Beyond Access: Publishing as Infrastructural Experimentation

Below is my response to comments from Stevphen Shukaitus and Simon Batterbury made on the Radical Open Access mailing list in October 2026. Stevphen and Simon were reponding to a July 9 issue of the Open Humanities newsletter titled 'Who Will Find Us?: What Happens to Open Access After Search?'

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Thanks Stevphen and Simon for the thoughtful and generous responses. I guess with that newsletter we were trying to get ahead of things when it comes to thinking through the implications of the shift from search engines to AI chatbots, rather than just letting things happen to us. But the question of what kinds of intellectual and social relationships we want publishing to make possible is also a good starting point for thinking further about all this. 

Speaking of social and human costs, I do worry about how much longer there will be enough people around who are willing and able to have such encounters, sustain such social relationships, participate in such communities of study and collective intellectual production, and bring new projects into being. As we know, large numbers of scholars are leaving the mainstream university system as a result of 'restructuring' (for which we can read the 'hollowing out' of critical subjects in the humanities and social sciences). In the UK, 'nearly 4,000 academic posts in social sciences, humanities and the arts have been axed in one year alone. In the 12 months to December 2024, just under 3,000 social sciences, 820 humanities and 240 arts jobs went. All but 110 were in non-Russell Group universities, reducing student choice and potentially exacerbating inequalities' (https://www.theguardian.com/education/2026/jul/14/university-job-cuts-humanities-social-sciences). The number of early-career humanities staff has fallen by 20% over the last decade (https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/humanities-hardest-hit-early-career-opportunities-disappear).

As a result, many early-career scholars are choosing not to remain in - or even to enter - the university system as researchers or lecturers: because they're seeing it as unattractive, precarious, individualised, conservative, hypercompetitive - in short, toxic.

Of those who do remain in the university, many are overworked - not least because they're having to take on the work of colleagues they've lost. They simply don't have the 'time, spaces  or capacities' to devote to such communities: to 'editing, organising, facilitating, maintaining relationships, caring for spaces' and so on. 

Because of the pressures of academic employment, promotion and evaluation, other early-career scholars apparently feel they have to echo what those in older generations who have achieved high-status do and say. They almost deliberately bland themselves out (consciously or unconsciously), continuing to operate much as such legacy academics did. So, yes, as Simon says, many are concerned with getting 'a standard article out so that they can obtain a job or advance their career', rather than with who is producing knowledge, experimenting with infrastructure and the 'social infrastructures of publishing', or setting up their own publishing projects. 

(Speaking of bringing new projects into being and encouraging a proliferation of experiments: to what extent are early-career scholars starting new open access academic presses these days, does anyone know? Or is this an activity that pretty much belongs to previous generations, with scholars today more likely to be interested in publishing on Instagram, Tumblr and YouTube and forming communities by running book clubs and hosting in-person events? After all, both Open Humanities Press and Minor Compositions are nearly 20 years old now, having been launched within a year of each other. Was there something in the air in 2008/2009 that isn't in the air so much now?)

As a result of all this, there's a real process of re-centering underway, one that goes beyond 'the infrastructures of academic publishing [becoming] increasingly concentrated in the hands of commercial interests', as Stevphen puts it, and that's moving in the opposite direction to which Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o (an original board member of OHP) directs us in Moving the Centre when he writes: 

I am concerned with moving the centre in two senses at least. One is the need to move the centre from its assumed location in the West to a multiplicity of spheres in all the cultures of the world…. The second sense is … to move the centre from all minority class establishments within nations to the real creative centres among the working people in condition of gender, racial and religious equality.

According to Andy Burnham, we're supposed to have reached the end of the neoliberal project in the UK. (Is this what the situation with Manchester City signals? It'd be nice to think so.) Yet there seems to be no sign of this message having reached the people who lead and manage universities. Although maybe their jobs, too, are going to be 'restructured' - ironically enough, thanks to AI (https://openhumanities.substack.com/p/the-end-of-management-two-new-books). 

In the meantime, I'm wondering what we can do to push back against the current direction of travel toward such re-centering? How do we support colleagues, both inside and outside the university, to be part of such communities of study and intellectual production - or to develop their own versions of them, including some that do indeed 'go beyond the conventional boundaries of what we think publishing involves'? What different arrangements, socially, organisationally, infrastructurally and economically, do they need for these activities to be possible for them?

