Fluid Notes on Liquid Books

Abstract

The following speculations on the future of digital scholarship and open media, and the potential they hold for transforming the geopolitics of knowledge, arise out of my work on a series of performative media projects I am tentatively describing as “media gifts.” These projects, which operate at the intersections of art, theory and new media, are gifts in the sense they function as part of what has come to be known as the academic gift economy, whereby research is circulated for free rather than as intellectual property or market commodities that are bought and sold. They are performative in that they are concerned not so much with representing or providing a picture of the world as acting in the world (Austin, 1962). In other words, my primary focus with these projects is not on studying the world and categorizing what I have found in order to arrive at an answer to the question “What exists?” and then, say, proclaiming that we have moved from the closed spaces of disciplinary societies to the more spirit or gas-like forces of the societies of control, as Gilles Deleuze (1997) would have it; or from a modernity characterized by fixed and solid structures to the uncertain, liquid modernity Zygmunt Bauman describes (see Bauman, 2000, 2003, 2005, 2006). Of course, ontological studies of this kind can be extremely important. Nevertheless, different forms of communication have different effectivities and I often wonder about the effectivity of such analyses.