Well, there seem to be some misconceptions. There seem to, there seem... I don’t think you understand. There seem... seemingly a misconception here. Amazon or an alternative? We either lean into our structural dependencies or lean away, but we cannot completely rely on or sever ties with capitalist industry until we are unalienated from one another and our work. There is much to learn from the aims of artisanal production and much to gain from the forms of capitalist production and distribution—namely, the advantages of industrial printing and logistics. Oleander left off with only questions, so we find ourselves with a stack of unopened letters arguing against an argument that was never made. There is only one black swan, but many performances! We should not seek an alternative because we are living that alternative each and every day. These are long steps of the skull. Artists may imagine their work as the work of a free act, but this work is not the bounds of our freedom and neither is the artist at the frontier of human society. Now the frontier of human society is the artist, and we are still hungry.

Hunger Artists and the Art of Hunger

Brains eat brains; ignorance breeds ignorance; and hunger feeds hunger, but artists cannot eat art, let alone literature. Well, R. Stevie Moore eats paper, but not all of us are R. Stevie Moore... No, today artists eat artists. Small Press Distribution (SPD) may not be a whale carcass settling to the sea floor, but its ribs are praised as the wings of Archangels, and the collapse of SPD—while puncturing the lungs of the small press—has not silenced the growling of our stomachs...

Then I gave warning to the ghosts who haven’t done their homework. Damn! You can only become an institutional ghost after graduating from ghost school.

— Kim Hyesoon, “Ghost School”

At the outset of a BRAT and doubtlessly surgical summer, Publisher’s Weekly makes a memorable missive in the wake of SPD with members of the non-profit Independent Book Publishers Association (IBPA), namely with IBPA and Microcosm CEO Joe Biel, discussing “Publisher-Owned Distribution” or a “Distribution Co-op.”^[1] In reality, Biel does not suggest a distribution network maintained cooperatively by presses, but rather offers Microcosm up as an alternative platform for distribution. Biel’s call for “publisher-owned” distribution—no matter how often they use the terms “Co-op” or “means of production”—is nothing other than a call for publishers to use Microcosm’s subscription software WorkingLit and rely on their logistical systems. Just be prepared to write a thorough essay about why your publications have “comps”—books comparable to the books they already distribute!

Yes, Biel and Microcosm have come a long way from distributing zines at Cleveland punk shows, but their vision of publishing at this point may have less to do with a “People’s Guide to Publishing” and more to do with guiding how people publish while pocketing some polly in return. The IBPA plays at the same table and with the same manners as SPD and the Community of Literary Magazines and Presses.

Go to an IBPA conference in Denver and learn about how “Book Industry Standards and Communication codes can help amplify the discoverability of your titles;” gain insight into “the psychology behind good book cover design;” and decode the science of using AI to better advertise your books. Buy the IBPA manual “How to Make Real Money Selling Books (Without Worrying About Returns)”... as opposed to making fake money selling real books? Most importantly, become a member. Become a member and gain a discount to everything publishers need in this challenging industry. Become a member now and receive tangible benefits, such as lower subscription rates on software; discounts on design and editorial services from IBPA members; discounts on printer and distribution services from IBPA members; and, crucially, gain access to downloadable author contracts. Why write out an agreement if all we are concerned with is owning the reproduction rights of art, and can’t we all agree on that?

However, not all publishers can join this professional organization. Only publishers who operate with royalty or “author-subsidized” financial models may become voting members and, thereby, have the right to pay for these benefits. This requirement is based on their realist mapping of the publishing industry. The IBPA’s “Guide to Publishing Models and Author Pathways” (MAP) outlines the publishing field with eight characteristic models: (1) Association, Society and Non-Profit Publishers, (2) Author Publishers, (3) Corporate Trade Publishers, (4) Higher Education and Academic Publishers, (5) Hybrid Publishers, (6) Independent Publishers and Small Presses, (7) Service Providers, and (8) University Presses.^[2]

The document defines these models by the material they publish; means of production and distribution; compensation relationships with authors; and funding structures. Regardless of these characteristics, publishers in MAP are primarily differentiated based on the material they publish, and, as a result, their publishing categories do not distinguish between production and distribution, relationships with authors, and funding. That is—outside of the individual experience of authors attempting to navigate these seas of moldering cheese—the models the IBPA proposes are useless for understanding contemporary publishing beyond a broad survey. All characteristics fail to consider the social relations of production. This is unsurprising given that nearly all models of publishing—with the possible exception of some independent and small presses—are undergirded by capitalist relations.

The category of “Independent Publishers and Small Presses” is particularly incoherent. The IBPA’s membership requirements state that Independents are presses who are not owned by conglomerates. But does only this make a publisher independent? Perhaps this may make them independent from the direct intervention of private interests, but publishers remain dependent on existing production and distribution channels. The MAP document gains clarity in describing Independent and Small Presses as often responsible for their own distribution and how they compensate authors with percentages, but these characteristics still reflect MAP’s fundamental concern with authors. Although most of us either approach the publishing industry as readers or authors, we cannot grasp any useful distinctions without considering the conflicting grounds on which publishers operate.

Strangely, the most useful aspect of IBPA’s assessment is information perhaps incidental to their mapping—the sources, or should I say source, of funding for publishers. With the exception of some self-publishing, Independent and Small Presses, and University Presses, all publishing models rely on funding from private equity. Trade publishers are all owned by larger conglomerates: HarperCollins by NewsCorp; Macmillan by Holtzbrinck; Penguin Random House by Bertelsmann; Simon & Schuster by KKR; and Hachette by Lagardére—not to mention the innumerable imprints that the “Big Five” hide themselves behind. One only has to look at a Barnes & Noble shelf to see that more than half of the diversity can be accounted for with trade imprints. The same funding and owner relationships exist with many Service Providers, Academic Publishers, and some Independent and Hybrid Presses. The archetypal examples are Catapult and its imprints Soft Skull and Counterpoint—all of which have since 2021 been distributed by Penguin Random House. What the IPBA does not explore are the indirect relationships between capital and the parent organizations of non-profits; the institutional funding sources of University Presses; or the murky grant streams of Independent and Small Presses.

Despite how incoherently IBPA’s document may illustrate contemporary publishing, it serves well for comfortably situated authors, professionals, and capitalists who want to invest their exploits in a meaningful venture. However, to map out publishing for everyone else, we should be concerned with establishing politically useful distinctions in publishing practices. What are practices that we as editors, authors, printers, and logistical workers want to end, continue, or strive for? If we are concerned with “freedom of speech,” we must recognize that all publishing has always been a political act because “freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one.”^[3]

Instinctively we know this as our eyes glaze over shelves of glossy “best sellers” and rest instead on the yellowing, faceless volumes of colorful leather or those spineless, vibrant pamphlets and zines. Trade publishers have been imitating these stylistic features, leaving uncut edges of paper; simplifying designs; and drawing from the idiosyncratic aesthetics of individual editors. But commercial publishers can’t shake awake the golems of mimeograph stencils... and neither can we.