For a New Technology of Philosophy

This is the abstract for a talk I’ve been invited to give at the one-day conference Post-Platform Media, taking place at the University of Westminster on 15 January 2027, organised by Paul Rekret and Henry Ivry.

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For a New Technology of Philosophy

A launch point for the thinking behind this talk was Anton Jäger’s 2023 book, Hyperpolitics, whose 2026 English edition is proving influential among the British left. Jäger identifies a new political era – hyperpolitics – as coming after the mass politics of the mid-20^th century; the desocialised (NGO, PR consultant, technocrat-dominated) postpolitics of the 1990s, a term also associated with Chantal Mouffe, Slavoj Žižek and Jodi Dean; and the long decade of anti-politics (Arab Spring, Indignados, Occupy) that followed the 2008 financial crash. It’s an intriguing way of describing a moment characterised by the erosion of the parties, trade unions, civic organisations and other forms of collective association through which durable political engagement was once channelled. Platform capitalism, social media, algorithmic amplification, viral outrage, culture wars and increasingly fragmented and fleeting forms of identification (pirate parties, BLM, gilet jaunes, school climate strikes) have intensified this tendency, producing what Jäger calls a ‘market-friendly’ hyperpolitics: ‘extreme politicization’ without anything actually changing. As he says, the ‘people who go on marches subscribe to the same podcast, might follow the same pages on Instagram, might be on the same Telegram channels, but they don’t have an organisational history they shared before they entered the march.’

At the same time Mouffe, Žižek and Dean all provided illuminating and often influential diagnoses of earlier political conjunctures. Yet the subsequent rise of populist ethno-nationalism, illiberalism and authoritarian politics – from Trump and Farage, Modi and Milei to a wider resurgence of the radical right in Sweden, Germany and elsewhere – shows that even the most philosophically sophisticated accounts of a political situation do not necessarily help transform it in a progressive direction. Several questions arise. Is hyperpolitics a more persuasive diagnosis of our individualised and deinstitutionalised present than postpolitics? Is diagnosis itself the level at which intervention is most urgently needed? And might the production of such radical theory inadvertently help sustain the institutions, technologies, economic models, publishing practices and forms of intellectual labour – across both post- and pre-platform media – that perpetuate the very conditions it seeks to overcome?

It’s not an either/or, of course. We still need pre-platform forms of (market-friendly?) legacy theory to raise such questions. But this talk argues that, when it comes to issues of mediation, circulation, logistics, maintenance and social reproduction, what is also required is not so much a new philosophy of technology – adding to a lineage stretching from Heidegger, Adorno and Flusser, through Baudrillard and Virilio, to Stiegler, Haraway, Hayles and beyond – as a new technology of philosophy. This means shifting from developing new theoretical accounts of technology – including ‘how practices of archiving, curation, preservation, and transmission operate under conditions of infrastructural precarity and platform dependency’ – towards experimenting more with the material, institutional and technological conditions through which philosophy is itself created and performed. Rather than asking only what philosophy should think about the political present while leaving its forms of organisation and material conditions of labour masked, we might ask what emergent, independent, even insurgent kinds of media technologies, institutions, infrastructures, economic arrangements and collective practices are required for philosophy to become otherwise – and, from there, perhaps politics itself.

Transit Asia Critical Concepts - new open access (free) book

Open Humanities Press is pleased to announce the publication of:

Transit Asia Critical Concepts

edited by Joyce C. H. Liu, Brett Neilson, Karin Oen-Lee and Ned Rossiter

https://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/titles/transit-asia/

Like all Open Humanities Press books, Transit Asia Critical Concepts is available open access ( = it can be downloaded for free).

Concepts hold the world together. But what happens when the world fragments, explodes in war, faces the epistemic collapse wrought by AI, or the ravages of climate spun out of control? Concepts also disintegrate, lose their self-positing status. And yet critique does not simply dissolve in conditions of radical uncertainty. There is a hunger to critique. It finds new forms, partial, provisional, forged from within instability rather than above. Transit Asia Critical Concepts emerges from this conceptual turbulence.

The concepts gathered in this book are not designed to map Asia, to fix its contours, or confirm its coherence. They move across Asian environments, through infrastructures of labour and logistics, inside computational architectures and their human remainders, against the unevenly distributed catastrophes of climate and war in ways that exceed the regional frame they inhabit. That excess is not incidental. It is what thinking from Asia produces, a movement beyond the cultural imaginaries, institutional settings, and lived encounters that give Asia its apparent shape. 

