Issuu

“I read, I organize, I disseminates” Instructor: Ben Lignel Time Zone: Montreuil, France Email: blignel@warren-wilson.edu The last two MatLab semesters will focus on the publica on, as usual, but the termina on of the MA in Cri cal studies adds a commemora ve dimension to our usual future-facing publica on project. As we celebrate the research that you do, and the unique skills that you have honed during the program and will deploy in your future endeavors, so must we envisage tending to the work done over the last ve years by students and faculty who may no longer sit at the table – but shaped the conversa on that was to be had around it. You are not this program’s keepers, however, and maintaining its legacy is not your burden. While you will be invited to engage with the program’s “papers”, you will do so to develop your own editorial stance, towards individual (or collec ve) publishing acts. These will be built, incrementally, over the next months. During residency, Namita and I will start by presen ng the publica on project to the faculty and student body at large. This rst session will be followed by another three, during which we will discuss what annota ng, organizing and publishing might mean, and the possibili es those ac vi es generate. In previous years, the publica on project was a collec ve a air, that was only indirectly concerned with audience and circula on. Our approach this year will be di erent: each of you will be responsible for overseeing a “publica on” from start to nish, and – during your fourth semester – for de ning points of contact between your publica on and its public(s). As before, this is an “applied” class, i.e. one that is directly engaged with “making something” (assembling, transforming, crea ng, deciding) and governed by the tangible outcome we need to deliver. Though this is our priority, this syllabus makes lots of room for discussing, cri cally, the ac vi es of publishing. We will re ect, in par cular, on three ques ons that extend the work of editorializing content: What is a response? What is an arrangement? What are we hospitable to? Overall course goals: By the conclusion of this course, students will have…. • Developed a working knowledge of some of the skill-sets that par cipate in a publica on act; • Flexed their cri cal muscles, and tested their own approach to cri cal feedback; • Understood the implica ons of editorial and design choices on reader’s intellectual experience; • Understood the social aspect of publishing acts, and the human networks it generates and makes visible.

Pre-semester readings You will nd the list of texts that you received before the semester under the relevant class, now accompanied by further pickings.

Meetings, sessions and deadline: quick overview July 1

Send in your pre-residency reading picks, and your paragraph-long survey.

July 14-31

Residency. Sessions 1-4

Aug. 3-11

Research (engage) –

August 11

Session #5

August 31

Assignment 1 (publish)

Sept. 7

Assignment 2 (advise)

Sept 8

Session #6

Sept 9-14

Indiv. mee ngs with BL and NW.

Sept 15

Send invita on to contributor(s)

Sept. 30

Assignment 3 (organize)

Oct 6

Session #7

Oct. 30

Assignment 4 (annotate)

Nov. 10

Assignment 5 (read)

12-3PM EST

9-12AM EST

Workflow for the semester: This semester’s assignments, even more than last semester, feed into one-another, and are rather ghtly packed. The mee ngs, sessions and readings are paced in order to provide you with the support you need, but this project has a strong self-driven component: make sure you reach out if you need extra support. We will use 1to-1 chats to go over your choices, discuss your concerns, ques ons or plans. Please let me know before due dates if you will be late on submission. Our semester sessions are really collec ve work and feedback sessions (though they will all include some presenta on on my part). In most cases, I expect you to either present your own project, or respond to one of your classmates: this frames the prepara on you need. As before, a list of “pickings” dangles under each session: these are references that shaped my understanding of the conversa on at hand, which I’d love to see complemented by your own references. Here is the place where we will add resources relevant to publishing. Rewrite policy Rewri ng and feedbacking are essen al elements of the editorial process, and you will do lots of both this semester. I will always provide feedback on a version of a text that you are working on, if you ask for it. I simply ask you to be mindful of my me, and strategic about the states of a text you submit. For cita on work, please refer to the cita on guide compiled by Julie Wilson, Director, Warren Wilson College Wri ng Studio. Participation I look forward to having dynamic sessions with you, and an cipate ac ve par cipa on from everyone. This means that you ac vely listen, par cipate, voice your ques ons, and support the exchanges that take place during class (in and a er residency). Office hours I will con nue last semester’s prac ce of labelling two hours of my Friday a ernoons as “o ce hours” (from 3 to 5PM). I live in Montreuil, in the me zone lovingly referred to as UTC+2: if you live on the East coast, that is 6 hours later than you (so my hours are really 9 to 11AM in EST). Please schedule our conversa ons at least 48 hours ahead of me: Send me an email with a proposed me, and I’ll respond with a zoom link. Treat this as a general landing area: if you can’t make that slot, we’ll gure out another me that ts with both our schedules. Likewise, my work at other ins tu ons may occasionally overlap with those hours: I’ll let you know if that is the case when you book a mee ng.

