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 material-

discursive 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