post-anthropocentric cosmos which Watkin associ- affrmation as human still depend, as ever, on some ates with Latour. actors’ capacity frst to recognise them as such, and Each of Watkin’s readings is admirably clear and then to do what is required, at the level of social or- impressively thorough, and his decision to approach ganisation, to affrm and look after them? Watkin’s the feld in terms of a single over-arching movement book certainly helps us to escape the conventional lends his book both a coherence and a momentum limits of humanist affrmation, but to my mind its that distinguish it from the great majority of survey- celebration of an effectively ‘unlimited humanity’ style overviews. Needless to say, readers with dif- seems to rely on precisely the sort of affrmative ferent political and philosophical priorities may well thought it seeks to undermine. see, in the overall movement from Badiou to Latour, something rather different than the broad opening Peter Hallward and progression that Watkin applauds – but there isn’t space for this argument here, and in any case politics isn’t one of this book’s central concerns. Two trails other question, however, seem harder to avoid. First of all, given Watkin’s determination to Kate Eichhorn, Adjusted Margin: , Art and avoid any reliance on a specifying host capacity or Activism in the Late Twentieth Century (Cambridge, substance, combined with his determination to ex- MA: MIT Press, 2016). 216pp., £21.95 hb., 978 0 pand the frame of reference as far as possible, the 26203 396 1 question of what exactly still serves to demarcate a The punning title of Kate Eichhorn’s book refers distinctively human fgure seems hard to pin down. to the ‘somewhat audacious argument’ at its core: That is Watkin’s point, of course, in his appeal to that the xerographic (or dry photocopying) ‘multiple, layered accounts of the human’ over any played an overlooked but decisive role in the form- ‘single-aspect’ identifcation. Nevertheless, in his ation of alternative artistic and political communit- recurring reference to the neonates or the severely ies in North America during the late twentieth cen- senile, what seems to recur are indeed fgures in the tury. As Eichhorn notes, however, evoking the over- most literal sense, fgures that we might recognise signifed margin ‘remains a somewhat perilous en- as human because, presumably, they appear to con- deavour’; perhaps as a consequence, this thoroughly form to a recognisably human shape. But this begs researched study of the emergence and decline of the question of why this should be so, and of where xerography tends towards a romantic celebration of (or why) we should locate the points at which any fg- the subcultural, alternative or peripheral. ure per se might cease to look human, in order to ap- The book begins by providing a succinct history pear as something else. of xerography’s technological development from the Second, the more thoroughly Watkin purges his late nineteenth century onwards; including unex- human fgures of their reliance on a host capacity pected details such as Edison’s ‘electric pen’ of 1895, such as reason or affrmative thought, the more his a motorised stencilling device that would eventu- own appreciation of the humanity of senile or dis- ally morph into the modern tattoo needle. Post- abled fgures seems tacitly to rely on a form of just Fordist regimes of work hastened these machine ad- such affrmation. Total elimination of every host ca- vancements, and yet, as Eichhorn demonstrates, the pacity deprives these fgures of any opportunity to burgeoning countercultural movements of the mid- affrm their own humanity, of course, as actors in twentieth century promptly abraded the adminis- their own right, and like some of Malabou’s ‘new trative and bureaucratic world of white-collar offce wounded’ they can appear here only as the objects of employment. The wildly successful North American others’ benevolent concern. But no matter how in- copy shop Kinko’s provides a neat framing device clusive and diversifed our categories of apparently for Eichhorn’s story, a grassroots business founded human-shaped objects might become, doesn’t their in 1970 that generated ‘the space and equipment to

124 RADICAL PHILOSOPHY 2.01 turn an administrative task (copying) into art and an- photocopying businesses in close proximity to uni- archy and social practice.’ Copy shops like these are versity campuses from the late 1980s onwards can cast as liminal social spaces in Adjusted Margin, in- be tied to education cutbacks and the rise of adjunct tegral to a shared ‘experience of public culture and faculty members without access to institutional re- the production of non-localized networks and com- sources, an interesting contention that would, to be- munities.’ come wholly credible, beneft from further research. Eichhorn explores the creative repurposing of a Xerography’s critical role in the production of mass administrative technology, tracing the publics and counterpublics is a major theme in the machine’s allegorical relocation from the offce to book, which particularly concentrates on the history artist’s studio. The prevailing use of these of subcultures in disinvested urban centres prior to served to challenge established notions of enforcement of gentrifcation schemes in the later and alternative publishing networks fourished (of- 1980s and 1990s. While similar ground has been ten at the expense of employers whose machines covered before, Eichhorn looks beyond the illustrious were quietly exploited), circulating everything from subcultural urban centres of this history to suggest fan fction to mail art to avant-garde poetry. ‘Visual that xerography and production permitted the artists and writers’, Eichhorn tells us, ‘embraced xer- ‘deterritorialisation’ of those downtown scenes. The ography as a way to produce books and booklike ob- circulation of photocopied materials allowed for act- jects quickly, cheaply and collaboratively.’ The activ- ivist and subcultural values to spread far beyond the ities Eichhorn describes here complement those an- limited physical space of, for example, New York’s thologised by Gwen Allen in her 2011 study Artists’ East Village. That this stands as a pre-digital form Magazines, where she connects the emergence of de- of social media is a convincing claim: ‘Beyond re- materialised modes of art to experiments in alternat- volutionizing printing by enabling one to photocopy ive publishing culture. Eichhorn’s technological ex- anything on a wide range of surfaces in myriad con- cavation provides a welcome counterpoint to Allen’s texts, then, xerography anticipated the mobile, high- earlier art historical perspective, enriching a grow- speed, real-time forms of communication that would ing feld of historical research concerned with late- be taken for granted by the end of the century.’ Draw- twentieth-century art, politics and print. ing on conceptualisations of the public sphere from The book considers copy shops as sites of per- Jürgen Habermas to Michael Warner, it is, she writes, mitted illegality, where under-age IDs are produced a pressing question of mediation: ‘what types of and copyright laws openly fouted without recourse. publics become imaginable through xerography that The impossibility of enforcing copyright as a result would have otherwise remained unimaginable?’ of technological advancement adds a valuable his- The book moves on to a discussion of AIDS and torical dimension to current debates regarding ‘open queer activisms, via which the organised produc- source’ online publishing and illegal digital sharing tion of graphic posters, fyers, and large-scale within the humanities. However, this line of enquiry demonstrations strikingly intervened in prominent takes a darker turn as Eichhorn points out how copy public spaces. The signifcance of xerography is shops’ association with illicit behaviour functioned shown to go beyond solely reprographic mechanics, in association with their high numbers of immigrant being instead bound up with the very fundamental staff to construct a space of ‘imagined terrorisms’ in ‘freedom to be public’ for which queer groups were the post-9/11 consciousness. The heightened sur- advocating. In concurrence with other writers in- veillance and state aggression against Muslim work- cluding Sarah Schulman and Tara Burk, Eichhorn ers at Best Copy in Toronto is taken as a case study discusses photocopying and postering in terms of the to explore how public opinion arrived at ‘the point visual character of cities, where the urban landscape where simply frequenting the shop was eventually is evocatively transformed into a peeling papered posited as potential evidence of a terrorist link.’ canvas, in some parts an inch thick. Eichhorn con- Eichhorn further proposes that a notable increase of veys the sheer volume of Xeroxed materials circu-

