left-wing critics of the journal’s slick paper and price, those “detractors of typography” with their “mimeographed image . . . of the consciousness of a class in which they fervently seek their stereotype Joe Worker.” Viénet, “The Situationists and the New Forms of Action against Politics and Art,” 213.

214 McKenzie Wark, “No One Wants to Be Here: John Douglas Millar Interviews McKenzie Wark,” 3:AM Magazine, http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/no-one-wants-to-be-here/. The anticopyright notice was brought from the back of the journal to the front in issue 3, when it was also worked up typographically to be a striking feature. The journal itself was not free. Number 12 was priced at 3 French franks, approximately $3.50 in 2015 prices, which, for comparison with other kinds of printed matter at the time, was less than one-fifth of the price of the first edition of The Society of the Spectacle.

215 Ruth Baumeister, Asger Jorn in Images, Words, and Forms (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015).

216 See Karen Kurczynski, “Red Herrings: Eccentric Morphologies in the Situationist Times,” in Rasmussen and Jakobsen, Expect Nothing Fear Everything.

217 Slater, “Divided We Stand,” 20.

218 Jacqueline de Jong, “Critique of the Political Practice of Détournement,” The Situationist Times 1 (May 1962).

219 Michèle Bernstein, “No Useless Indulgences,” Internationale situationniste, no. 1 (June 1958), trans. NOT BORED!, http://www.notbored.org/no-useless-indulgences.html#_ednref8. I have included an image of de Jong’s text to convey an impression of its material and emotional qualities, and thanks to Howard Slater’s transcription, the content can now be read with ease. See Jacqueline de Jong, “Critique of the Political Practice of Détournement,” in Rasmussen and Jakobsen, Cosmonauts of the Future, 77–84.

220 It is well known that the SI contained other organizational tendencies, which included a strict adherence to internal group discipline as well as a certain aestheticization of organization and the practice of exclusion. For a compelling analysis of the organizational question in the SI and the Scandinavian Situationist groups, see Slater, “Divided We Stand.”

221 Nancy, Inoperative Community, 31. The trope of “literary communism” appears in a number of places in the book and gives chapter 3 its title.

222 Debord, Society of the Spectacle, §220. For critique of the place of workers’ councils in the SI’s theory, see Jean Barrot, What Is Situationism (London: Unpopular Books, 1987).

223 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 4.

224 Marx, “A Contribution to Hegel’s Philosophy of Right,” 253.

1 I take this quotation from the translation of a 1973 Invariance text by Jacques Camatte, “Statements and Citations,” in This World We Must Leave and Other Essays, ed. Alex Trotter, 172–80 (New York: Autonomedia, 1995). Camatte explains that its original source is not Bordiga’s anonymously authored series, “Sul Filo del Tempo” (The thread of time), in the journal Battaglia Comunista (Communist struggle), but a journal with the same title that published a single issue in May 1953.

2 For critical analysis of anonymous and pseudonymous collective practice from feudal to contemporary scenes, see Marco Deseriis, “Improper Names: Collective Pseudonyms and Multiple-Use Names as Minor Processes of Subjectivation,” Subjectivity 5 (2012): 140–60.

3 Maria Chehonadskih, “What Is Pussy Riot’s ‘Idea,’” Radical Philosophy 176 (2012): 1–7. Harry Halpin, “The Philosophy of Autonomous: Ontological Politics without Identity,” Radical Philosophy 176 (2012): 19–28.

4 Michel Foucault, “What Is an Author?,” in Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology, ed. James D. Faubion, trans. Robert Hurley et al. (New York: New Press, 1998), 221.

5 Jeffrey T. Nealon, Foucault beyond Foucault: Power and Its Intensifications since 1984 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2008).

6 Foucault, “What Is an Author?,” 205.

7 Ibid., 211–12.

8 Cited in Mark Rose, Authors and Owners: The Invention of Copyright (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993), 22.

9 Ibid., 15.

10 Foucault, “What Is an Author?,” 212.

11 By a Rheinlander [Karl Marx], “Comments on the Latest Prussian Censorship Instruction,” in Marx and Engels, Collected Works, 1:112.