Session 1. Browsing (with Namita) July 16 During this opening session, Namita and I will present to both faculty and student body the “ nal” publica on project. The desire to celebrate the program, its graduates and faculty, while giving everyone as much editorial freedom as possible, led to some technological and tac cal choices: we will talk about “the MACR archive”, present the cataloguing system developed to date, and sketch the possibili es inherent to trea ng everything as “miscellaneous”. An overview of the resources and interfaces we have will lead to ini al discussions about what might be missing from the archive, and how everyone is thinking about their publica on. Please make sure you have read the assignments sec on of this syllabus before this session, and come to class with ques ons. During the second part, we will present a short hands-on assignment, conceived as an an dote to the distanceless, fric on-less, and object-less logic of our introduc on: you will be invited to spend me in the Pew Research center for a bit of old- me browsing, and have a go at producing a table of content in 90 minutes. The results of this short assignment will be discussed in the 3rd session. Assignment: Create a table of content in 90 minutes, from the Pew Library physical holdings. This nal list should include a text you read, one you wrote, and one you sent out to a peer. Note how you navigate the space, what seems close and what seems far etc: how do you navigate and dance through this terrain…). Do this on your own me, but please send in the nal TOC to us by July 27th. Pickings David Weinberger, Everything is Miscellaneous (2007)

Session 2. Reading and writing July 25 Barthes’ musing on the “writerly” will kick-start a collec ve re ec on on ac ve reading, and the writerly ac vi es that take place in proximity of a text. Star ng with the feedback prac ces that are common to this program, we will broaden our scope to consider a wider range of annota on strategies, and the prac ces they are embedded in, leaning on Kalir’s and Garcia’s Annota on (2021) (their transversal approach encourages us to think of editorial feedback, and of the textual elements that surround a main body of text within a con nuum: we will try to gure out whether it is useful to do so). Narrowing our scope a li le, and to tether it back to the publica on project, we will examine three topics: the ethics of giving feedback (D’Agatha and Fingal, Goulish), the social aspect of annota on (Spoerri, D’ignazio and Klein’s open peer reviewed Data Feminism), and the idea of peritext as a “transac onal zone” (Gene e) where a text comments on itself and invites further interac on. This session means to prepare you for both edi ng the work of others, and contextualizing the items in your publica on. To conclude, we will consider the tools we will use, during the semester, to “write in proximity” of text. Pickings Jose-Luis Borges, Pierre Menard (1939) Daniel Spoerri, An Anecdoted Topography of Chance (1962, 1966, 1968, 1970, 1995, 2016) Roland Barthes, S/Z (1970,2002) John D’Agatha and Jim Fingal, The Lifespan of a Fact (2003) Remi Kalir and Antera Garcia, Annota on (2021) Catherine D’Ignazio and Lauren Klein, Data Feminism (2020) Here

Session 3 - Assembling July 28 The literature on organized textual content assumes a sort of tragedy of arrangement, an intellectual horizon de ned by the order and hierarchies given ideas (through classi ca on systems) and things (through the physical arrangement of books). We will keep both knowledge organiza on and library design in mind as we debrief on the assignment given at the end of Namita and my joint session. Your experience of physically naviga ng the Pew Research Center’s aisles as you shape a Table of Content will kick-start a conversa on around the poli cs of classi ca on systems in the era of the book and various e orts to challenge the implicit hierarchies and gaps of discipline-based classi ca ons (Samoa House library, Helsinki Library). Moving from ins tu ons to shelf, we will invoke the materiality of browsing, imagining how placement can generate “frui ul con guity” (Warburg, Benjamin), and how resources, classi ca on and access impact research (Bert). Looking at resources from a cri cal cra perspec ve, we will ques on the prevalence of libraries, and what they encourage us to consider as legi mate documents for thinking about cra . Looking back at our rst session, and the discussion around “miscellaneous,” we will consider other forms of documents (could an object be an entry in your publica on?), but also “gaps in the shelves” (Hartman, Hau-Ofa) as possible star ng point for your own editorializa on process. Pickings Walter Benjamin, Unpacking my Library (1931) Italo Calvino, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler (intro) (1979/81) Georges Perec, Think / Classify (1982) Judith Leemann, Three Hours to Disappointment (2004) David Weinberger, Everything is miscellaneous (2007) Okwui Enwezor, Archive Fever (2008) Saidiya Hartman, Venus in Two Acts (2008) David Senior, ∞ Hospitality (2008) Abigail de Kosnik, Rogue Archive: Digital Cultural Memory and Media Fandom (intro) (2016) Alice te Punga Somerville . ‘”I do s ll have a le er”: Our sea of archives’ (2016) Samoa House Library, A Short History of the Samoa House Library (2021) And Pre-post-print.org, here