Searching for “alternative” principles of publishing can be as disorienting as wandering a warehouse of books, but, once these principles are expressed, we will see all the more clearly how our work as publishers can meet and grapple with capital—because the contestation of social relations is occurring in the very place that constitutes its medium of communication.

Continually we are confronted by the shifting masks of publishers. I am not referring to how journalists and editors can be identified as the faces of media organizations. Capital and its governments again and again assert with ease how they can either grant or strip from an individual the rights of publishing. See today the enduring example of Julian Assange. While the self-publisher can be facile, the individual as publisher is intolerable to the State and commercial publishers. The term ‘publisher’ may now maintain the facade of an active and self-sustaining literary ecosystem.

As our time, energy, and finances have further strained, individual press operations have dwindled, and that vague occupation publishing has proliferated. Printing is outsourced to print service providers, and presses outliving their editors are crumpled-up into the imprints of conglomerate publishers.^[4] Presses shifting their printing activities emerge as publishers. Whereas publishers once produced their printed material or maintained direct relationships with printers, publishers now often only release material digitally; have unstable relationships with print shops; or conduct themselves entirely through integrated logistical chains, such as Lulu, Bookmobile, Barnes & Noble, Ingram, and Amazon. This change is not complete and should not be read as a fall from grace but only as a general shift alongside the tendency of profit rates to decline. Amazon exemplifies this change taking place in the economies of publishing because of their encompassing role for publishers: producing, storing, providing a storefront, and shipping their books. Moral and aesthetic stridencies abound, this is the characteristic form of labor today. However, please do look for union printshops in your region; I work for one of them...

Sure, embrace or condemn Amazon and Ingram as corporations that accumulate immense profits for private interests, but let us stress a distinction that is often left unspoken—a distinction often made invisible for authors and the public, a productive distinction that undermines the flourishes of non-profit masquerades and those abyssal movements of trade publishers.

Publishers publish, presses print.^[5]

Yes, and... ? Press, publisher. This sleight of hand relies on our vision of publishers as the producers of books, though they are often less than intermediaries between printers and distributors or conversely take on a larger role in both domains. More than we may realize, the “publishing industry” is a recent market phenomena and may have more in common with the development of internet media than with the publishing operations of the nineteenth and even mid-twentieth century. Penguin Random House today reputes its own printing and distribution services, yet worker testimony and their own jacket information speaks to an increasing reliance on outside fulfillment, particularly with the introduction of “Print-on-Demand.” Still, a perverse, pervasive identification of publishers with printers persists in our historical imagination or we may dismiss this development as a necessity of “deindustrialization.”

Bleeding Stock and Copy... Rot

Without the resources or knowledge to print, digitization may for some serve as stitches for the phantom wound of print. But the internet can only be a dissolving suture. The heart is left to seep. Failing to reconcile the digital with printing, we cling to the fitful fantasy of abstracting authorship from production. Perhaps this relationship has already been fatally severed. Can the internet claim any longer to be an open space? No. Can the author argue they are involved in the making of their book when its labor may drain it of any meaning? The substance of trade publishing is emptied of life, similar to how we may imagine our cities and streets as public, human spaces when they are decidedly the dominion of private business and commodified, hostile transportation. The acceptance and invisibility of cars is like our near blind acceptance of copyright and reproduction rights. Law and contracts are set by conglomerate publishers and reproduced without reexamination or rebuff. All that seems to remain are those temples of what’s to come and what has been—the libraries. There, find a recent Penguin paperback and read their copyright statement:

Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.^[6]

Here is the axle for publishing as a business stated as explicitly and with as much propagandistic vigor as possible. Here is the book as intellectual property, eternal commodity. Here is the text handed down humbly to us from on high by the raised and lowered hands of this house. Here, publishing is the closest phenomena to an Art Factory. And now...

poetry is business

& now the revolution!

is turning on to art,

& the full efforts of the

revolution will be to

save the word motherfucker

from extinction…

& it doesn't matter where

you’re consciousness is,

the people in power

have needs so great

they’ll kill you to express

their inability to become

human —

Reproduction rights are the axle for publishing as a business, a business whose commodity is the book? No, more precisely, a publisher’s business is control over the making of a book, the exclusive right to copy a text—both the reproduction and prohibition of producing the specific text of an author. Uncritically adopting the copyright terms of commercial publishers will inevitably lead any publisher—regardless of their consciousness—to reproduce the same economic relationships with their authors and readers, relationships akin to the branding of cattle, but, now, we are invited to brand ourselves.

RM Haines, editor of Dead Mall Press, notes how the practices of conglomerate and non-profit publishers pervade even the smallest presses, including strict copyright; little to no authorial control; limited collaboration between editors and authors; contests or prizes; and submission fees. Surfacing from this delirium is nearly impossible, because we learn to accept terms given to us while the regime of intellectual property continues to reshape itself through legislation and litigation. Digital archives and libraries remain accessible literary sanctuaries, but many libraries are being privatized—often through digitized collections themselves—forced to downsize, fall into disrepair, and certain practices of digital lending are being challenged.

Commercial publishers want authors to fear anything other than copyright norms, norms they have constructed for profitability. When Penguin asserts that “copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture,” they want us to confuse copyright as a means to protect individual authors, though it largely serves as a legal mechanism to protect Penguin’s profits. Despite the stringency of copyright in commercial publishing, a variety of copyrights are articulated by Creative Commons; more explicitly radical with Creative Comrades; and most mockingly with the destructive writing and concrete prose of d.a. levy’s copyrot.

What an unalienated form of compensation between artists and publishers will look like in society as a whole is not evident, but I am certain that this relationship cannot be balanced unless we all have control over our time; the material basis for our art; and access to a variety of venues and publishers. Of course, these conditions are not met for a minority of a minority. Rent continues to eat at us from the inside; education and medicine expand into dominating industries that force us into lifetimes of debt—lifetimes of work—all while steady employment is made increasingly unavailable. We are reduced to a reserve army of hunger artists.^[7] Our productive capacities and the ubiquity of printing technologies make possible a future, if not a present, where publishing is not predicated on profit or compensation.

Balk, bark if you like, but I’m not convinced that the artist need make or should make a living from their art. While we as artists are persuaded, compelled, and often forced to sell our work, this must be treated in the circumstances of our capitalist political economy. I salute Paul Lukcas of Beer Frame when he comments:

Here’s my art: it’s paper.

“I say it has value; why can’t you agree with me?”

^[8]

I may believe my books are more or less than an empty journal, however, I am under no delusions that my art is necessarily valuable or socially necessary... Well, perhaps no less and no more valuable than our ability and freedom to make art. I, too, hiss when I hear collectors and museums have acquired a Pollock for a cool $2,000,000, but, generally, I think the value we impart to art is a series of justifications for its own impotence and acts as an excuse for taking shelter in the humanist shrouds of Literature, History, and Philosophy.

