This article for the Journal of Writing in Creative Practice is a position statement about my understanding of what Information As Material try to do together, as a self-publishing collectiove of writers, through a mode of ‘publishing as praxis’.
The first half outlines the intersecting concerns shared by Craig Dworkin, Simon Morris and me as co-editors, explaining how our collective identity functions as a self-publishing framework for writers who produce ‘conceptualist reading performances’. Following this, I explain how certain kinds of self-publishing can be differentiated from vanity publishing by analysing how the two differently relate to the subject-status of the authorial self that they make public.
In the second half, I speculatively map these ideas onto the emergent field of Conceptual Writing, re-positioning it as an extra-literary approach to writing that performs on the outside of literature’s territory to alter the question of authoriality so central to how we understand literature’s horizons.
