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Reader 05 Intro Contd
Similarly, ‘Cities of Everyday Life’ , ‘Shaping Technologies’, and ‘Crisis/Media’ all point to the possibility of polysemic inscriptions and multivalent readings. Poised between their capacious generalities and very pointed, but often veiled, references, the call for each Reader acts as a kind of ‘strange attractor’ which gathers many different kinds of content to itself. Our task as the Editorial Collective is then to enable ‘unlikely encounters’ to occur between the different ideas and texts that accumulate in our mailboxes.
This invitation is posted on to various electronic discussion lists, to the ‘Reader-list’ (which grew out of the process of discussing the contents of Reader 01, in 2001), and others such as ‘Nettime’, ‘Fibre Culture’, ‘Spectre’, ‘Undercurrents’ and ‘Commons Law’. The invitation asks potential contributors to mail abstracts. These are collated, and a first selection of possible articles is made by autumn. Selected authors are then contacted, and complete texts solicited. On some occasions, members of the editorial collective also solicit contributions from people they think have things to say, independent of the process that has just been described.
This process generates a great variety of tone and style. We have featured contributions by philosophers, software programmers, novelists, filmmakers, lawyers, historians, comic book writers, artists and students. Some of these people have chosen to write in an academic manner, others have consciously chosen not to. Some have been established and well-known names, others have become well known since they published in the Sarai Readers, and still others were having their work published for the first time. We have consciously sought to make different registers of writing, the academic, the literary, the journalistic, the autobiographical and the practice-based, speak to each other. We have also deployed visuality and design as arguments, as rhetorical devices in their own right, to complement the role of the written word. To us, this entails a commitment to a variegated and democratic universe of discourse production. The contents and design of the Sarai Readers refuse to make any one ‘voice’ feel more entitled to expression than others. Each expression makes a claim to knowledge, and brings its own protocols and practices of the making of knowledge.
‘Eclectic’ tends to be a pejorative term in the world of discourse. We, however, are happy to be termed ‘eclectic’. In the ancient Greek usage of the word, ‘Eclectics’ were a class of philosophers who neither attached themselves to any recognised school, nor constructed independent systems, but ‘selected such doctrines as pleased them in every school’. Diogenes Laertius speaks of an ‘eclectic sect’ founded by Potamon of Alexandria in the 2nd century. The term continues to be applied to those who combine elements derived from diverse systems of opinion or practice in any science or art. For the published flagship of a programme of interdisciplinary research and practice, the term ‘eclecticism’ should not be something to apologise for, but something to consistently aspire towards.
Finally, something that is obvious, but perhaps needs to be said, at least once in five years. The Sarai Reader series would never have been possible but for the generosity and intellectual capaciousness of the tradition for which CSDS is known, and for the partnership with the Waag Society in Amsterdam (for the production of Readers 01-03). It would also have been impossible but for the labour, skill, enthusiasm and love that all those who work on its design and production in the Media Lab at Sarai-CSDS bring to the Reader, year after year. It would also not have been possible but for all those who have responded to our call for contributions and to our urgent, and sometimes impatient, solicitation.
And of course, it would not have been possible for the community of readers of the Sarai Reader, who in time have also produced some of our most exciting writers.
Now, you, dear reader, could say to us, as they say so often in the country of television, “Gimme five!”
And we would, willingly.
This invitation is posted on to various electronic discussion lists, to the ‘Reader-list’ (which grew out of the process of discussing the contents of Reader 01, in 2001), and others such as ‘Nettime’, ‘Fibre Culture’, ‘Spectre’, ‘Undercurrents’ and ‘Commons Law’. The invitation asks potential contributors to mail abstracts. These are collated, and a first selection of possible articles is made by autumn. Selected authors are then contacted, and complete texts solicited. On some occasions, members of the editorial collective also solicit contributions from people they think have things to say, independent of the process that has just been described.
This process generates a great variety of tone and style. We have featured contributions by philosophers, software programmers, novelists, filmmakers, lawyers, historians, comic book writers, artists and students. Some of these people have chosen to write in an academic manner, others have consciously chosen not to. Some have been established and well-known names, others have become well known since they published in the Sarai Readers, and still others were having their work published for the first time. We have consciously sought to make different registers of writing, the academic, the literary, the journalistic, the autobiographical and the practice-based, speak to each other. We have also deployed visuality and design as arguments, as rhetorical devices in their own right, to complement the role of the written word. To us, this entails a commitment to a variegated and democratic universe of discourse production. The contents and design of the Sarai Readers refuse to make any one ‘voice’ feel more entitled to expression than others. Each expression makes a claim to knowledge, and brings its own protocols and practices of the making of knowledge.
‘Eclectic’ tends to be a pejorative term in the world of discourse. We, however, are happy to be termed ‘eclectic’. In the ancient Greek usage of the word, ‘Eclectics’ were a class of philosophers who neither attached themselves to any recognised school, nor constructed independent systems, but ‘selected such doctrines as pleased them in every school’. Diogenes Laertius speaks of an ‘eclectic sect’ founded by Potamon of Alexandria in the 2nd century. The term continues to be applied to those who combine elements derived from diverse systems of opinion or practice in any science or art. For the published flagship of a programme of interdisciplinary research and practice, the term ‘eclecticism’ should not be something to apologise for, but something to consistently aspire towards.
Finally, something that is obvious, but perhaps needs to be said, at least once in five years. The Sarai Reader series would never have been possible but for the generosity and intellectual capaciousness of the tradition for which CSDS is known, and for the partnership with the Waag Society in Amsterdam (for the production of Readers 01-03). It would also have been impossible but for the labour, skill, enthusiasm and love that all those who work on its design and production in the Media Lab at Sarai-CSDS bring to the Reader, year after year. It would also not have been possible but for all those who have responded to our call for contributions and to our urgent, and sometimes impatient, solicitation.
And of course, it would not have been possible for the community of readers of the Sarai Reader, who in time have also produced some of our most exciting writers.
Now, you, dear reader, could say to us, as they say so often in the country of television, “Gimme five!”
And we would, willingly.
Editors
Delhi/Amsterdam, February 2005
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