What are the queer processes of printing? My immediate response to this open question draws its inspiration from Gilbert Simondon’s idea of technical object. A technical object individuates itself from the milieu by forming a feedback loop in which it conditions and is conditioned by the milieu. In other words, think of a smartphone adjusting its screen brightness based on ambient light conditions, where it not only responds to but also conditions the user's interaction with the device in different environments. This notion of individuation is fundamentally different from the neoliberal consumerist notion of individualism in that the individuation of a technical object is a permeable process, wide open to its milieu.
This dialectic is present in every technological good around us; this MacBook, for instance, is a technical object with the open possibility to interact in many different ways with its surroundings, to be even hacked and misused against the product policy of Apple, while Apple, as a capitalist corporation, conceals this potentiality in this sleek and thin aluminum box, with its parts glued together thus making it impossible to repair or modify, in its business plan supported by the planned obsolescence of its older products, in line with their branding of a world-leading IT corporation that sells beautiful products for creative havermelk-elite professionals.
What I mean by a queer practice in relation to the idea of a technical object is to attend to its open technical capacity, resisting its reduction to mere commodities by concealing its open technical capacities and social relations, what Marx referred to as commodity fetishism. For example, hormone replacement therapy for a transgender person is a process of attending to the technical capacity of one’s body, openly exploring what their hormonal receptors can do in response to its milieu, similar to how the work of a carpenter is not a “mastery” of “his” craft but a mutual process also informed by the properties of the wood. Therefore, my understanding of queer technology is far from identity politics, an unmediated reduction of politics as an open process to mere representation.
I’m very interested in riso printing precisely in relation to its open technical capacity. Risograph is essentially an automated screen printing, or mimeograph that was widely used as the daily copy technology in the 90s but rendered obsolete by digital copy machines. It was only later that artists and autonomous publishers brought attention to the technical capacity of the risograph, suitable for artistic publishing due to its brilliant colors, incredible affordability and relative promptness for small-to-medium-scale production. The low-tech nature of the risograph allowed people to refurbish these several-decade-old untimely machines formerly used in schools and churches, clean their drums, mix ink, and make Facebook communities, facilitating the emergence of a radical DIY maintenance culture. The risograph has thus become an important medium for queer publishing culture and the cultural and economic ecosystem of zines.
However, on the other side of the dialectic, there’s commodity fetishism that reduces the aforementioned political and economic processes into a mere consumerist preference of “Oh, I like its colors.” This is also why I’m not so excited about the brand-new A2 Riso duplicators that cost tens of thousands of euros as a political concept, even though I wouldn’t mind at all if you could donate one for us. The fetishization of riso print, for instance, the abundance of redundantly stylized riso-printed posters disguised as collectors’ items with edition numbers, diverts our attention away from its social relations, collective labors and queer technical capacities to its fictitious value. I speculate that the day we will see a beautifully framed riso print in an American suburban house for a white, Christian, cis-hetero nuclear family, which I thankfully haven't seen yet, will be the sign that the queer potentiality of this technology is completely alienated.
I would like to make it clear that my point is not at all about antagonizing one mode of using the risograph against another. In fact, as a queer publishing collective in an uncaring neoliberal society, we attend to both sides of this dialectic. This means we are also often worried about “the nice color” or whether the zine will sell. My interest is in sketching what queer movements are possible in this context. One important potentiality I see, for instance, is when the queer constellation of the technology stretches out globally, opening up economies with different paradigms in various peripheries of the world. While the official manufacturer of riso duplicators has discontinued the replacement parts and consumables for older models, many small businesses in China produce compatible replicas of these parts, distributing them through AliExpress, with a completely different understanding of intellectual property rights and patents. I am not interested in romanticizing their labor or exoticizing their relationship with technology. However, my question remains largely unexplored: Can we speculate about the possibility of a broad alliance or unionization among these diverse peripheries of the global economy, between a queer publishing collective in Belgium and the manufacturers of unofficial riso supplies in China?
Lecture text by Noam Youngrak Son
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