Editor Bios

Joyce C. H. Liu is Professor Emerita and Director of the International Center for Cultural Studies, National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University, Taiwan. Her work on coloniality, biopolitics, and Inter-Asian infrastructures includes One Divides into Two (2020) and Tianxia and Its Discontents (Routledge, 2026).

Brett Neilson is Professor at the Institute for Culture and Society, Western Sydney University. He is author, with Sandro Mezzadra, of Border as Method (2013), The Politics of Operations (2019), and The Rest and the West (2024).

Karin Oen-Lee is Assistant Professor of Art History and Museum Studies at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. Her work as a curator, editor, and art historian focuses on diasporic, transdisciplinary, and interlocal creative practices as part of global Asia.

Ned Rossiter is Director of Research at the Institute for Culture and Society, and Professor of Communication, School of Arts, Western Sydney University. His current book projects include The Logistical Episteme and (with Soenke Zehle) Entropological Materialism: Ordering Disorder in the Cybnernetic Century (2027).

Series

Transit Asia Critical Concepts is published as part of the Low Latencies series, edited by Brett Neilson and Ned Rossiter:

https://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/series/low-latencies/

CONTRADICTionary: An Almanac of Resistance - new open access (free) book

Open Humanities Press is pleased to announce the publication of: 

CONTRADICTionary: An Almanac of Resistance

edited by Bernd Herzogenrath and Nicol A. Barria-Asenjo

Like all Open Humanities Press books, CONTRADICTionary is available open access (= it can be downloaded for free): 

https://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/titles/contradictionary/

CONTRADICTionary: An Almanac of Resistance is a collective intervention into the politics of language at a time when words themselves are being policed, erased, and weaponized. Emerging from the suppression of terms like ‘diversity,’ ‘intersectionality,’ and ‘climate crisis,’ the project reclaims and expands this contested vocabulary through contributions from over 100 scholars, artists, and activists worldwide. Each entry interrogates how language shapes what can be known, said, and done, while offering new, situated meanings rooted in lived experience and critical inquiry. Neither dictionary nor manifesto alone, CONTRADICTionary operates as a living archive of dissent, embracing contradiction as method and multiplicity as strength. By transforming banned words into sites of analysis, imagination, and action, it challenges regimes of silence and invites readers to actively participate in redefining the terms that govern collective life.

Editor Bios

Nicol A. Barria-Asenjo is a Chilean researcher in Social Sciences and Humanities linked to the University of los Lagos in Chile. Her books include Global Manifestos for the Twenty-First Century: Rethinking Culture, Common Struggles and Future Change (2023), edited by Nicol A. Barria-Asenjo, Brian Willems and Slavoj Žižek; Political Jouissance (2024) edited by Nicol A. Barria-Asenjo and Slavoj Žižek, and José Luis Villacañas in Political Theory (2026).

Bernd Herzogenrath is a professor of American literature and culture at Goethe University of Frankfurt am Main, Germany. He is the author of An American Body|Politic: A Deleuzian Approach (2010), and of many academic essays and articles. He is the editor of various edited essay collections, including The Farthest Place: The Music of John Luther Adams, Deleuze|Guattari & Ecology, and media|matter: the materiality of media, matter as medium. His latest publications include the collections The Films of Bill Morrison: Aesthetics of the Archive (2017), Film as Philosophy (2017), sonic thinking (2017), Practical Aesthetics (2020), Spectral Futures (2026),and the multimedia international arts project (c)ovid’s metamorphoses (meakusma 2023).

Series

CONTRADICTionary: An Almanac of Resistance is published as part of the Seedbooks series, edited by Sigi Jöttkandt and Prudence Gibson:

https://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/series/seedbooks/

Response to Roger F. Malina, 'Rethinking Space Art in 2026 as Pirate Philosophy in Action'

Roger, 

Thanks for sharing this. I really like the move from thinking up to thinking down, and especially the idea of an 'underview effect'.

The question that occurs to me on reading 'Rethinking Space Art in 2026 as Pirate Philosophy in Action: No Thinking Up Without Thinking Down ### No thinking Fast Without Thinking Slow etc.' is: What would it mean to pirate not just space, but the ways in which space is known, imagined and organised? Or, to put it another way: What would a space programme look like if it were itself organised according to pirate principles? 

Would addressing such a question have the effect of moving the discussion through something like the following four stages?

