Nicholas Thoburn

Materialities of Independent Publishing: A Conversation with Aaaaarg, Chto Delat?, I Cite, Mute, and Neural

This text is a conversation among practitioners of independent political media, focusing on the diverse materialities of independent publishing associated with the new media environment. The conversation concentrates on the publishing projects with which the participants are involved: the online archive and conversation platform AAAAARG, the print and digital publications of artist and activist group Chto Delat?, the blog I Cite, and the hybrid print/digital magazines Mute and Neural. Approaching independent media as sites of political and aesthetic intervention, association, and experimentation, the conversation ranges across a number of themes, including: the technical structures of new media publishing; financial constraints in independent publishing; independence and institutions; the sensory properties of paper and the book; the politics of writing; design and the aesthetics of publishing; the relation between social media and communicative capitalism; publishing as art; publishing as self-education; and post-digital print.

Is There an Autonomist Model of Political Communication

This article explores the different models of political communication that inhere in Hardt and Negri’s Empire trilogy, models that are explicit and implicit, intended and accidental, dominant and latent. From their existence tangled up in Hardt and Negri’s work, I draw out for consideration the communicative models of the rhizome-book, manifesto, textbook, mass-market book, autonomous language, and political journal. My aim is less to evaluate the relative dominance of these models in the trilogy, than to take the opportunity this work offers for thinking political communication as specifically communist problematic, a somewhat neglected field of inquiry.