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Abstract
This article proposes Ullapoolism, a post-data, activist, autoethnographic epistemology for contemporary book culture studies. It begins by addressing the challenges of contemporaneity and multidisciplinarity in researching the creation, circulation and use of books. We identify a rigidity that limits existing theoretical frameworks for the study of book cultures, and a paucity in existing research modes – including those from literary sociology, the digital humanities and cultural analytics – that collect, count and model book cultures. Our alternative epistemology, Ullapoolism, draws on two modes of action developed by the Situationist International – détournements, mischievous re-inscriptions of existing cultural artefacts; and dérives, active drifts through space attuned to emotion – and addresses potential predicaments including recuperation and entanglement. The situated knowledge produced through this epistemology has practical applications. Fields are not neutral, and as mischief-making activists, we use creative critique and playful experimentalism to oppose structural inequity. Ullapoolism therefore offers a future programme for both cultural analysis and scholarly activism.
disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1 Debord, “Theory of the Dérive” 65; Stevenson. The authors would like to acknowledge funding support contributing to this article from Australian Research Council Discovery Project Grant DP170103192, the Macgeorge Bequest, the Faculty of Arts, University of Melbourne and the Division of Literature and Languages, University of Stirling, in addition to intellectual support from the Styrofoam head of Michèle Bernstein.
2 Ullapoolism is named for Ullapool, Scotland, the site of some of our early fieldwork. For more details, see <https://ullapoolism.wordpress.com/>.
3 See, for example, Murray, The Adaptation Industry.
4 We have explored the limitations of the Frankfurt School through our custom tote bag, FFS, which we debuted at the Frankfurt Book Fair in 2017. See <https://ullapoolism.wordpress.com/2017/10/26/frank-furt-school/>; Driscoll, “Take Bookish Action.”
5 Hence, a sociology of literature, for which, see Griswold, “Recent Moves”; English; Franssen and Kuipers.
6 See, for example, Squires, Marketing Literature 72–74; Underwood.
7 The satirical twitter account @RobotDarnton does both these, by making the statements and questions “How will the _____ change the future of publishing?” and “The history of ______ is the future of the book.”
8 Inspired by Simon Eliot’s work on continuity and change in the publishing industry, we have coined the phrase “the continuity change okey cokey” to describe debates about how much of each quality is observable in the present.
9 See, for example, Da; Liu; Fiormonte; Grusin; Kirschenbaum; Klein in the bibliography.
10 Named after the chocolate biscuit machine in “The Mouse Mill” episode of the children’s TV series Bagpuss <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UY_ehvuWt7E>.
11 Frow is, in this quote, writing about “high culture”; Bennett, Carter, and Brennan 149 suggest this description could also apply to Literature (which we consider to be one form within contemporary book cultures).
12 Examples of scholars using Bourdieu’s model to study book cultures include McDonald; English; Thompson; Sapiro; Casanova.
13 For general and academic accounts, see articles by Dery; Eagles; Elias; Klein; Kurczynski; Lasn; Sandlin and Callahan; Wark.
14 See discussion in articles by Eagles; Kurczynski; Wark.
15 For feminist acts of détournement, see Harris; as well as Kuni (including work on the Guerrilla Girls); for antiglobalisation uses, see Barnard 119.
16 See work by Coverley; Self; Smith.
17 See, for example, Squiscoll.
18 See Squires, “Taste and/or Big Data”; Driscoll and Squires, “Oh Look, a Ferry.”
19 See (again) Ramdarshan Bold; Brook, O’Brien, and Taylor; Saha; and on the racialised bias of algorithms, Noble.
20 See Casanova; Brouillette.
21 For inspiration, see Stupart’s spell to bind all male conference panels.
22 See McGrath.
23 Our Top 11 slogans are: DIRECT ACTION, SIDEWAYS THINKING; GAME-INSPIRED NOT GAMIFIED; MINGLE MORE AT BOOK EVENTS; RAPIDISM, AMATEURISM, EPISTEMOLOGICALISM!; NO INSIGHT WITHOUT INSIDE, NO INSIDE WITHOUT OUTSIDE; WARNING: NOT EVERYTHING IS A GAME; SENSE THINK DO REPEAT; BENEATH THE BOOK, THE CARNIVAL; BOOKS ARE BUILT ON RUBBLE; THE SALON IS EVERYWHERE; CONSCIOUSLY LIBERATE DATA!
24 See, for example, discussion by Larson and Lizardo of the commodification of Che Guevara’s image, and Plant’s of the twentieth anniversary of May 1968 (Most Radical Gesture 104–05).
25 Mary Poppins sings that “In every job that must be done, there is an element of fun,” resulting in making the “job” a “game.” While she might therefore be seen to be supporting a neoliberal playfulising of work, her version of play crucially involves actual magic and, as argued by Levin specifically with regard to the Disney adaptation, oppose in addition to standard employment processes, the patriarchy, establishment values, colonialism and the world of finance (117).
26 For scholarship on work and its cultural representations in a deindustrial age, see Brouillette; Bernes; and the Post45 issue edited by McClanahan on “Deindustrialization and the New Cultures of Work.”
27 A question asked by Padmini Ray Murray at the 2018 annual conference of the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing.
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