Fall 2022
CRFTXXXX – Material Lab
“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 publication, as usual, but the termination of the MA in Critical studies adds a conservative dimension to our usual future-facing publication 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 five years by students and faculty who may no longer sit at the table – but shaped the conversation 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 collective) publishing acts that critically reflect on learning. These will be built, incrementally, over the next months.
During residency, Namita and I will start by presenting the publication project to the faculty and student body at large. This first session will be followed by another three, during which we will discuss what annotating, organizing and publishing might mean, and the possibilities those activities generate. In previous years, the publication project was a collective affair, that was only indirectly concerned with audience and circulation. Our approach this year will be different: each of you will be individually responsible for overseeing a “publication” from start to finish, and – during your fourth semester – for defining points of contact between your publication and its public(s).
As before, this is an “applied” class, i.e. one that is directly engaged with “making something” (assembling, transforming, creating, deciding) and governed by the tangible outcome we need to deliver. Though this is our priority, this syllabus makes lots of room for discussing, critically, the activities of publishing. We will reflect, in particular, on three questions that extend the work of editorializing content: What is a response? What is an arrangement? What is a publication 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 participate in a publication act;
• Flexed their critical muscles, and tested their own approach to critical feedback;
• Understood the implications 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 find 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 answer.
July 14-31 Residency. Sessions 1-4
Aug. 3-11 Research (engage) –
August 11 Session #5 12-3PM EST
August 31 Assignment 1 (publish)
Sept. 7 Assignment 2 (advise)
Sept 8 Session #6 12-3PM EST
Sept (TBD) Indiv. meetings with BL and NW.
Sept 15 Send invitation to contributor(s)
Sept. 30 Assignment 3 (organize)
Oct 6 Session #7 9-12AM EST
Oct. 30 Assignment 4 (annotate)
Nov. 10 Assignment 5 (read)
Workflow for the semester:
This semester’s assignments, even more than last semester, feed into one-another, and are rather tightly packed. The meetings, 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 1-to-1 chats to go over your choices, discuss your concerns, questions or plans. Please let me know before due dates if you will be late on submission.
Our semester sessions are really collective work and feedback sessions (though they will all include some presentation 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 preparation you need. As before, a list of “pickings” dangles under each session: these are references that shaped my understanding of the conversation 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
Rewriting and feedbacking are essential 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 time, and strategic about the states of a text you submit.
For citation work, please refer to the citation guide compiled by Julie Wilson, Director, Warren Wilson College Writing Studio.
Participation
I look forward to having dynamic sessions with you, and anticipate active participation from everyone. This means that you actively listen, participate, voice your questions, and support the exchanges that take place during class (in and after residency).
Office hours
I will continue last semester’s practice of labelling two hours of my Friday afternoons as “office hours” (from 3 to 5PM). I live in Montreuil, in the time 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 conversations at least 48 hours ahead of time: Send me an email with a proposed time, and I’ll respond with a zoom link. Treat this as a general landing area: if you can’t make that slot, we’ll figure out another time that fits with both our schedules. Likewise, my work at other institutions may occasionally overlap with those hours: I’ll let you know if that is the case when you book a meeting.
Session 1. Browsing (with Namita)
July 16, 3 hrs
During this opening session, Namita and I will present to both faculty and student body the “final” publication 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 tactical choices: we will talk about “the MACR archive”, present the cataloguing system developed to date, and sketch the possibilities inherent to treating everything as “miscellaneous”. An overview of the resources and interfaces we have will lead to initial discussions about what might be missing from the archive, and how everyone is thinking about their publication. Please make sure you have read the assignments section of this syllabus before this session, and come to class with questions.
During the second part, we will present a short hands-on assignment, conceived as an antidote to the distance-less, friction-less, and object-less logic of our introduction: you will be invited to spend time in the Pew Research center for a bit of old-time 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 final 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 time, but please send in the final TOC to us by July 27th.