Ah, and books, the books of a dark kingdom, those great, steel coffins into which our lives recede. Once, we crawled into them with the absolute secrecy of our own lives. When did we begin to stir? Are we uncomfortable with being dead or are we so uncomfortable with living that we crawl into our new caskets for the comfort of confirming to ourselves we once lived? Still, we carve windows out of hesitation. What, then, do we see all too clearly through the open glass of the museum without walls? We see everything in the perfect binding of every moment after death. Well, let us scatter like insects at light and scatter once again as that very light. Remember, having nearly forgotten the hunger artist in their cage beside the animals, the circus supervisor asks:

“You’re still fasting? Aren’t you ever going to stop?”

“Forgive me, everyone,” whispered the hunger artist; only the supervisor, holding his ear to the bars, understood him.

“Of course,” said the supervisor and put his finger against his brow to indicate the hunger artist’s condition to the workers, “we forgive you.”

“I always wanted you to admire my fasting,” said the hunger artist.

“And we do admire it,” said the supervisor obligingly.

“But you shouldn’t admire it,” said the hunger artist.

“Well, then we don’t admire it,” said the supervisor, “but why shouldn’t we admire it?”

“Because I have to fast, I can’t do otherwise,” said the hunger artist.

^[9]

We may shrug at the idea of publishing without profit, and further perhaps without compensation, but this has historically been the operating conditions of publishing activity. Only in specific social and economic circumstances—not to mention with exceptional texts—does mass production make publishing a profitable enterprise.

Presently, grants, non-profit structures, and even private equity funding serve to overcome and, oftentimes, obscure this reality. In these forms contorted to meet the demands of profit, publishing relies on the surplus of land, labor, and dead authors but betrays this true basis as a sign of good will on the part of the capitalist, national heritage on the part of the State, or cultural maintenance on the part of the corporation. In general, publishing is often reliant on funding from sources outside its production—surpluses, which always have origin in the productive labor of other industries or are summoned into and out of existence by the State. In capitalist societies, cultural organizations subsist on the redistribution of profits, but only after they have been dogeared by business interests and state officials. As such, publishers reliant on these funding sources often assume the structures and attitudes of capital. Their existence is out of their control because they cannot reproduce themselves, so uncertain and docile, no matter how much self-consciousness and self-criticism. The rebellious, but sterile Sisyphus. The decorative, though emaciated ticks.

Publishing is—more often that not—not predicated on profit, much less compensation for the author. For the capitalist publisher, however, the production of books is a pretense without preface. It is no great wonder then that less cancerous forms of contemporary publishing take shape through the book artist, small press, independent publisher, and university press because they make books to make books. Now we can return to the lowercase...

Although I cannot settle the question of compensation, the issue can perhaps be laid to rest here with the example of the nineteenth century Russian literary journal The Alarm Clock, whose editor, A. Kurepin, paid its contributors in furniture and, on more than one occasion as with Anton Chekhov, with an alarm clock. Of course, this is as tenable a solution as APARTMENT offering its authors apartments... More than a century ago, Edgar Allan Poe criticized poorly paying periodicals as “Magazine Prison-Houses,” but now we are asked to pay for the privilege of literary prison labor. More often than not, I feel that the question of compensation for artists is a useful, but hopefully irrelevant issue. Useful in that the question stimulates thought about labor and encourages the making of art as a necessary freedom, yet also irrelevant in that future artists may have no need for compensation, no need for selling their art... and themselves. Perhaps the horizon of art will soon be exclusively that of sharing and compensation on a situational basis with reference to general guidelines.^[10]

Art is at the core of human history, arts being the discipline of human culture, but today art is not central to the material reproduction of society. Even if art is necessarily social or necessary to the reproduction of human culture, it cannot be socially necessary to the reproduction of society. Even if the artist appears or attempts to be outside society, where could they now escape?—to history, no, to hallucinations, perhaps, to allusion, certainly... Anywhere but tomorrow. Today, these thoughts may only act as a bridge of clouds, but, tomorrow, will they be a kibbutz in the sky?

An Ugly Penny For A Pretty History or An Editor Edited

We can print the operating manuals for our presses on the very machines they outline, but the press must first be built. Can we, then, review a book without the book first being published or written? Well, let’s call this an introduction or a foreword. What then of history? Surely, we can’t write a history without, well, history. But this is precisely what we stumble on here—a history nearly devoid of circumstance, one that precipitates itself from the cultural haze of a political hallucination.

Taking half its title from Diane DiPrima, editor of Ugly Duckling Presse Matvei Yankelevitch has written the most accessible “history” of small press publishing: “Power to the people’s mimeo machines! or the Politicization of Small Press Aesthetics.” Notably published by Poetry Foundation, the essay was released in the form of serialized, online articles throughout early 2020. While DiPrima’s inky call to arms provides the essay with a red bandana of revolutionary excitement, the second half of the title better characterizes its substance and motivations. Yankelevich aims to revitalize “small press aesthetics” as political; and, on his own terms, he may achieve this, but this aim itself may also forgo printing as a political activity, instead marking out the small press as a political aesthetic, an authentic activity, a protected territory. Oddly enough, then, he mirrors the New Critics such as T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound in their defense of literariness. What does Yankelevitch mean by politicizing the aesthetics of the small press? He certainly does not mean more worker control or representation at SPD, let alone criticism of its former director Brent Cunningham. Yes, the songs of hell are sad, but its seasons are ruthless...

Under Yankelevitch’s hand, politicization becomes a purely discursive act and doubly so because he is contesting the aesthetics of publishing. In outlining the history of the small press in the US, he begins with the premise that institutions have “transformed small press values” and “set parameters for success and value in literary publishing.” He then characterizes the autonomous and radical activities that have historically defined the small press, beginning with the 1960s “mimeo revolution.” Naturally, origins of the small press are located no earlier than the countercultural latter half of the twentieth century, and there is no mention of the Committee of Small Magazine Editors/Publishers (COSMEP), let alone the socialist and labor publishing activity of the early twentieth century.

What Yankelevitch does not explicitly lay out is how his history amounts to a survey of degeneration—how the small press has turned its back on amateur, autonomous, and anti-capitalist values in favor of professional, institutional, and business values. Here, he contends that early small publishers “legitimized new writers outside the academy and aesthetics unacknowledged by commercial publishing;” “confronted exploitation of the wage-worker;” “provided a physical context for content that called out the secure complacency of the literary establishment and undermined institutional control and arbitration over taste and cultural capital.” How these achievements of small presses have been overturned by a transformation of small press values or how these supposed values change is a mystery.