Session 4 – Publishing July 28 Publica ons coming out of teaching ins tu ons can (should?) make visible a network of learners, and an environment for learning. This idea, borrowed from David Senior, will guide our last session’s discussion around publishing as a “commitment to being hospitable to certain ideas, and their site of emergence”. While this may be a neat way to frame your publica on’s rela on to the program, we are also interested in the new rela ons (or networks) a publica on project generates. Looking at a handful of case studies, we will talk about publishing as a network-building and network-reliant ac vity (Balaguer). Looking ahead to semester IV, we will start to envisage what sort of “ac vi es” your individual publica ons may make space for, and the curious idea of publishing as maintenance. Although disguised as a discussion around publishing, this last session will also dedicate a chunk of me to your ques ons about this semester’s assignments. Please come to the session with syllabus in hand! Pickings Paul Benzon, On Unpublishing (2016) Be Oakley, in Defense of the So cover Publica on (2018) (pp. 20-43), here Clara Balaguer, Spring 2021 lecture Series, here Marc Fisher, Towards A Self Sustaining Publishing Model (2021)

Assignments At the end of the semester, you will have selected, wri en or co-wri en, edited, introduced, and commented a sequence of items (presumably in text format, but not necessarily always so). In other words, you will have “done” a publica on, which will be released under your name, as editor, at the end of the year. This is groovy. The project is de ned, in part, as a cri cal re ec on on the MA in Cri cal Cra studies: as the program ends its 5-years rela on with Warren Wilson College, we would like both students and faculty to look back at the work done, and to make some of its aspects visible to this last MACR publica on’s readership. At the beginning of the residency, Namita, Jessie and Ben will present an archive-in-progress: we will discuss together how it can be expanded and engaged with in the course of the semester (session 1). The project is also de ned as an opportunity to bring into relief what you can do. The core mission of the program has been to nurture future colleagues: you all received here a cra educa on that none of your faculty has received. This strange reality is an invita on for you to take stock of the unique understanding of cra that you have developed in this program, and to use the publica on to showcase that understanding, to the people you want to be in conversa on with. The project is de ned, nally, as means to experience (and re ect on) the editorial process rst-hand. Though Namita and I will be present every step of the way and play the roles of editorial advisors, design consultants, or copyright specialists, you will be in charge, and should take responsibility for, what you put together. In some cases, you may decide to merge this project with prac cum: we will discuss during residency how that can work. Though this semester’s assignments are divided in 5 chunks, it is best to consider them as part of an ongoing work with p-of-the-iceberg deliverables. These have been sequenced from nish to start: you will start by producing the press release, and end by annota ng the texts that you will include in your publica on. Frontloading your editorial desires, and the means to make them known, is deliberate: I want us to think of “making (something) public” primarily as something inten onal, addressed, and interpersonal. Namita and I will oversee the wider coordina on of this mul ple-part project (it will also include current and exfaculty contribu ons). Please make sure that you book mee ngs with us, whenever you need, to discuss strategy, decisions, possibili es. You are used to my rather open-ended briefs, but also know that this freedom can be daun ng: reach out if you need to chat! Please come prepare to mee ngs as if they were professional mee ngs, with a clear agenda and clear ques ons.

Performance evalua on There has been an ongoing discussion, from the very start of this program, about the desirability of grades: this discussion hinged on how to incen vize learning but remove the tempta on to “work to assignments”. It faltered as we worried that removing grades would penalize those of you whose future educa onal opportuni es depend on a good GPA. Je solved this, last year, by establishing a “contract” with you all, which proposed to make feedback, rather than grades, the benchmark of your progress. I would like to go for something similar for the nal MatLab year. My thinking is that the public-facing nature of publishing is incen ve enough to give this project your best, and that you will see the publica on as an opportunity to de ne (and showcase) learning excellency. You will therefore all receive an automa c “A” for MatLab, if the following requirements are ful lled: A end all classes, be responsible in ful lling the requirements of the project and in mee ng its deadlines, an cipate your needs and share your ques ons with faculty, de ne your own goals alongside the faculty’s, and meet them as best you can. July 1

Send in your pre-residency reading picks, and your paragraph-long answers to the following ques ons: If the nal publica on were a toolbox re ec ng the program’s quali es and the speci c skills you are developing in it, which tools would you nd in it?