Pickings
David Weinberger, Everything is Miscellaneous (2007)
Session 2. Reading and writing
July 25, 2.5 hrs
Barthes’ musing on the “writerly” will kick-start a collective reflection on active reading, and the writerly activities that take place in proximity of a text. Starting with the feedback practices that are common to this program, we will broaden our scope to consider a wider range of annotation strategies, and the practices they are embedded in, leaning on Kalir’s and Garcia’s Annotation (2021) (their transversal approach encourages us to think of annotation as an umbrella term to describe writings in proximity of the text – like editorial feedback, but also the textual elements that surround a main body of text: we will try to figure out whether it is useful to do so). Narrowing our scope a little, and to tether it back to the publication project, we will examine three topics: the ethics of giving feedback (D’Agatha and Fingal, Goulish), the social aspect of annotation (Spoerri, D’ignazio and Klein’s open peer reviewed Data Feminism), and the idea of peritext as a “transactional zone” (Genette) where a text comments on itself and invites further interaction. This session means to prepare you for both editing the work of others, and contextualizing the items in your publication. 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, Annotation (2021)
Catherine D’Ignazio and Lauren Klein, Data Feminism (2020) Here
Session 3 - Assembling
July 28, 3 hrs
The literature on organized textual content assumes a sort of tragedy of arrangement, an intellectual horizon defined by the order and hierarchies given ideas (through classification systems) and things (through the physical arrangement of books). We will keep both knowledge organization 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 navigating the Pew Research Center’s aisles as you shape a Table of Content will open a conversation around the politics of classification systems in the era of the book and various efforts to challenge the implicit hierarchies and gaps of discipline-based classifications (Samoa House library, Helsinki Library). Moving from institutions to shelf, we will invoke the materiality of browsing, imagining how placement can generate “fruitful contiguity” (Warburg, Benjamin), and how resources, classification and access impact research (Bert).
Looking at resources from a critical craft perspective, we will question the prevalence of libraries, and what they encourage us to consider as legitimate documents for thinking about craft. Looking back at our first session, and the discussion around “miscellaneous,” we will consider other forms of documents (could an object be an entry in your publication?), but also “gaps in the shelves” (Hartman, Hau-Ofa) as possible starting point for your own editorialization 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)
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 still have a letter”: Our sea of archives’ (2016)
Manuel de Landa, Assemblage Theory (2016)
Samoa House Library, A Short History of the Samoa House Library (2021)
Jérôme Lamy & Jean-François Bert, Voir les Savoirs (2021)
AndPre-post-print.org, here
Session 4 – Publishing
July 28th, 2 hrs
Publications coming out of teaching institutions 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 publication’s relation to the program, we are also interested in the new relations (or networks) a publication project generates. Looking at a handful of case studies, we will talk about publishing as a network-building and network-reliant activity (Balaguer). Looking ahead to semester IV, we will start to envisage what sort of “activities” your individual publications 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 time to your questions 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 Softcover Publication (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, written or co-written, 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 publication, which will be released under your name, as editor, at the end of the year. This is groovy.
The project is defined, in part, as a critical reflection on the MA in Critical Craft studies: as the program ends its 5-years relation 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 publication’s readership. During 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 defined 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 craft education that none of your faculty has received. This strange reality is an invitation for you to take stock of the unique understanding of craft that you have developed in this program, and to use the publication to showcase that understanding, to the people you want to be in conversation with.
The project is defined, finally, as means to experience (and reflect on) the editorial process first-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.
Though this semester’s assignments are divided in 5 chunks, it is best to consider them as part of an ongoing work with tip-of-the-iceberg deliverables. These have been sequenced from finish to start: you will start by producing the press release, and end by annotating the texts that you will include in your publication. 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 intentional, addressed, and interpersonal.
Namita and I will oversee the wider coordination of this multiple-part project (it will also include current and ex-faculty contributions). Please make sure that you book meetings with us, whenever you need, to discuss strategy, decisions, possibilities. You are used to my rather open-ended briefs, but also know that this freedom can be daunting: reach out if you need to chat! Please come prepare to meetings as you would a professional meeting, with a clear agenda and clear questions.
Performance evaluation
There has been an ongoing discussion, from the very start of this program, about the desirability of grades: this discussion hinged on how to incentivize learning but remove the temptation to “work to assignments”. It faltered as we worried that removing grades would penalize those of you whose future educational opportunities depend on a good GPA. Jeff 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 final MatLab year. My thinking is that the public-facing nature of publishing is incentive enough to give this project your best, and that you will see the publication as an opportunity to define (and showcase) learning excellency.
