Publishing as a praxis of conceptualist reading performances

Since 2006 I have been a co-editor of the independent publishing imprint information as material. This article is a position statement about my understanding of what we try to do together through a mode of ‘publishing as praxis’. The first half outlines the intersecting concerns shared by Craig Dworkin, Simon Morris and I, 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.