July 14-31

Residency. Sessions 1-4

Aug. 3-11

Research (engage) – Please look at the living archive, familiarize itself with its categories, re ect on what interests you within it, and on its gaps. Start considering which of its elements could t in your publica on. Decide whether this will be your prac cum project, and whether you will do it on your own.

August 11

Session #5 12-3PM EST Present current thoughts on your publica ons. Ar culate a tenta ve project orally, name its perceived goal.

August 31

Assignment 1 (publish) Please deliver a distribu on-ready press release for your publica on: it will include a tenta ve table of content, name contributors and their background, and ar culate in a short, but extremely precise text, your editorial process, what this publica on will contribute to the world (its goal, in other words), and the conversa on that it is part of. Your press release will iden fy 2-3 authors from whom you would like to commission a work, and de ne what sort of ask you will put to them, and how you think their contribu on will enrich your publica on. In this press release’s margin, add comments, addressed to your advisors (faculty and classmates), about ques ons you have about your project: what are you unsure about? Where do you need help? In a separate document, re ect on the communi es of allies that this publica on has (or will generate, in the course of its produc on), and on its future readership: who are they? Why would they be interested? How can you reach them? What do you think they could do with it (or to it)? Be speci c about the ways you will reach them, and consider the materiality of your outreach campaign (would a small adver sement in a specialized media be best? Should it be a personal ad? An IG post? Hand-wri en, personal notes?) Goals Re ect on goal, rela on-to, audience Models Provide publica on pitches (Shows and Tales et al.) Pickings Clara Balaguer, Hardworking Good Looking, on using speci c dissemina on strats

Sept. 7

Assignment 2 (advise) Read the press release of two of you classmates, and provide cri cal feedback to them. Take into account their own ques ons, but don’t be limited by them: you may have en rely di erent ones. Your cri cal feedback is primarily about discerning, and naming, the project’s possibili es: How do understand it? What “moments of exhilara on” does it make possible? What sugges on can you make to amplify its e ects? Pickings Ma hew Goulish, “Cri cism”, in 39 Microlecture

Sept 8

Session #6 12-3PM EST Each student to name unresolved ques ons, to be discussed 1-on-1. Discuss peritext, its theory Show examples (online and in print) of genera ve annota ons Introduce Trello (?) or airtable

Sept 9-14

Individual mee ngs with BL and NW. Please be prepared to discuss your TOC (including unresolved ques ons ). This mee ng is meant to help you nalize your contributor(s)’ list.

Sept 15

Send invita on to contributor(s) Include general pitch and speci c ask, as well as meline and mode of interac on

Sept. 30

Assignment 3 (organize) Finalize your TOC De ne the elements that will cons tute the peritext of your project. Titles, prefaces, notes, introductory paragraphs; photographic, sound or text commentaries; further readings; explanatory inserts (de ni ons; histories), acknowledgements, colophon: what will you include? List your to-dos (including reproduc on permissions) and create a Trello board with deadlines Write a foreword for your publica on, ar cula ng its logic, and purpose (lean on your press release to do so, but also acknowledge the distance that now separates you from that earlier formula on of a goal). Let this foreword be a place where you situate yourself and the unique perspec ve that you bring to the material you have carefully selected and commissioned, organized, and contextualized.

Oct 6

Session #7 9-12AM EST Discuss “wri ng in proximity”, and what you expect from it. Discuss how your forewords do jus ce to both the publica on, and your skills. Address ques ons.

Oct. 30

Assignment 4 (annotate) Write your peritext and collate them into the relevant documents When approaching this task, think back to our class about annota on (session 2), and consider them as a “transac onal zone” where the meaning of your texts is nego ated. Also look back to your notes form last semester on summaries/annotated bibliographies). Models Glenn Adamson, Cra Reader The Talmud Maggie Nelson, The Argonauts J. Boully (The Body) and J.Diaz (The Wonderous Life of Oscar Wao) on footnotes @Eatli ood

ffi

Assignment 5 (read) Acknowledge recep on of your commissioned piece, start editorial process with its author

Nov. 10

Fall 2022 CRFTXXXX – Materials Lab