Although there is a broad history and there remains a proliferation of socially motivated poets and publishers, Yankelevich in essence returns to a “formally experimental but politically disengaged modernism.” In Repression and Recovery, Dr. Cary Nelson argues how this literary tradition functions as a means to absorb “the varied and often politically focused discourses… including black poetry, poetry by women, the poetry of popular song, and the poetry of mass social movements.” We continue to broaden the canon—the curriculum—but our attempts to historically situate literature remain tenuous and have not become any more explanatory. Modern, that is to say, technically innovative poetry now occupies the position that genteel poetry once occupied—the object of a high culture, a bourgeois culture, reupholstering transcendent values for a socially disengaged discipline that persists disembodied as a critique of values.^[11]

Rather than returning to the constitutive role of self-production for the small press, Yankelevitch draws from Michael Davidson’s analysis in Ghostlier Demarcations, emphasizing the “authenticity” asserted by the very printing technologies of these publishers. As examples of the authentic aesthetics of the small press, he names Broadside [Lotus] Press (Dudley Randall), Cranium (Clifford Burke), Umbra [Umbra Poets’ Workshop], Black & Red (Fredy Perlman), Renegade Press (d.a. levy), El Corno Emplumado (Margaret Randall), and City Lights (Lawrence Ferlinghetti). Yankelevich goes on to add a litany of book artists who engaged with the ‘democratic multiple,’ including Ed Ruscha, Dieter Roth, Sol LeWitt, Matka Rosler, and Ulises Carrión. Still further, he later dwells on language publishers and poets, taking as a primary example the late Lyn Hejinian who edited Tuumba as well as predecessors at Black Sparrow (John and Barbara Martin), Burning Deck Press (Rosmarie and Keith Waldrop), and Toothpaste Press, later Coffee House Press (Alan Kornblum).

While I’m surprised to see levy mentioned—if only for Renegade Press, omitting Seven Flowers and his many periodicals—what this grouping indicates more than anything is the incoherence of Yankelevich’s assessment of the political commitments and activities of publishers. In this framework, the revolutionary operating principles of publishers like Fredy Perlman and d.a. levy are set alongside book artists, academics, and non-profits through their shared printing methods, then mixed together into a great ink fountain where political vision is lost like transparent white. Luckily, the final print doesn’t lie. Here, the distinguishing criteria is the transformation of social relations not only on the individual level but on a societal level. The revolutionary aim is a classless society and nothing more or less. [Debates on this point fall within that great chasm of revolutionary praxis.]

When Yankelevich speaks of small press “economy and systems of exchange,” his political vision rests with presses setting aesthetic standards that challenge “reigning ideas of literary quality.” Socialist values fade into non-commercial aesthetics and autonomy becomes a shallow grave of “expressive poetic[s] that validates personal gestures of discovery.” Political action and history is diminished into a precedent for present countercultural activity. This politicization of the small press in Yankelevich’s essay would be better described as an attempt to create a history of the small press that justifies Ugly Duckling Presse and similar publishers as the inheritors of a radical publishing history. In truth, the politicization of small press aesthetics would be more accurately phrased as the aestheticizing of political commitments through forms of printing once common to radical publishers. Joe Biel and the IBPA’s efforts are surely just as muddled, though they at least do not attempt to sequester themselves and make no pretense of radical aims.

Marginal literature is only in the margins of academic scholarship and never needed or asked for legitimization in the literary history of the academy—though the academy cannot help but prostrate to radical traditions, reminiscences as much as recreational recreations. Once more, the authorities, those suburban deities of literature, demonstrate their reliance on minorities to grasp their own existence and buttress their concrete cathedrals. They only gain coherence through an organized cowardice or in reaction to the “underground”—no, not Dostoevsky’s or one of those secret locations, but only the underground in its ordinary use, the basements and apartments whirling with cylinders, coated in wet ink, or humming with scanners. This is the serious endeavor of the unknown act. As Søren Kierkegaard remarks on St. Paul in his 1847 journals while occupied with writing The Instant:

Had Paul any official position?

No.

Had he any means of livelihood?

No.

Did he make lots of money?

No.

Well, then, Paul was not a serious man!

But some arguments are too serious to be discussed seriously, no? Let us now cleanly lop off the essay’s head. Yankelevich’s “Politicization of Small Press Aesthetics” is an exemplar of what we could call pornographic history. A history that poses “a crude excuse for a beginning; and once having begun, it goes on and on and ends nowhere.”^[12] A nowhere without end because its fantasy is continual failure, but never that of the poet’s victory in defeat; only endless impotence, but not for lack of self-satisfaction... No, this is a history that cannot grasp an end for itself because victory can only serve as another premise for seduction. A history that is a series of surgeries and sexual acts. “Surgery is the new sex;”^[13] we are the fatal parasites of a fabled pornography, and history is our latest host.

However, are we not more than the parasites who infest texts? Are we not the heroes we admire when we tell, write, or print their stories? How do you kill a hydra? Behead the Gorgon or become the Gorgon. Do I perform the same task as this pornographic history? Perhaps, perhaps not, but— even beheaded—we defeat the hydra and walk along its necks as a bridge to tomorrow. This has been recorded in myth and can be expressed by our literature, but not yet in history. Naturally, because “to give an accurate description of what has never occurred is not merely the proper occupation of the historian, but the inalienable privilege of any man of arts and culture.”^[14] Yes, this is a pretty history, but it is nothing without an ugly penny, and I am nothing without the grotesque.

While we could commend Yankelevich in criticizing traditional histories of publishing and for chiding the inhabitation of small presses by MFA programs or their professionalization as Indies, his own approach to the small press blinds him to how the same critique applies to Ugly Duckling Presse and its cousins—particularly with the collapse of SPD.^[15] Nevertheless, his critique is reduced to merely another demand for the legibility of “aesthetic and political positions.” At the end of this morass, we can finally say that there is nothing inherently political about printing methods or the various aesthetics of production.^[16] The development of political aesthetics, however, is not incidental to printing methods. What we now recall as transgressive aesthetics were simply the styles that arose out of the necessities of production by individuals or groups motivated by political necessities “...have you never noticed that it is the realism of one age which becomes the decorative work of the next?”^[17]

Yes, ‘power to the people’s mimeograph machines!,’ knowledge to their operators, and vision to their work, but we must not confuse the motifs of aesthetics with the motives of politics. Aesthetics may inhabit the realm of freedom, but freedom is the motive of political action, and this action—often only the ordinary movements of life—is what composes the realm of our freedom, the bounds of any aesthetics. Art and literature that ventures to the edges of this freedom creates the impression that the aesthetic cannot be divorced from the political, but this can only be the case in bourgeois discourse where the political sphere is subsumed in questions of culture or the existing State structure. Ah, what a relief that must be! Still, we can take a breath and confidently say now that there can be no depoliticization of aesthetics by any “new professional literary class” because there is no literary class, and there never was a political aesthetic.^[15]

[A Pretty Postscript]

Discussing the mimeograph revolution in relation to Lorine Niedecker and d.a. levy, Jonny Lohr, in his “Notes on Karl Young,” argues that

the fetishization of mimeo is in the presentation of the text itself. Because the mimeograph creates the stencil directly from the typewritten page, the published page has a more direct connotation to the drafted page, basically creating a facsimile edition that allows the reader to peer into the intimacy of a work created in the proximity of the scene.^[18]

Here, the mimeograph is strangely more “recognizable through the context it conveys, rather than the print medium itself.” Lohr adds: “Attempts to recreate the magic would be inherently pastiche.” No less so the publication of a radical history by the Poetry Foundation... "while offset is more often seen as printing and mimeo as duplicating,” publishers used mimeographs to create the initial runs of books as opposed to duplications of an already printed edition. As such, every copy of a mimeograph publication was an ‘original.’ The peculiarity in this misuse of the technology is perhaps what sets the stage for Yankelevich’s political aesthetic.