12 By a Rheinlander [Karl Marx], “Debates on Freedom of the Press and Publication of the Proceedings of the Assembly of the Estates,” supplement to Rheinische Zeitung, no. 139 (May 19, 1842), in Marx and Engels, Collected Works, 1:174. My discussion here is informed by the dialogue between Esther Leslie and Ben Watson, “‘Write to Live; Live to Write’: Trading Ideas in Academia and Journalism,” http://www.militantesthetix.co.uk/critlit/livewrite.htm.

13 [Marx], “Debates on Freedom,” 175.

14 John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, cited in Rose, Authors and Owners, 5. Roger Chartier writes that from the mid-eighteenth century, a “monetary appreciation of literary compositions, remunerated as labour and subject to the laws of the market, was founded on an ideology of creative and disinterested genius that guaranteed the originality of the work.” Chartier, The Order of Books: Readers, Authors, and Libraries in Europe between the 14th and 18th Centuries, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1992), 38.

15 Karl Marx, “The Class Struggles in France: 1848–1850,” in Surveys from Exile, ed. David Fernbach (Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin 1973), 134. This feeling for the value of anonymity in journalism features in the earlier essays too. For instance, regarding efforts to deny freedom of the press to anonymous and pseudonymous writers, Marx jibes, “When Adam gave names to all the animals in paradise, he forgot to give names to the German newspaper correspondents, and they will remain nameless in saecula saeculorum [for ever and ever].” [Marx], “Debates on Freedom,” 178.

16 Marx, “Class Struggles in France,” 134.

17 Ibid., 178, 137.

18 Ibid., 135. The English translation here is actually “sinister anonymity,” which diminishes the psychological dimension of unheimlich.

19 Margaret A. Rose, “The Holy Cloak of Criticism: Structuralism and Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire,” Thesis Eleven 2 (1981): 83.

20 Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1973), 31.

21 Foucault, “What Is an Author?,” 138.

22 Ibid., 207.

23 Ibid.

24 Michel Foucault, “The Masked Philosopher,” trans. Alan Sheridan, in Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, ed. Paul Rabinow (Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin, 1997), 321. Marx made a similar point in his justification for journalistic anonymity, that it ensures the reading public “sees not who is speaking, but what he is saying.” Marx, “Justification of the Correspondent from Mosel,” in Marx and Engels, Collected Works (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1975), 1:334.

25 Foucault, “Masked Philosopher,” 321.

26 Michel Foucault, “The Discourse of History,” in Foucault Live: Collected Interviews, 1961–1984, ed. Sylvère Lotringer, trans. Lysa Hochroth and John Johnston (New York: Semiotext(e), 1996), 26.

27 Foucault, “Masked Philosopher,” 28, 29.

28 Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge (London: Tavistock, 1974), 17.

29 Nealon, Foucault beyond Foucault, 76.

30 In terms of Foucault’s own work, the most significant instance of his anonymous writing was that undertaken as part of the Groupe d’information sur les prisons, where authorial anonymity played a role in constructing collective and situated political writing that was immanent to the “intolerable” conditions of the penal system. See Cecile Brich, “The Groupe d’information sur les prisons: The Voice of Prisoners? Or Foucault’s?,” Foucault Studies 5 (2008): 26–47. David Macey, The Lives of Michel Foucault (London: Random House, 1993), 257–89. Alberto Toscano, “The Intolerable-Inquiry: The Documents of the Groupe d’information sur les prisons,” Viewpoint Magazine 3 (September 25, 2013), http://viewpointmag.com/2013/09/25/the-intolerable-inquiry-the-documents-of-the-groupe-dinformation-sur-les-prisons/.

31 Foucault, “Discourse of History,” 28.

32 On this distinction with regard to Bourbaki, and the broader division between collective pseudonyms and multiple names, see Deseriis, “Improper Names.”

33 Luther Blissett, “Richard Barbrook and Luther Blissett,” http://www.lutherblissett.net/archive/322_en.html.

34 Karl Marx, “On the Jewish Question,” in Early Writings, 230. For Luther Blissett’s engagement with this text, see Luther Blissett, “Introduction to Enemies of the State: Criminals, ‘Monsters,’ and Special Legislation in the Society of Control,” trans. Wuming Yi, http://www.lutherblissett.net/archive/078_en.html.

