Download Cutting the book together/apart - Open Reflections

Cut-and-paste scholarship
How are we as
scholars able to enact
and perform different
cuts with, in and
through the book,
especially with
respect to our
publishing practices?
What role can living, liquid and remixed
scholarly books play in this respect, in
rethinking specifically controlling
boundaries such as authorship, quality,
fixity and copyright, and which
alternative cuts do they propose?
Not enough
responsibility is taken
for the cuts that are
enacted with and
through the book as
a specific materialdiscursive practice
Karen Barad
Agential realism and
posthumanist
performativity
‘agential cuts’ cleave
things together and
apart, creating subjects
and objects by enacting
determinate
boundaries, properties,
and meanings.
Life after New Media - Sarah
Kember & Joanna Zylinska
A vitalist and affirmative
way of ‘cutting well’ thus
leaves space for duration, it
does not close down
creativity or ‘foreclose on
the creative possibility of
life’
How can we make ethical, critical cuts in our
scholarship whilst at the same time
promoting a politics of the book that is
open and responsible to change, difference
and exclusions? How can we account for our
own ethical entanglements in the becoming
of the book?
The apparatus
‘a thoroughly heterogeneous
ensemble consisting of discourses,
institutions, architectural forms,
regulatory decisions, laws,
administrative measures, scientific
statements, philosophical, moral
and philanthropic propositions in
short, the said as much as the
unsaid.’
In what way has the apparatus of the book—which
consists of an entanglement of relationships
between amongst others authors, books, the
outside world, readers, the material production and
political economy of book publishing and the
discursive formation of scholarship—executed its
power relations through cutting in a certain way?
Living Books About Life
& Remixthebook
We can start to rethink and re-perform the
way we publish our research if we start to
pay closer attention to the specific cuts we
make (and that are made for us) as part of
our publishing practices.
Janneke Adema
@openreflections
www.openreflections.wordpress.com