Cutting the book togetherapart Janneke Adema Coventry University

Cutting the book together/apart Janneke Adema Coventry University Resurrecting the Book Birmingham 15 th to 17 th November 2013

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