35 Marx, “On the Jewish Question,” 230.

36 Ibid., 231.

37 Stathis Kouvélakis, “The Marxist Critique of Citizenship: For a Rereading of On the Jewish Question,” South Atlantic Quarterly 104, no. 4 (2005): 707–21.

38 Luther Blissett, “Mondo Mitomane 1994–96,” http://www.lutherblissett.net/archive/283_en.html.

39 Jean-Luc Nancy, Being Singular Plural, trans. Robert D. Richardson and Anne E. O’Byrne (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2000), 154.

40 Wu Ming 1, “Interview for Contravenção, 14.12.2003,” http://www.wumingfoundation.com/english/giap/Giapdigest24.html.

41 Wu Ming 1, “Stories Belong to Everyone: Tale-tellers, Multitudes, and the Refusal of Intellectual Property,” http://www.wumingfoundation.com/english/giap/giapdigest11b.html.

42 Blissett, “Richard Barbrook and Luther Blissett.” One could say that Marx himself was groping toward this conjunction of anonymity and general intellect in an 1843 text that includes justification of his choice of anonymity, albeit that his critical terrain was still liberal democratic: “anonymity is an essential feature of the newspaper press, since it transforms the newspaper from an assemblage of many individual opinions into the organ of one mind.” Marx, “Justification of the Correspondent from Mosel,” 333–34.

43 Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy (Rough Draft), trans. M. Nicolaus (Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin, 1973), 706.

44 Ibid., 705, 694.

45 Paolo Virno, “Notes on the ‘General Intellect,’” trans. Cesare Casarino, in Marxism beyond Marxism, ed. Saree Makdisi, Cesare Casarino, and Rebecca E. Karl, 265–72 (New York: Routledge, 1996).

46 Marx, Capital, vol. 1, chapter 25.

47 Uncertain Commons, Speculate This! (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2013), http://speculatethis.pressbooks.com/chapter/chapter-1/.

48 Sabrina Ovan, “Q’s General Intellect,” Cultural Studies Review 11, no. 2 (2005): 69–76.

49 This comment about defeat was made by Wu Ming 1 in a radio interview with Aaron Bastani and James Butler on Resonance FM, June 4, 2013, http://novaramedia.com/2013/06/in-conversation-with-wu-ming/. The remark about allegory, which is presented as Benjamin’s position, is by Wu Ming, cited in Marco Amici, “Urgency and Visions of the New Italian Epic,” Journal of Romance Studies 10, no. 1 (2010): 10.

50 Luther Blissett, Q, trans. Shaun Whiteside (London: Harcourt, 2003), 743–44.

51 Ibid., 481. Sabrina Ovan, “Nameless History before and after Las Meninas: Luther Blissett’s Archaeological Fiction,” Genre 45, no. 3 (2012): 423–41.

52 Stewart Home, “The Return of Proletarian Post-Modernism Part II: Luther Blissett’s Recent Best Seller,” Metamute, June 10, 2003, http://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/return-proletarian-post-modernism-part-ii-luther-blissettaposs-recent-best-seller-aposqapos.

53 Blissett, Q, 411.

54 Marx, Grundrisse, 278.

55 Blissett, Q, 403–4.

56 Ibid., 409.

57 Ibid., 743.

58 Wu Ming, radio interview.

59 Wu Ming, “Wu Ming: A Band of Militant Storytellers,” interview by the Celluloid Liberation Front, New Statesman, May 29, 2013, http://www.newstatesman.com/world-affairs/2013/05/wu-ming-band-militant-storytellers.

60 Luther Blissett, “The Luther Blissett Manifesto,” in Mind Invaders: A Reader in Psychic Warfare, Cultural Sabotage, and Semiotic Terrorism, ed. Stewart Home (London: Serpent’s Tale, 1997), 43–44. This text is itself a performance of the multiple name: “Originally composed in Italian and placed on the Net in May 1995, this English language version bears little resemblance to the first provisional translation, which was accompanied by a request that it should be rewritten by everyone who found themselves in agreement with its theses.” Ibid., 44.

