War at the Membrane

Abstract

Howard Slater, Anomie/Bonhomie and Other Writings, London, Mute Books, 2011, 148pp; 9.99[pounds sterling] paperback I first encountered Howard Slater's sharp-witted and inventive writing in the pages of a magazine called Autotoxicity. An unholy mix of artists' book and journal of ultra-left theory, Autotoxicity exemplified a key principle of Slater's work, that political writing is as much an intervention in textual and publishing form as it is the production of critical content. It is a principle that, as Walter Benjamin puts it, has tended to favour the 'inconspicuous forms' of writing and publishing ('leaflets, brochures, articles, and placards') over the 'pretentious, universal gesture of the book'. (1) And yet Anomie/Bonhomie comes to us in the form of a book, Slater's first venture into this medium. If it was simply a compendium of texts published previously in more inconspicuous forms then this could be a step backwards, as one might assume from the book's acknowledgement of a number of publishing projects that hosted some of these writings and facilitated their development, from Copenhagen Free University, Datacide, and Variant to the more mysterious Ourganisation. But this acknowledgement is very much an assertion of the present, not the past, of these texts, locating the book in a field of experimental and small-press media as much as in the circuits of consumption for books of critical theory. Befitting that intimate association with independent media, Slater's book has its own experimental qualities. It is the first volume of a new series of Mute Books, part of Mute magazine's shift toward a 'hybrid' publishing model based on experimental testing of the techno-social capacities of new media publishing. In this regard Anomie/Bonhomie is an example of what Alessandro Ludovico has called 'post-digital print', a print product of the enmeshing of print and digital technologies that makes critical use of the qualities and properties of each. (2) Here, 'print on demand' (POD) publishing, among other resources, allows small-press and experimental publishers to move into the previously price-prohibitive terrain of book publishing. And so, though the form of the book still holds its place at the summit of bibliographic respectability, the distinction Benjamin draws between the book and its inconspicuous forms, the publishing centre and its margins, is now less secure, as the post-digital book becomes widely available to critical and formal experiment and alternative modes of production and distribution. The design and published form of Anomie/Bonhomie plays with these major and minor aspects of the contemporary book; there is a confident simplicity or even austerity to its design that at once recalls the style of an established and respected imprint, a 1970s Pelican Book perhaps, and asserts the more DIY print, page, and image aesthetics of POD technology, making an aesthetic virtue of what in academic presses usually feels merely like an economy. The title essay, 'Anomie/Bonhomie: Notes Towards the Affective Classes', published here for the first time and filling half the book, is an engagement with the affective conditions of contemporary labour and class. But unlike recent research on the emergence of affective labour in post-Fordism, Slater posits affect at the heart of the class relation, as the disavowed and unacknowledged suffering that has been the condition of waged and un-waged labour from the start. In an unsettling and rather moving opening, the essay begins not, as we have grown accustomed, with a manifesto-like narrative of an emerging political subject, but with a mourning for the working class, a litany of worries, anxieties, and sicknesses, a class without any subjective agency beyond a desire to stop: 'all we knew as working class is we didn't want to work for a living, we didn't want to be working class'. The workers' movement, for its part, was as much the problem as the solution, assisting capital in cathecting suffering to the identities of work. …