Simon Morris invited to lecture and create a workshop at Publishing as Performance Symposium, convened by PhDArts, Royal Academy of Art (KABK), Prinsessegracht 4, 2514 AN The Hague, The Netherlands, Friday 25^th April 2014.

“No signification can be sustained other than by reference to another signification.”

..qu’il n’est aucune signification qui se soutienne sinon du renvoi à une autre signification“

Lacan, Jacques. Écrits. A Selection. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: W.W. Norton, 1977.126, 150

The symposium Publishing as Performance will examine the role of artist/authors engaged in new forms of publishing practices through the notion of the performative. The increasingly autonomous means of publishing (web and print) has expanded the forms and formats of publishing, re-defining the relationship of publishing to dissemination, and in turn of authorship to creative reproduction. The identity of the artist/ author is interrogated through emergent forms of publishing that considers appropriation, citation, re-distribution, and reinterpretation as tactics to resist and re-invent modes of circulation and distribution of the text.

The performative is an interdisciplinary manner of considering the dissemination of text, its agency and movement through the world, its ability to draw attention to itself. The concept of performitivity will be taken up as a transformative force that concerns an emergent identity, a coming into being, its instantaneous and eventual outreach. The text will be examined through the thrust of its dissemination, how it is kept alive through its own performativity, as a temporal process, unfinished, that produces new meanings at each junction of its reception.

“Il n’y a pas de première insémination ni d’origine singulière : le commencement est déjà dissémination, avant laquelle il n’y a rien.” Jacques Derrida

Publishing as Performance conceptualizes the act of publishing as the global act of making a text public; how acts of exposure and circulation are creatively conceived of. The notion of publishing is not limited here to the traditional print on bound paper form. A multiplicity of emergent forms of publishing will be examined.

Through widening and experimenting with emergent forms of publishing, the notion of intertextuality is further explored. Inter-textuality refers to a key element in Derridean thought, namely that a text generates meaning through its differentiating power from other texts. In other words, the meaning of a publication may be grasped through its interplay of multiple sources, formats, and networks that it is a part of Publishing as Performance Symposium further pushes the notion of inter-textuality through an interdisciplinary transposition. The symposium will examine how a text undergoes an interdisciplinary transposition across diverse disciplinary frames; from performance to book form to journalism to poem to document. Within this exercise of transposition across disciplines, the notions of origin and author enter into scrutiny. The symposium engages in new forms of research that examine, through the performative, how identity and authorship are manifested in relation to established networks of dissemination. The concept of the individual, the artist’s voice, is proposed as a potential challenge to institutional power and knowledge distribution, a voice that continually re-inserts and re-positions itself in relation to the politics of authorship and recognition.