61 Luther Blissett, “Missing Presumed Dead: How Luther Blissett Hoaxed the TV Cops,” in Home, Mind Invaders, 4–9.

62 Luther Blissett, “Negative Heroes: Luther Blissett and the Refusal to Work,” trans. John Foot, in “Luther Blissett, Football (Soccer) and the Refusal to Work,” http://www.wumingfoundation.com/english/giap/giapdigest33.htm.

63 Ibid.

64 See “Luther Blissett Fantasy Footballer,” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3bRuTkmTIjg.

65 Foucault, “What Is an Author?,” 119.

66 The essence of the hoax was that the (fabricated) English conceptual artist Harry Kipper had vanished on the Italo-Slovenian border while tracing the word “ART” across the continent, shortly after attending a conference in Bologna where he had proposed the collective adoption of the name Luther Blissett. Their attention piqued, interviews with Kipper’s acquaintances drew the television crew of Chi l’ha visto? (Has anybody seen them?) across Italy and as far as London’s Isle of Dogs (or the “Isle of Leutha’s Dogs,” as it is in William Blake’s “Jerusalem”), where Stewart Home and Richard Essex guided the TV crew to the wreck of Kipper’s old residence. Unfortunately, the hoax was dashed, an overheard bar conversation resulting in the announced program being pulled shortly before broadcast, but not without the press getting wind of it and Luther Blissett being launched into the mediascape. See Blissett, “Missing Presumed Dead.” Thanks to Fabian Tompsett for the Blake reference.

67 Luther Blissett, “Introduction to Enemies of the State.”

68 Henry Jenkins, “How Slapshot Inspired a Cultural Revolution: An Interview with the Wu Ming Foundation,” 2006, http://www.henryjenkins.org/2006/10/how_slapshot_inspired_a_cultur_1.html.

69 Luther Blissett, “Why I Wrote a Fake Hakim Bey Book and How I Cheated the Conformists of Italian ‘Counterculture,’” August 1996, http://www.evolutionzone.com/kulturezone/bey/luther.blissett.fake.hakim.bey.

70 Gary Hall, Digitize This Book! The Politics of New Media, or Why We Need Open Access Now (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008). Gary Hall, “#Mysubjectivation,” New Formations 79 (2013): 83–102.

71 Luther Blissett, “Seppuku 2000,” in Quaderni rossi di Luther Blissett, accompanying booklet to Luther Blissett, The Open Pop Star, music and spoken word CD, Wot 4 Records.

72 Wu Ming 1, in Jenkins, “How Slapshot Inspired a Cultural Revolution.”

73 Virginia Woolf, “Anon.,” in “‘Anon’ and ‘The Reader’: Virginia Woolf’s Last Essays,” ed. Brenda R. Silver, Twentieth Century Literature 25, no. 3/4 (1979): 382.

74 Wu Ming, “Wu Ming: A Band of Militant Storytellers.”

75 Blissett, Q, 89. 90.

76 Martin Luther, more generally, is deemed to have sold the hope of the Reformation back to the powerful, and to have “freed us from the Pope and the bishops, but . . . condemned us to expiate sin in solitude, in the solitude of internal anguish, putting a priest in our souls, a court in our consciences, judging every gesture, condemning the freedom of the spirit in favour of the ineradicable corruption of human nature.” Ibid., 405.

77 Ibid., 406.

78 Ibid., 360.

79 Ibid., 472.

80 Ibid.

81 Ibid., 525.

82 Ibid., 535.

83 Gustav Metzger, “Manifesto Auto-Destructive Art,” originally published 1960, http://radicalart.info/destruction/metzger.html.

84 Ibid., 454, 455, 456.

85 Ibid., 526.

86 Ibid., 483.

87 This point is developed in Bonnie Mak, How the Page Matters (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012).

88 Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (London: Routledge, 2001).

89 Kelsey, “Translator’s Introduction,” in Michèle Bernstein, All the King’s Horses, trans. John Kelsey (Los Angeles, Calif.: Semiotext(e), 2008), 8.