RADICAL PHILOSOPHY 2.01 125 lating under the offcial radar, from illegally copied insightful cultural analysis with personal and prac- university texts to scientifc reports on new AIDS tical observations, treading a line between scholarly drugs, and her enthusiastic prose evocatively cap- and activist registers. Although her celebration of tures a tactile sense of inky materials being passed radical xerographic practice firts with hyperbole, the from hand to hand. If the book risks repetition at tone is exciting. The clean design of the book itself times this might be attributable to the endlessly re- remains thankfully free of ‘xerography’s gritty aes- productive technology under discussion. thetic’, but it also hints at the inherent contradiction Eichhorn concludes by pointing out the almost of writing a scholarly-press history of activist mater- total replacement of xerographic machines with di- ials. The copyright page clearly states: ‘no part of gital photocopiers by around 2000, an occurrence this book may be reproduced’. ‘most people didn’t even notice’. This, she con- tends, is signifcant because the original machines Victoria Horne enabled replication without a master copy, whereas the new technology consists of a scanner and data bank: ‘While people no doubt continue to use copy Smart writing machines in subversive ways, in the digital era they can no longer do so with a guarantee that they won’t Sarah Kember, iMedia: The Gendering of Objects, En- leave a trace.’ A visit to a technology museum in vironments and Smart Materials (London: Palgrave Berlin reveals that, as objects, copy machines are Macmillan, 2016). vi+122pp., £45.00 hb., 978 1 13737 ‘bereft of design considerations’. As such, unlike 484 4 the stylish , turntables and Polaroid cam- Sarah Kember’s new book positions itself in a feld of eras that continue to change hands as desirable retro theory dominated by an often masculinist discourse commodities, these machines have been completely that privileges conceptualisations of its research abandoned. However, the technology lives on in objects as things or environments in-themselves, what Eichhorn calls the ‘xerox effect’, a DIY aesthetic instead of as the conficted and hypermediated that is digitally reproducible and functions in dia- objects-in-time that they are. Im/mediacy is a recur- logue with new forms of social media. As she puts it: ring theme throughout the book, which bears both a ‘If photocopied posters, fyers, and zines still quickly political and conceptual charge. In particular, Kem- found a place in Occupy, it is because the aesthetic ber targets the theoretical practices stemming from of these forms continues to signify something that Object Oriented Ontology (or OOO), arguing that exceeds a method of document reproduction.’ The disavowing processes of mediation and problems of signifcance of the photocopied aesthetic is that it ‘is subjectivity leads to a disturbing complicity between anarchic and punk, radical and queer’, a bold claim the media industry and iMedia theorists. Her con- that needs, possibly, to be situated in relation to less tention is that if we stop asking the question ‘who optimistic readings of analogue media and nostalgia, writes?’, while positing a fat ontology as the ground as discussed, for example, in the 2014 collection Me- on which materials, environments and objects ap- dia and Nostalgia edited by Katharina Neimeyer. pear as equal, undifferentiated and neutralised, then Eichhorn’s lucid ‘media archaeology’ persuas- we run the risk of erasing the structural and epi- ively situates the photocopier as a new technology stemological hierarchies which constitute those ob- essential to the production of alternative communit- jects. This negation can do little to counter the cur- ies in late twentieth-century North America. In this rent post-political, neoliberal consensus, especially it achieves the outcome of good material culture re- if it goes hand-in-hand with a dismissal of critique search by taking an object of such ubiquity that it had as something outdated and redundant. become practically invisible and rendering it fresh The task of iMedia is to unpack and undo such again. As in her previous book, The Archival Turn in covert complicities between theory and the post- Feminism: Outrage in Order (2013), Eichhorn weaves political. She does this in a skillful, albeit sometimes

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