Whereas Yankelevich and others may still seek to recreate the magic of this period when the economies of publishing were so visibly shifting, Karl Young and his network of collaborators had already begun “reversing these roles.”^[19] Approaching print “beyond the page and in the context of the whole book,” Lohr contextualizes Young against the aggrandizement of the typewriter and mimeograph in Charles Oslon’s ‘Projective Verse’: “The shift from mimeo to offset, overtaking even one of the more prominent composing theories of the time, shows the standardization of the Membrane Press presentation.”^[19] As opposed to the form of writing exerting itself over the printing, this compositional method was guided by the characteristics of offset printing. In contrast to the transition of language poets from self-publishing to academic presses and positions,^[20] Lohr argues how “Young’s scene was created through publishing in collaboration with other presses.”^[21] As an offset printer, spanning the mimeo and digital eras, Young did not follow the tendency “to use the early self-publishing work to initialize the outsourcing of publication work to professional printers,” but instead learned “the labor of offset printing and professional book publishing himself.”^[22]

There is perhaps no explicit aesthetic suggestive of offset printing as with letterpress or mimeograph. “There is no romanticism to offset printing” because it has no authoritative aesthetic, but only those marks made invisible by their very labor. The point “where the book is handed off from the publisher to a third-party” is where we circumscribe any claim to authorship and decision-making.^[23] Here, the commercial realm subsumes any aesthetic possibilities, not only because this act inspires a banal impression unworthy of the sacred artistic endeavor, but because this labor is necessary to the production of the book as a commodity—the mass produced book. Ostensibly, the book is, if not an expression of freedom, an act of free expression, yet it is created through unfree conditions. Regardless, those invisible marks can be traced and reclaimed under a collective authorship, one where the labor of print and its maintenance through the internet are recognized and can not only take part in but set free the artistic act. This is the task today of our faithful building and buzzing.

With a Beard of Bees... And Hands of Faith

If you want to view Paradise,
simply look around and view it.
Anything you want to, do it.
Want to change the world?
There’s nothing to it.
There is no life I know
to compare with Pure Imagination.
Living there, you’ll be free
if you truly wish to be.

— “Pure Imagination,” Willy Wonka & The Chocolate Factory, sung by the inimitable Gene Wilder...

Founder of the press Barbe de Abejas [“Beard of Bees”] in Argentina, Eric Schierloh, in an interview with World Literature Today, discusses his impetus to publish and print.^[23] Disappointed with the existing state of industrial publishing and after meeting Ulises Carrión, Schierloh taught himself editing, design, bookbinding, and distribution. He emphasizes the significance of not limiting any publishing effort to the writing of one’s own time, region, and language, stressing specifically translation as “a tool for economic survival, peripheral translation... not at the helm of publishers from the large conglomerates in book publishing, and often not by professional translators either.” Contrasting industrial publishing and small presses, he prefers to call his efforts “artisan publishing”—a term that specifically applies to publishers making their own printed material. Schierloh describes his approach to artisan publishing as “a way of being and relating to the world… a more democratic, more diverse, and, yes, poetic space, so to speak, opposed to a certain general barrenness in the industrial publishing system.”

Crucial to his vision of sustainable and self-managed publishing are his aims to (1) “break down the local and national borders and build ties with other artisan publishing projects in the rest of the continent and, why not, the world;” (2) “expand the production of books on a small scale, and especially in those places far from large urban centers;” and (3) “establish contact with other publishers . . . who would like to publish some of the texts in their distant places” as well as through open, digital circulation. Here, he lays out the ambitions guiding his pamphlet “How to Prepare Yourself for the Collapse of the Industrial Publishing System” (Half Letter, 2022).^[24]

Although Schierloh does not broach the possibilities of transforming the social relations of industrial publishing, he captures its existing dynamics more acutely than any other in the conflict between industrial publishing and artisan publishing. This divide between the commercial and social spheres of literature can be breached in the instance of the individual, and perhaps the collective, but the division will remain to be overcome in society. The individual can take on more of the labor in the production process, but this cannot transform broader social relations. As most, the instinct of the artisan is anarchist and, at worst, that of the petite bourgeois, the individual or small shop proprietor—more often the latter. While many “small” or “independent” publishers aim to occupy a space between industrial and artisan publishing, they are effectively dependent on and integrated into the production and distribution systems of the commercial publishing industry. If there can be any sense of an independent press, then we must not be reliant on either business interests or state projects. To be able to take part in any revolutionary activity to end our exploitation and domination, the publisher cannot aspire to any state-capitalist future.

First addressing industrial publishing, Schierloh distinguishes it primarily by the centralization of production, amassing of capital, standardization, waste creation, and specialization in labor, such as with marketing, editing, designing, printing, and logistics. Describing the relations of industrial publishing, he focuses on the industry’s pitiful treatment of writers and employees—both in terms of compensation as well as in the conditions of work and author agreements; the requirement of privilege to participate, whether that be through time, money, connections, or professional degrees; the publishing industry’s preservation and dissemination of culture effigies through the incessant reproduction of fashionable texts—profitable texts; and the industry’s top-down/one way communicative exchange, which engenders a closed and isolated knowledge of publishing. This is most evident in the continual separation of the roles involved in publishing, and in how the industry treats books as consumer commodities, separates readers from writers and writers from publishers, and extends these divisions into both the public and private education systems. In this case, a people educated to be readers are only a people taught to accept propaganda—a people, in fact, disaffected from reading and writing after their forced exposure to the eternal texts of the corporate school. If it were not for libraries and exemplary teachers our higher education would be difficult to tell from shopping centers with well-maintained parking-lots. After all, this is the best education you can buy...

Schierloh recognizes through these relations the basis of the industrial publishing system in private intellectual property. This root expresses itself most explicitly in aspects such as the ISBN, barcode, gloss or silk coating,^[25] the blurb, identifiable title or author on the spine, and other less visible elements to readers like proprietary design software and the pinched nerves of print shop workers. This is the book as an industrial commodity and publishing as an industrial system of production guided by the movement of capital. More accurately, this is the book as a system of production guided by the commodity of labor. Though the industry will present itself with the benefits of visibility, high compensation for a select few, large print runs, and without alternatives, Schierloh undermines each of these as misleading, if not false, advantages.

While these elements certainly characterize the industrial publishing system as it exists today, they are not inherent to industrial methods of printing. However, these atavistic elements will always be characteristic of commercial publishing because this business model is founded on capturing and maintaining copyright. Here, the value of books is captured from both the living labor of printers and the dead labor of belabored voices. Regardless, Schierloh’s attack on industrial publishing is not an attack on industrial printing itself and, even if it were, this would not detract from his turn to artisan publishing because we must look there to find positive values. To grasp Schierloh’s artisan publishing, we could conjure up values opposite to those of industrial publishing, but, in the process, we would lose any positive vision for social publishing at either an individual or industrial scale.