90 Ibid. This doubling of All the King’s Horses with Reena Spaulings picks up on a dynamic internal to Bernstein’s novel, which is a self-conscious play on Pierre Choderlos de Laclo’s 1782 novel of libertine manipulation, Les liaisons dangereuses, as well as Marcel Carnés’s film Les visiteurs du soir (The devil’s envoys), and forms a double with Bernstein’s second novel, La Nuit, which feeds the same story through the scrambling techniques of the nouveau roman. In turn, the English translation of La Nuit was published with its own double, After the Night by Everyone Agrees, a reflexive engagement with Bernstein’s text and the process of translation, as manifest also in the book’s covers and design. See Michèle Bernstein, “Preface in the Guise of an Autobiography (or Vice Versa),” in The Night, trans. Clodagh Kinsella, ed. Everyone Agrees (London: Book Works, 2013), 9–10. Everyone Agrees, After the Night: The Meeting of Failures: Act II (London: Book Works, 2013).

91 Bernstein, All the King’s Horses, 33.

92 Kelly Baum, “All the King’s Horses (Review),” TDR: The Drama Review 56, no. 1 (2012): 161.

93 Michèle Bernstein, “Preface in the Guise of an Autobiography,” 9–10.

94 Kelsey, “Translator’s Introduction,” 9–12.

95 This was not the only form of paid labor that Bernstein contributed to the SI. In an interview with Greil Marcus, as he reports it, she listed the following: “a racetrack prognosticator (‘I made it all up’), a horoscopist (‘That too’), a publisher’s assistant, and finally a successful advertising director (‘To us, you understand, it was all spectacle; advertising was not worse than anything else. We took our money where we could find it’).” Marcus, Lipstick Traces, 377–78.

96 Kelsey, “Translator’s Introduction,” 13.

97 Ibid., 14.

98 Ibid.

99 Ibid., 9.

100 Bernadette Corporation, Reena Spaulings (New York: Semiotext(e), 2004), 2.

101 Ibid., 1.

102 Ibid.

103 Ibid., 2.

104 Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory, trans. Nancy Margaret Paul and W. Scott Palmer (New York: Zone Books, 1991), 9.

105 Ibid., 25, 149.

106 Ibid., 21.

107 Ibid., 95, 32.

108 Bernadette Corporation, Reena Spaulings, 1.

109 Ibid., 13.

110 Ibid., 13.

111 Ibid., 17, 14.

112 Ibid.

113 Ibid., 16.

114 Ibid., 3, 7.

115 Ibid., 63.

116 Ibid., 134.

117 Famously, Marx and Engels describe the conditions of “communist society” in The German Ideology as allowing “for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic.” Marx and Engels, Collected Works, 5:47

118 Bernadette Corporation, Reena Spaulings, 85.

119 “Monsieur Roubignoles presents The Kelsey Collection Artforum 2004–2012,” http://www.johnkelseycollection.com.

120 Zac Dempster, Eric-John Russell, Veronika Russell, and Nicolas Vargelis, “Who, or What, Is John Kelsey? A Postscript,” http://www.metamute.org/community/your-posts/who-or-what-john-kelsey-postscript#.

121 See http://tarnac9.wordpress.com/.

122 For more detail on the reception of Tiqqun and incisive assessments of its theses, see Joost de Bloois, “Tiqqun, The Coming Insurrection and the Idiosyncracies of an Epoch,” Historical Materialism 22, no. 1 (2014): 129–47. Frére Dupont, “Release to Us the Field!,” Mute, June 30, 2010, http://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/release-to-us-field. Endnotes, “What Are We to Do?,” in Noys, Communization and Its Discontents, 35. For an excellent analysis of the broader range of anonymous practice today, including, significantly, its role amid the politics of undocumented migration, see John Cunningham, “Clandestinity and Appearance,” Mute, http://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/clandestinity-and-appearance.

123 Invisible Committee, The Coming Insurrection (Los Angeles, Calif.: Semiotext(e), 2009), 29.

124 Ibid., 204, 206.

125 Alexander R. Galloway and Jason E. Smith, “A Note on the Translation,” in Tiqqun, Introduction to Civil War, trans. Alexander R. Galloway and Jason E. Smith (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2001), 7.

126 Invisible Committee, Coming Insurrection, 28.

127 It was two years after publication that its authors’ identities were revealed for the first time in print, in George Julian Harney’s introduction to the English translation by Helen Macfarlane.