You will therefore all receive an automatic “A” for MatLab, if the following requirements are fulfilled:
Attend all classes, be responsible in fulfilling the requirements of the project and in meeting its deadlines, anticipate your needs and share your questions with faculty, define 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 questions:
If the final publication were a toolbox reflecting the program’s qualities
and the specific skills you are developing in it, which tools would you find in it?
July 14-31 Residency. Sessions 1-4
Aug. 3-11 Research (engage) –
Please look at the archive, familiarize itself with its categories, reflect on what interests you within it, and on its gaps. Start considering which of its elements could fit in your publication. Decide whether you will do it on your own, or with someone else.
August 11 Session #5 12-3PM EST
Present current thoughts on your publications.
Articulate a tentative project orally, name its perceived goal.
Models
Ben to provide publication pitches (Shows and Tales et al.) not so much a definitive selection as a definition of an intellectual project that people may want to board.
August 31 Assignment 1 (publish)
Please deliver a distribution-ready press release for your publication: it will include a tentative table of content, name contributors and their background, and articulate in a short, but extremely precise text, your editorial process, what this publication will contribute to the world (its goal, in other words), and the conversation that it is part of. Your press release will identify 2-3 authors from whom you would like to commission a work, and define what sort of ask you will put to them, and how you think their contribution will enrich your publication.
In this press release’s margin, add comments, addressed to your advisors (faculty and classmates), about questions you have about your project: what are you unsure about? Where do you need help?
In a separate document, reflect on the communities of allies that this publication has (or will generate, in the course of its production), 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 specific about the ways you will reach them, and consider the materiality of your outreach campaign (would a small advertisement in a specialized media be best? Should it be a personal ad? An IG post? Hand-written, personal notes?)
Goals
Reflect on goal, relation-to, audience
Pickings
Clara Balaguer, Hardworking Good Looking, on using specific dissemination strategies
Sept. 7 Assignment 2 (advise)
Read the press release of two of you classmates, and provide critical feedback to them. Take into account their own questions, but don’t be limited by them: you may have entirely different ones. Your critical feedback is primarily about discerning, and naming, the project’s possibilities: How do understand it? What “moments of exhilaration” does it make possible? What suggestion can you make to amplify its effects?
Tool
Use Hypothesis, in group mode
Pickings
Matthew Goulish, “Criticism”, in 39 Microlecture
Sept 8 Session #6 12-3PM EST
Each student to name unresolved questions, to be discussed 1-on-1.
Discuss peritext.
Show examples (online and in print) of generative annotations
Tool
Introduce Trello, as a time management system.
Sept (TBD) Individual meetings with BL and NW.
Please be prepared to discuss your TOC (including unresolved questions ). This meeting is meant to help you finalize your contributor(s)’ list.
Sept 15 Send invitation to contributor(s)
Include general pitch and specific ask, as well as
timeline and mode of interaction
Model
Ben to provide model of invitation letter
Sept. 30 Assignment 3 (organize)
Finalize your TOC
Define the elements that will constitute the peritext of your project. Titles, prefaces, notes, introductory paragraphs; photographic, sound or text commentaries; further readings; explanatory inserts (definitions; histories), acknowledgements, colophon: what will you include?
List your to-dos (including reproduction permissions) and create a Trello board with deadlines
Write a foreword for your publication, articulating its logic, and purpose (lean on your press release to do so, but also acknowledge the distance that now separates you from that earlier formulation of a goal). Let this foreword be a place where you situate yourself and the unique perspective that you bring to the material you have carefully selected and commissioned, organized, and contextualized.
Oct 6 Session #7 9-12AM EST
Discuss “writing in proximity”, and what you expect from it.
Discuss how your forewords do justice to both the publication, and your skills.
Address questions.
Oct. 30 Assignment 4 (annotate)
Write your peritext and collate them into the relevant documents, using Hypothesis
When approaching this task, think back to our class about annotation (session 2), and consider them as a “transactional zone” where the meaning of your texts is negotiated. Also look back to your notes form last semester on summaries/annotated bibliographies).
Models
Glenn Adamson, Craft Reader
The Talmud
Maggie Nelson, The Argonauts
J. Boully (The Body) and J.Diaz (The Wonderous Life of Oscar Wao) on footnotes
@Eatlitfood…
Nov. 10 Assignment 5 (read)
Acknowledge reception of your commissioned piece, start editorial process with its author