Central to Schierloh’s view of publishing outside the industrial system (or from inside its decaying corpse) is the autonomous act of making books, whether that be as an individual or a collective, making books as a free act; making books as a freeing act; making “free” books; freeing books from their former binding; and freeing up the production of books. Though poetry precedes the questions and commitments of literature, we can still say, as centuries before and nearly a century after Jean-Paul Sartre, that “the book is not, like the tool, a means for an end whatever; the end to which it offers itself is the reader’s freedom.”^[26]

This opening up of bookmaking necessitates also the distribution of printing skills with various writing and printing technologies: typewriter and computer, mechanical and digital, letterpress, inkjet, laser, engraving, block print, silkscreen, mimeograph/duplicator, thermal, offset, etc. A working knowledge of printing technologies expands the possible relationships between texts and books, blurring the divisions made by commercial publishing between authors and publishers as well as publishers and printers.

Rejoining the act of publishing and printing is often reduced to a statement on the moral or aesthetic superiority of “artist books” when all this act may provide for us is a basis for criticizing the industry’s tendency to absorb into itself and variegate publishing work, consuming adjoined sectors or being consumed by adjoined sectors, namely logistic, retail, and print. Printing as an act of publishing or printing as an act of writing is not just a means of opening up the standardized book—the book commodity, which has been limited in terms of length, scope, design, form, and printing method. This view limits itself to possibilities within the book and has hardly lifted its gaze up and across the table to look levelly into our eyes.^[27] Can we hold our stare? What of our working limitations in the print shop, our working conditions, our living conditions, the broader circumstances of our lives?

Considering a literary field guided by the principles of artisan publishing, Schierloh calls this new art of making books an “agricultural revolution of writing.” However, this vision cannot take place without the dispersal of printing technology and operating knowledge, including skills in printing methods, design, binding, and, more broadly, skills across myriad constellations, such as editing, copyediting, photography, translation, distribution, event-planning, finance, and web design. Of course, no expertise is required for a majority of these activities. A working knowledge can be self-taught, but shared materials or mentorship in difficult areas—printing and editing for example—can aid greatly in the endurance of publishing projects. To accomplish this, Schierloh above all advocates sharing in all forms: re-reading, lending or giving equipment, exchanging material, collective events, collective printing, and open digital access to publications. All these acts of sharing weaken the coherence of the industrial publishing system and strengthen publishing as a social activity.^[28] While language may not be a singularly human characteristic, publishing and its range of activities could be constitutively human or, at least, the grounds for what it means to be human.^[29]

Schierloh’s pamphlet is a challenge for us to directly relate our publishing efforts to our living conditions—a relationship that demands our writing and printing to not reenact political messaging of the past but demands us to grasp our circumstances and create the conditions for effective communication and debate. Not only with our own terms but on our own terms.^[30] This practice of publishing is where the realm of necessity and the realm of freedom meet, where we realize the necessity of freedom.^[31] After all, as Schierloh remarks, our goal is to reach the point of no possible return; the departure of the wholesale culture and publishing system; the collapse of publishing and indeed all industries as commercial.^[32]

A vision not of unused offset printers in abandoned warehouses, but one where, by rebuilding the links between writing and publishing, text and book, publishing and printing, we can achieve a productive and political continuity as well as a unity between our lives and labor. Perhaps, then, we can return to congratulate SPD for how its collapse reveals the insufficiency of distribution alone and the incoherence of a literature that depends on capitalist production. We must reclaim for social use the productive capabilities of the industrial publishing system and, thereby, establish a unity of production and distribution. Unimpeded now by profit and under social control, another literature begins unbounded across all of society. For every unread, rotting, and recycled copy of Hilary Clinton’s biography, the bilingual verses of an unknown poet...

FUCK THE UNDERGROUND, I’M GOING POP

My face is the front of shop.
My face is the real shop front.
My shop is the face I front.
I'm real when I shop my face.

— SOPHIE, “FACESHOPPING”

Fuck the “Underground”^[33]—not Warhol, but Orwell. Once again: Fuck “Class Diversity” but we must recognize the existing publishing industry as our only alternative—that is, “there is no alternative” to capitalist industry in those famous, famously dry words of Margaret Thatcher and Angela Merkel (“es gibt keine alternative”). The existing state of things is the only alternative to which we will continue to return, but the existing print industry and efforts of editors certainly gives us the materials to transcend both capitalist and artisanal publishing models.

Will publishers organize themselves into a network for the purposes of skill-sharing, production, and distribution? This could already be a lost future, but, more likely, this future could never have been lost in the first place. The achievement of this future lies in acknowledging its defeat from the outset. This aspect may best be exemplified by the strained and impractical labor of the Poet’s Union.^[34] Perhaps, however, these vital though premature efforts will gain clarity and purpose through a transformation of the publishing and printing industries as a whole, a general transformation of our working relationships.

In addition to the continual crises of capital, a rift has opened between digital and print. This rift and its many fissures have yet to be reconciled. While there now exists a greater variety of suitable online platforms for publishing, they are all limited in their capacities for complex or sustained discussion—not to mention their structural failings as subscription services or reliance on advertisements and algorithmic cataloging.^[35] Perhaps only now we are realizing that in a rapid transition from print to digital we lost more than paper and ink. Yes, this transition may have been freeing in some aspects, widening and intensifying the role of publishing and communication in our lives, but the limitations of print themselves allow for the creation of discursive structures, and this labor of publishing is the freedom of our discipline.^[36]

As Octavio Paz opens his essays on the Children of the Mire, the poem

is the product of a definite history and a definite society, but its historical mode of existence is contradictory. The poem is a device which produces anti-history, even though this may not be the poet’s intention. The poetic process inverts and converts the passage of time; the poem does not stop time—it contradicts and transfigures it.^[37]

Discussing the insoluble structure of time in modernity, Paz dwells on the word “revolution”; at once meaning the continual return of celestial bodies and a transformation of society. “It is fate and freedom.”^[38]

In his concluding essay, he argues that the end of modernity—and Paz contends we are still in the modern period—will return us to “primordial time,” but a return that also takes the form of a departure. Will the end of the modern era be “the end of art and poetry?” Paz answers:

No: the end of the 'modern era' and, with it, the end of the idea of ‘modern art and literature.’ Criticism of the object prepares the way for the resurrection of the work of art, not as something to be possessed, but as a presence to be contemplated. The work is not an end in itself, nor does it exist in its own right: the work is a bridge, an intermediary. Nor does criticism of the subject imply the destruction of poet or artist but only of the bourgeois idea of author. For the Romantics, the voice of the poet was the voice of all; for us it is the voice of no one.^[39]

Now, however, we can all strive to speak with the voice of the poet, with the voice from within history, the voice that both comprises and crosses the black bridges of history. Examining the relationship between money and commodities in Capital, Karl Marx distinguishes between a circuit that begins and ends with commodities (C-M-C) and another circuit that begins and ends with money (M-C-M). This latter movement is characteristic of capital, which “adds to itself a surplus-value or expands itself.” This creation of surplus is what transforms mere money into capital. Simply put: “money ends the movement only to begin it again.”^[40] Any analysis of publishing must contest not only with books as commodified, as containers of capital—yes, even editions of Capital—but with the dynamics of production and the social relations in which books are produced—the wage as well as the employer and employee relationship.