128 Marx and Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party, 31–32.

129 The title was thus shortened for the first time in the 1872 German edition. See Eric Hobsbawm, “The Communist Manifesto in Perspective,” http://www.transform-network.net/journal/issue-112012/news/detail/Journal/the-communist-manifesto-in-perspective.html.

130 Karl Marx, “Marx to Ferdinand Freiligrath,” February 29, 1860, in Marx and Engels, Collected Works, 41:82, 81, 87.

131 Amadeo Bordiga, “Considerations on the Party’s Organic Activity when the General Situation Is Historically Unfavourable,” 1965, https://www.marxists.org/archive/bordiga/works/1965/consider.htm.

132 Marx, “Marx to Ferdinand Freiligrath,” 82.

133 Ibid.

134 Marx and Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party, 49.

135 Alain Badiou, “Politics Unbound,” in Metapolitics, trans. Jason Barker (London: Verso, 2005), 74, 75.

136 Jacques Rancière, The Philosopher and His Poor, trans. John Drury, Corinne Oster, and Andrew Parker (London: Duke University Press, 2003), 86.

137 “Spontaneity, Mediation, Rupture,” Endnotes 3 (2013): 240.

138 For development of this point, see Thoburn, “Weatherman.”

139 Puchner, Poetry of the Revolution, 52.

140 Helen Macfarlane, Red Republican: Essays, Articles, and Her Translation of the Communist Manifesto, ed. David Black (London: Unkant, 2014). Puchner, Poetry of the Revolution.

141 Comité, “[Communism without Heirs],” 92.

142 Comité, “On the Movement,” in Blanchot, Political Writings, 106, 108.

143 Comité, “[Communism without Heirs],” 93.

144 Ibid.

145 See Blanchot, Political Writings, 189–90. The use of square brackets in many of the Comité essay titles in Political Writings is said to be because the journal did not in most cases use titles, but inspection of Comité reveals that the titles are not missing but embedded (and uppercase) in the opening paragraphs.

146 Comité, “[The Possible Characteristics],” in Blanchot, Political Writings, 85. It would have been a striking opening text to Comité, as Political Writings implies, but “[The Possible Characterisitics]” is part of the body of paratexts associated with the fashioning of the journal. Many thanks to Zaki Paul for answering my questions about Blanchot’s publishing practices.

147 Jacques Camatte, 1972 preface to Camatte and Collu, “On Organization,” 20.

148 Comité, “[The Possible Characteristics],” 85.

149 Kevin Hart, “Foreword: The Friendship of the No,” in Blanchot, Political Writings, xxiv. Comité, “[The Possible Characteristics],” 85.

150 Karl Marx, “Letter to Arnold Ruge,” September 1843, in Marx and Engels, Collected Works, 3:142.

151 Jasper Bernes, “Logistics, Counterlogistics and the Communist Prospect,” Endnotes 3 (2013): 173.

152 Marx, “Letter to Arnold Ruge,” 145.

153 “Crisis in the Class Relation,” Endnotes 2 (2010): 12. “What Are We to Do?,” 35.

154 “Editorial,” Endnotes 3 (2013): 10.

155 “About Endnotes,” http://endnotes.org.uk/about. “Editorial,” 1.

156 “About Endnotes.”

157 Ibid.

158 Ibid.

159 Camatte and Collu, “On Organization,” 33.

160 “Editorial,” 1.

161 Ibid.

162 Comité, [“The Possible Characteristics”], 86. This remained just intent, because only one issue was published.

163 Insipidities, “Have a Care: Endnotes 3 and the Resplendent Quetzal,” http://insipidities.blogspot.co.uk/2013/11/have-care-will-endnotes-3-ever-become.html.

164 Ibid.

165 “The Holding Pattern,” Endnotes 3 (2013): 12–54.

