This essay uses the history of Information As Material and a critical understanding of self-publishing to make five points about the horizons of contemporary small-press culture: First, how we might distinguish certain kinds of self-publishing by the way in which they problematise the subject-status of the self at work. Second, how the digital mediatisation of writing technologies outside the context of the language arts is casting some kind of technical foreshadow in front of new writing generally. Third, what might be interesting about recontextualising our experiences of mediatised media as literature or art. Fourth, how those aesthetic possibilities beg the question, ‘but what kind of realism is it?’ And finally, how the critical frameworks with which we attend to acts of publishing need to shift from analysing objects to analysing processes.
It features in The Contemporary Small Press: Making Publishing Visible, edited by Georgina Colby, Kaja Marczewska and Leigh Wilson as proceedings from a symposium entitled 'Forms of Criticism' held between Parsol Unit and the University of Westminster in London, summer 2015.