Recognizing this dynamic, some publishers reject operating on a for-profit basis and attempt to maintain the relations preceding capital (C-M-C). Naturally, this approach cannot overcome general alienation or exploitation, but perhaps it offers a reminder, a reminder of an “alternative” within or beyond capitalist relations. Yes, a gashing reminder, but however gashing or persistent our resolve, no resolution.

Discussing the various expressions of “estranged human life” involved in capitalist production, Marx argues that even forms of “religion, family, state, law, morality, science, art, etc., are only particular modes of production, and fall under [captial’s] general law.” While religious forms affect an inner alienation and economic forms an outer alienation, a “positive transcendence of all estrangement” would rather be “the return of man from religion, family state, etc., to his human, i.e. social mode of existence.” As such, religion and history in their “abstracted general character as politics, art, literature, etc.” are understood today as inseparable from being human, while industrial activity is perceived as alien to being human. Contrary to a desperate embrace of religion and cultural production as the only fields of human activity, Marx proposes industry, productive activity, as a potentially human realm and one that may be necessary “in the process of human emancipation and recovery” from environmental degradation and economic servitude.^[41] Rather than reconciling poetry to the basements of business as Hart Crane debated with the model of Wallace Stevens, “Humanist” activities can and must be united and transformed with industry.

This thought is, of course, unrecognizable in conventional scholarship as well as in a great share of radical publications. Just as bourgeois economists recognize technology, not humanity, as the subject of history, the book in isolation becomes for critics the subject of literary history and the limit of all analysis. This is the “unbridgeable gap opening up between subject and object that we find confronting us everywhere in modern life,” but our wills are subordinated to the commodity as an artistic object. Our existence as the commodity of labor serves only as a substance in the creative creation of commodities. Lukács is broadly correct to say that “art can do no more than shape this problematic without however finding a real solution to it,” yet, here, he takes on the same isolated view of art that he criticizes in the bourgeois economists with technology.^[42]

The object of literature is often only the text or the author; hardly the relationships of readers and books; less often the relationships of writers and readers; and nearly never the relationships between publishers, authors, and readers. Literary critics explain the qualities of literature but can we not also engage with the fascinating circumstances involved in the production of books? Can literature set down its object and take up its subject?

Following disenchantment with the Soviet Union and the policies of the Third Period beginning in 1935, many writers with revolutionary commitments either eschewed themselves from social movements or accommodated themselves “to opposing a generalized people’s culture to fascist and anti-democratic impulses.”^[43] Revolutionary writers lost their basis in Socialist and Communist parties and rearticulated their projects against fascism, imperial war, and social inequities. Revolutionary writers and publishers today still share this predicament. At once, writers gained their independence and were forced to overcome their reliance on the CPUSA, Soviets, Socialist parties, and other political organs such as unions, yet this often led to writers becoming dependent on other institutions for support—primarily the academy. However, the academy cannot alone be relied on any longer for institutional support or reliable teaching and research positions. If we can reclaim our productive independence while also reconnecting to unions and working-class parties, the social possibilities for poetry will be endless...

Regardless of its historical circumstances and commitments, Sartre asserts further that “the fate of literature is bound up with that of the working class.” As an absolute end, literature cannot accommodate itself to Socialist utilitarianism, but neither can we accommodate ourselves to being the propagandists of capital. And, yet, just as literature is an end toward the reader and writer’s freedom, so is the unconditional ambition of a classless society. We can then say that a literature committed to this end acts as an end for an end. If we cannot conquer any means of printing for our own ends, “we must resign ourselves to be forever writing for nobody but the bourgeois. If we can do so, we can speak to those to whom no one has spoken except to lie.”^[44] Maurice Blanchot more explicitly discussed this exigency of literature:

If we want to restore literature to the movement which allows all its ambiguities to be grasped, that movement is here: literature, like ordinary speech, begins with an end, which is the only thing that allows us to understand. If we are to speak, we must see death, we must see it behind us. When we speak, we are leaning on a tomb, and the void of that tomb is what makes language true.^[45]

I stated above that if literature reconnected to working-class organizations the social possibilities of poetry will be endless . . . but poetry, in fact, needs nothing, need nothing. What sense is there in the fate of art, literature, and poetry? Naturally, art has no fate whatsoever other than that of the artist and humanity as a whole.

Discussing Lorine Niedecker’s Homemade Poems as an example of mail art, Jonny Lohr notes how their publishing acted as correspondence. Mail art represents the most “vehement or liberatory rejection of all forms of commercialism, censorship, and hierarchies.”^[46] Significant in the development of ‘visual text art’ and ‘concrete poetry’, mail art was “probably the most widely practiced avant-garde distribution system,” yet it is “also the one that received the least documentation.”^[47] Poet, publisher, and printer Karl Young approached the early internet as a means to publish as he did with mail art in his use of both mimeograph and offset printing. Light & Dust offers an archive of past and present work that can be duplicated as one would a “master” copy. Recalling Young’s efforts at the edge of what is possible with independent publishing–integrating offset printing and digital publishing with the networks of mail art, bridging the mimeograph revolution to the digital revolution—we must now ask “What is the next revolution?”

Although the phrasing of these periods suggests otherwise, just the same as the previous “revolutions,” the next will not simply be technological. The mimeograph revolution does not refer to the invention of the duplicator, but rather the abandonment of this equipment from commercial use and, as such, being made accessible outside commercial production. The next revolution is precluded by a revolution in every sense of the term—a transformation of social relations that would allow for access to industrial machinery. This is the point where the commercial cannot traverse so smoothly to the individual, where the commercial sphere itself must pass into the communal.

As offset printing has integrated with digital technologies, we are now confronted with the potential of an offset approach, or rather the affordances characteristic to offset printing, such as volume, accuracy, and color variability. Commercial print shops have their procedures, but there are ruptures in communication between customer and print shop, design and press operators. Collaboration between authors, editors, designers, and printers could reveal many possibilities in the aesthetics inherent to the limitations and advantages of offset printing. This investigation would undoubtedly produce wild experimentation as well as impart new standards. For example, concerning specifically the simplification of the printing process, designing around wider sheets would drastically reduce the labor of cleaning and reduce wasted ink. Further, designs with films as opposed to solids would decrease the visibility of distortions throughout a print run and, therefore, allow for less downtime and maintenance.

Since Young’s time, offset printing has digitized, making possible the digital design and transference of plates to locations with comparable printing capabilities. Considering the growth of the web and home printing, Lohr notes with irony how this only grew the rift between authors and publishers:

The increased availability of the means of production has caused a restriction of what qualifies as acceptable forms of production and that the isolation of the labor of book production (physical) from the labor of content production (text) was seen as the only publishing mode that ‘counted,’ or credited the author.

This characteristic of offset printing “grants the power of crediting to those with the manufacturing capital. The editors who ‘count’ are those who can afford to pay to outsource the labor of book production.” Here, Lohr provides examples with the NEA, who require book publications to be from a “major press,” SPD, who only distribute[d] perfect bound books, and Entropy, who does not review self-published books.^[48] Mail art has dissipated with the advent of the internet, but there are many projects beyond Light & Dust that have now attempted to bring the two forms of media together, extending or deepening the simple surface of print.^[49] These depths may lead to broken links, lost paths, but, then again, there have always been links and paths that never led anywhere.