166 Sonogram of a Potentiality, in Tiqqun #2, trans. Tiqqunista, ed. D. E. Machina (Brooklyn: Pétroleuse Press, 2011), 8. I read this in the form of a PDF scan of a water-stained pamphlet, downloaded from the text-sharing resource AAAAARG.org. Such scanned printed works present rich post-digital materialities, as Sean Dockray has so eloquently described. A scan is an “ambivalent image,” it “oscillates back and forth: between a physical page and a digital file, between one reader and another, between an economy of objects and an economy of data.” But much else is encoded in the image: “An incomplete inventory of modifications to the book through reading and other typical events in the life of the thing: folded pages, underlines, marginal notes, erasures, personal symbolic systems, coffee spills, signatures, stamps, tears, etc. Intimacy between reader and text marking the pages, suggesting some distant future palimpsest in which the original text has finally given way to a mass of negligible marks.” Dockray, “The Scan and the Export,” Fillip 12 (2010), http://fillip.ca/content/the-scan-and-the-export.

167 Junius Frey, “Letter to the Editor,” in Tiqqun, Theory of Bloom, http://libcom.org/files/blooms.pdf.

168 Ibid.

169 Comité, “[Tracts, Posters, Bulletins],” in Blanchot, Political Writings, 95.

170 Comité, “[Reading Marx],” in Blanchot, Political Writings, 105.

171 Ibid.

172 Frey, “Letter to the Editor.”

173 Tiqqun, Introduction to Civil War, 177, 179.

174 Ibid., 174.

1 This chapter draws on an interview I conducted with the founders and directors of Mute, Pauline van Mourik Broekman and Simon Worthington, and the editor, Josephine Berry Slater, in London on September 7, 2010.

2 Mute, “About Us,” http://www.metamute.org/about-us.

3 “Ceci n’est pas un magazine,” Mute 19 (2001): 24–25.

4 “The Magazine That Mistook Its Reader for a Hat!,” Mute 25 (2002): 8–9.

5 Regarding his militancy in Operaismo, Negri describes the magazine form as pivotal to the break with the Italian Communist Party: “Until the mid-’60s our movement was a magazine movement, then we used leaflets as well, which were distributed in factories.” Antonio Negri, interviewed with Verina Gfader, “The Real Radical?,” in EP Vol. 1, The Italian Avant-Garde: 1968–1976 (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2013), 202.

6 Antonio Negri, “Postface to the Complete Text of the Journal Futur Antérieur (1989–98),” multitudes.samizdat.net/Postface-to-the-Complete-Text-of.

7 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 9.

8 Ibid., 25.

9 Josephine Berry Slater, “Disgruntled Addicts—Mute Magazine and Its History,” in Proud to Be Flesh: A Mute Magazine Anthology of Cultural Politics after the Net, ed. Josephine Berry Slater and Pauline van Mourik Broekman (London: Mute Publishing, 2009): 15.

10 Ibid., 25.

11 Pauline van Mourik Broekman, post on Empyre LISTSERV, June 15, 2010, http://www.mail-archive.com/empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au/msg02124.html.

12 Anthony Davies and Simon Ford, “Culture Clubs,” Mute 18 (2000): 29–33, 30, 35. For Davies’s analysis of the situation after the dotcom crash, 9/11, and the Enron bankruptcy, as capitalist culture reverted to its conservative instincts, see his “Basic Instinct: Trauma and Retrenchment 2000–4,” Mute 29 (2005): 67–77.

13 Angela Mitropoulos, “Precari-Us?,” Mute 29 (2005): 90.

14 Siegfried Zielinski, [. . . After the Media] News from the Slow-Fading Twentieth Century, trans. Gloria Custance (Minneapolis: Univocal, 2013), 1.

15 Van Mourik Broekman, post on Empyre.

16 The forty thousand print run of each issue thus cost a mere £800. See Pauline van Mourik Broekman, Simon Worthington, and Damian Jaques, Mute Magazine Graphic Design (London: Eight Books, 2008).

17 Ibid., 12.

18 Berry Slater, “Disgruntled Addicts,” 16; Pauline van Mourik Broekman, “Mute,” transcript of a presentation at Publications on (Not Only) Art: Cultural, Social, and Political Uses, Seville, June 15–18, 2011, http://ayp.unia.es/dmdocuments/public_doc06b.pdf.