1st stage) Space art about the present space system

2nd stage) Testing the space system itself

As you put it, this would mean testing the 'assumption that outer space belongs principally to governments, military agencies, billionaires [e.g.Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos], engineers and corporations. They would challenge the enclosure of satellite data, astronomical knowledge, launch facilities, radio frequencies and planetary resources'. 

But it could also involve a redistribution - or, perhaps better, a predistribution - of funding and resources to others (people, groups, communities - both humans and nonhumans), 'beneath the satellite, rocket trajectory, mine and AI data center', capable of generating approaches to, and understandings of, space that are more diverse, and certainly less Euro-Western, humanist and liberal (and white, male and middle-class, for that matter).  

We need to give others the time, funding and resources to help bring these different futures about (see stage 4 below). They need to be able to control the conditions of production for the space system, and this requires a significant investment in them and their communities; and perhaps also the defunding of others.

With regard to AI, for instance, one can imagine money and resources going to towards making SLM AI engines, datasets, tools and infrastructure available to communities on a commons basis. This could make it easier for a diverse range of smaller, more politically and ethically responsible (and so visible, unmasked), independent and non-profit entities to be part of the AI ecosystem. It also connects with what some have been thinking about in terms of ‘good AI’: AI that is green, community-led (‘whether it takes the form of a workers' cooperative, an open source collective, stewardship by an academic or NGO, or some other simple format for sharing the work and the tech’), accessible and genuinely open-source.

3rd stage) Testing space art itself

This would indeed include the pirating of our own professional identities as artists, scientists, engineers, philosophers and editors. But it also connects with a larger question I guess I've been pursuing for some time: if we want to change things radically, is changing our radical theories about the world enough? Or do we also need to change the technologies, institutions and material practices through which those radical theories are created and circulated?

For me, that is where 'piracy' becomes more than a metaphor. The pirate philosopher doesn't simply think differently. The pirate experiments with different ways of being a thinker, researcher, artist, scientist or institution. The point, as you say, is not to romanticise the outlaw, but to use piracy as a method of putting our own practices to the proof. If we are not prepared to change, how can we expect others to?

This is part of what distinguishes a pirate philosophy, if we want to continue using the term, from simply having a more critical philosophy of space. The latter can leave the underlying organisation of knowledge intact: we produce a critique of the space system using the same institutional, technological and disciplinary arrangements that produced the space system in the first place. (Indeed, the critique is very much part of the existing system.) Pirate philosophy asks whether we can change those arrangements too. 

IP and copyright could certainly be part of this. But so could the unique author, the real name, the immutable book, the single-voiced narrative, originality, subjectivity, artistic authority, the rational (and possessive) human individual, for-profit income streams, and the apparatus of celebrity and elite scholarship. 

So: no critical thinking about space without experimenting with the organisations, infrastructures and economics through which that thinking takes place.

4th stage) Space art experimenting with alternative space - and Earth - systems

Systems that do indeed 'resist both state and corporate enclosures without treating Indigenous knowledge, community data or other worlds as freely available material.' The point, then, is not simply to criticise the existing space system, but to create the conditions in which other systems can emerge. And with them very different futures – for both space (including space environments, technologies, data and institutions), and for Earth, life, intelligence and the cosmos. 

These are the kinds of futures Jacques Derrida and Mark Fisher would say modern capitalist society is haunted by: futures (for people, communities, technologies, institutions, space, Earth... ) that are being closed off by the current cuts in funding and support to libraries, museums and universities, and within them to the humanities, in favour of the technical specialists of STEM.

These cuts seem to be motivated by more than economics. They increasingly look ideological, too. In the UK, for example, they are hitting the 'new' universities particularly hard. These are institutions that have traditionally provided educational opportunities for non-traditional students, including those from working-class, Black and global majority backgrounds. They were also pivotal in promoting fields such as media studies and critical and cultural theory, fields that are now being positioned as ideologically problematic. Recent data indicates that 820 pure humanities jobs and 240 arts jobs were cut, with all but 110 of the total losses in the sector occurring in such non-Oxbridge and non-Russell Group universities.

So perhaps space piracy in action isn't - as you do indeed indicate it isn't - only about getting onto the vessel and questioning its destination, ownership and design. It is also about asking who gets the resources, time and institutional capacity to imagine and build other vessels - and other spaces, and other Earths - in the first place.

That's where the idea of pirate philosophy or pirate space art becomes particularly interesting. It isn't simply about resisting the existing system. It's about experimenting with the conditions under which different systems, and therefore different futures, can become possible.

Best, Gary