The brightest, perhaps the only promising path for artists, is naturally the path for us all. We punch in, punch out, and count the hours, no, we count our wages against the hours and what remains from the wages of war. What energy is left for the hours of the day that remain? The day is not enough. The wage can never be enough, not because I am not compensated enough to live, but because you, because all of us are not compensated by and with our time. We have lived now for generations in a machine age—whether they be threshers, printing presses, or computers—but our lives are still dominated by them, however distant the factories. Though our lives were once constrained by the efficiency and skill of our hands, we now coexist with the time of machines. This relationship already characterizes or impresses on all productive labor, but our work remains alienated.

The machine is the property of individuals and businesses, and our work through the machine is captured as the property of its owners, but if we can measure standards of production and account for our labor on the equal basis of time, the owners of machinery will cease to accumulate the value of our labor. Our labor will cease to be a commodity, and books will cease to be another form of material violence. Businesses gradually reorganize themselves from within under the dynamics of collective production.

Even if artists sell their work, intellectual or material, these transactions would fall outside of the sphere of communal reproduction. In effect, however, the patronage or compensation the artist receives would be akin to giving them your time. This speculation stays with the individual artist. What remains to be discussed is how art may become the general character of human industries. Productive labor ceases to be an alienating force and becomes instead another domain of creative, human life.^[50] It is not without irony that work stops being a commodity, but becomes the medium of exchange, time itself. On the other side of time, both industry and the artist will now concern themselves with the production of time.

Art ceases to burrow itself like a burr into our breasts and enters the warehouse. We open the loading bays in the warehouse of paper, and, at the departure of the book as a commodity, so too do its composing hands release themselves and decompose in that furious determination of the black lake, the wake of the city.

Our paths do not meet only through the book but pass together through the press and hands of its printers.

Let this book fall at your feet as ashes.

Let the book disperse like the rains and pass into the transforming hands of our children.

Don’t confuse the book as the beginning or ending of our liberation.

The book is our discipline

and can be a means to discipline each other.

Don’t confuse the kowtowing of organizations or institutional investment with a social movement, the movements which are imperceptible, those quiet tasks of ordinary lives.

Don’t confuse recognition or acceptance

with freedom or revolution.

If you think you can sing alone, you’ve forgotten cicadas are a part of your voice. If you think you are outside society, you are someone else’s waking dream.

Don’t confuse yourself as a commodity. Don’t aspire to be your own commodity.

Don’t confuse publishing as a practice toward or beyond any imagined future.

The book is our means to give shape to and share our visions.

The highest form of criticism in this age will be friendship.

This book opens at the arrival of many worlds.

Addendum 2

Don Quixote proceeded in his inquiry, and when he asked another corrector the name of a book, on which he saw him at work; he understood it was the second part of the SAGE HIDALGO DON QUIXOTE DE LA MANCHA, written by a certain person, a native of Tordesillas. “I have heard of this performance,” said the knight; “and really, in my conscience, thought it was, long before now, burned into ashes, or pounded into dust, for the impertinence it contains; but, as we say of hogs, ‘Martinmas will come in due season,’ the nearer they approach to truth and the more probability they contain; and, even history is valued accordion to truth and authenticity.”^[51]

Addendum 3

Jean Baudrillard has provocatively expressed: “Today what we are experiencing is the absorption of all virtual modes of expression into that of advertising.”^[52] Yes, trade publications are both language commodities and the language of commodities. Yes, there has always been an entanglement between literature, journalism, and advertising, but now careers in advertising and content writing capture many of those with English degrees; and, in disquieting ways, advertising has taken on characteristics of literature and literature has taken on characteristics of advertising. Advertising becomes increasingly concerned with its narrative capacities and its ability to make emotional connections, while in literature the relationships between reader and writer simplify into that of authorial influence or guidance. This is the brand as myth and the book as pure ideology—the stories that capital seamlessly tells us about itself. Instead of asking what advertising can learn from literature, I’d like to ask “What can literature learn from advertising”?

Perhaps literature has nothing to learn from advertising because trade publishers and their authors, conscious or unconscious, have implicitly drawn from advertising narrative frameworks and modes of address. Literature acting as ideological marketing, an educational or ethical intervention for readers of a particular sociological group. We have already been where “What’s your audience?” meets “Who’s your consumer?” Advertising narratives enforce a form of capitalist realism, that is, a reality where all our desires are manufactured and fulfilled by products and all of us are the heroes of our own universe. “You’re the hero of every purchase” (Capital One, Samuel L. Jackson). However, the product is always the true protagonist of advertising, and we can no longer have a fetish for our lover, but only ever be the fetish of this lover. Art and books, in particular, become one of the only respectable commodities to consume. Oh, and they are infinitely consumable because they can either never be exhausted or never be engaged. Our lives are conceived as a series of successive pleasures, sublimities, and existential solutions. A WORLD OF PERFECT MOMENTS.

Addendum 5

Elegies are written for the dead or dying. We can only hope Vance has written his own elegy, an elegy for his form of existence, that of the politician, specifically the ungoverning politician. In Hillbilly Elegy he does not produce a performative politics, but presents a politics of performance, a performance of his own origins that he so vehemently rejects. After all, his vision of politics transfers all dynamics of society to the sphere of culture.

This sad little Ohio boy, this hillbilly hobbit summoned to fight the forces of darkness. This marine, this reef shark out of his depth, lacking all conviction or commitment—as all politicians do—without marrow, all cartilage. Gogol’s great nose buried in the face of a bear that always misses Spring and sleeps on into the following Winter . . .

If Vance doesn’t aim to govern, let's talk to him as an artist. Politicians are the artists of our time, the most prolific and well paid because their performances pay off, pay out.

This “Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis” reads like the middling college application essay from Middletown that it is. An elaborate billboard for a “working-class” senator. He speaks of poverty as a family tradition and his home as a hub of misery, but confuses the roots of social decay for the withered petals of wallpaper flowers. Discussing the departure of the manufacturer Armco from his hometown in a merger with Kawasaki, he excuses management decisions to preserve profit as if they were natural law and, in the same motion, criticizes his neighbors as ignorant and lazy. His own mother confesses that she “used drugs to escape the stress of paying bills,” but Vance goes on to condemn addicts for destroying what little value exists in their lives through their dependence. He calls for us to return to the values of our grandparents “old-fashioned, quietly faithful, self-reliant, hardworking”—but we know that Vance only recognizes one value.

Although Vance acted as senator of Ohio, he concludes in Hillbilly Elegy that government policy is “powerless to resolve other problems in our community” because the real problems that children like him faced, that children like him face “is what happens (or doesn’t happen) at home.” Afterall, we only need to look ourselves in the mirror and face the reality that “these problems were not created by governments or corporations or anyone else. We created them, and only we can fix them.” In his resignation of politics, Vance explicitly reveals the impotence of the State to control the forces of capital. In a way, Vance and other politicians place themselves already in the realm of politics after the transformation of capital and the dissolution of the State.