19 To locate this point more historically, if the Daily Courant was the first newspaper to be published in London’s Fleet Street, the Financial Times was by this stage paradigmatic of the industry after Rupert Murdoch relocated the News International presses to Wapping and the decimation this visited on the print profession and its unions. Dramatizing the new situation, the corridors of the Docklands site were apparently lined with portraits of printers past, a now familiar practice of the representation of labor as depoliticized heritage in sites where it no longer has physical presence and conflictual force. Van Mourik Broekman et al., Mute Magazine Graphic Design, 18.

20 Rosalind E. Krauss, “A Voyage on the North Sea”: Art in the Age of the Post-Medium Condition (London: Thames and Hudson, 1999). Rosalind E. Krauss, Under Blue Cup (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2011).

21 Krauss, A Voyage on the North Sea, 7.

22 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 67, 502–3. In keeping to the usual meanings of “content” and “form,” I have had to take some liberties with Deleuze and Guattari’s terminology, because for them “content” refers to something closer to what I hear mean by “form” (with “expression” taking the role played here by “content”). There are further dimensions to Deleuze and Guattari’s content–expression dyad that I do not pursue here.

23 Hayles, Writing Machines, 25.

24 Guattari, Schizoanalytic Cartographies, 253, 255.

25 Pauline van Mourik Broekman, in Jodi Dean, Sean Dockray, Alessandro Ludovico, Pauline van Mourik Broekman, Nicholas Thoburn, and Dmitry Vilensky, “Materialities of Independent Publishing: A Conversation with AAAAARG, Chto Delat?, I Cite, Mute and Neural,” New Formations 78 (2013): 178.

26 Deleuze, Foucault, 38. Gilles Deleuze, “What Is a Dispositif?,” in Two Regimes of Madness: Texts and Interviews 1975–1995, ed. David Lapoujade, trans. Ames Hodges and Mike Taormina (Los Angeles, Calif.: Semiotext(e), 2006), 338.

27 Deleuze, Foucault, 38.

28 Ibid.

29 “Magazine That Mistook Its Reader for a Hat!,” 8.

30 Ibid.

31 See Puchner, Poetry of the Revolution. This volitional aim is apparent in van Mourik Broekman’s description of the minifesto as a “promise, or commitment, . . . a token of faith to an imagined reader.” Van Mourik Broekman, “Mute.”

32 Van Mourik Broekman, interview.

33 Pauline van Mourik Broekman, “On Being ‘Independent’ in a Network,” Free Bitflows exStream, Collaborative Media (2004): 5. Van Mourik Broekman, interview. Toni Prug, “Introducing OpenMute,” Mute 25 (2002): 8–9.

34 Gilles Châtelet, Figuring Space: Philosophy, Mathematics, and Physics, trans. Robert Shore and Muriel Zagha (Dordrecht, Netherlands: Kluwer Academic, 2000), 8, 7, 3. I owe this reference to John Cussans, with thanks, and to discussions at the Diagram Research Use and Generation Group.

35 Ibid., 10.

36 Ibid., 9.

37 Ibid.

38 Ibid., 20.

39 Ibid.

40 “Magazine That Mistook Its Reader for a Hat!,” 8.

41 Dictionary.com, s.v. “hybrid.”

42 See http://www.metamute.org/editorial/video/video-forever-blowing-bubbles-walking-tour-peter-linebaugh-and-fabian-tompsett-2008.

43 Deleuze, Foucault, 38. While for Deleuze the diagram is not a visual entity, in contrast to Châtelet, as a virtual “non-place,” it is illusive and needs touchstones, often visual ones, to grasp it. This point is well made in Jakub Zdebik, Deleuze and the Diagram: Aesthetic Threads in Visual Organization (New York: Continuum Books, 2012).

44 Deleuze, Foucault, 34. This fortuitous characterization of the diagram as “mute” adds a diagrammatic valence to the connotations of Mute’s name, a name chosen in part as “a comment on the liberatory rhetoric of . . . new technologies,” connoting that “new technologies didn’t automatically grant a voice; that, in fact, this was to do with operations of power at a social level.” Van Mourik Broekman, “Mute.”

45 Deleuze, Foucault, 38.

46 Châtelet, Figuring Space, 54.

47 Van Mourik Broekman et al., Mute Magazine Graphic Design, 131.