publish the process

Alex J: Hi, Alex. Thank you for agreeing to be in conversation with me tonight and your tomorrow for my blogging project, where I am talking to people that I’m in collaboration with about the nature of our engagements and how that might be of some use to us as human beings, certainly as American human beings, in three days, after our new president is inaugurated.

You and I have good news, which is that we just got four very positive reader’s reports for a Handbook that it looks like we’re going to get to co-edit together on feminist media (studies).

Alex MR: Thank you for including me in this. I love the way that you live, and the way that you publish the process. What I love about collaboration is the way that we’re co-becoming together, creating who we are, and our difference together, in the process of creating something for other people. So we’re not producing as a model of the autonomous subject. What we’re doing is creating a relational self or relational selves that come together through the process. And when other people encounter the text or the objects that result from that, this foregrounds the impact that that process has on them as well and how they become part of it too. It’s just a very honest way of showing how authorship really functions or how creation really happens, because I think that process is always there. It’s just very often hidden.

Alex: I would love you to talk about how that has a political efficacy.

Alex MR: If people are conscious of the impact that being in relation has on them, then they will be ethical in relation to others. Enacting or reperforming the violences that are structurally embedded in a system that’s predicated on the autonomous individual becomes difficult when you are being reminded of your becoming with and dependence on and responsibility to others. When that’s foregrounded, it becomes very difficult to perpetuate that fiction that is all around us. It’s like Levinas thought on the face-to-face encounter: where you look into someone’s face and it has an effect on you where it’s impossible not to see someone’s humanity, and to see their difference, and their vulnerability. That happens when you’re in connection to the process of collaboration. It’s visible and noticeable.

Alex J: Of course, we both think about and use collaboration as a method to make things, as is visible in the still from your recent video, “Let the listener share the frame” (showing soon at transmediale 2025 in Berlin). And so there’s the face-to-face encounter, which defines who we are in a much more realistic way as humans in the world than any autonomous self or selfie. And then there’s something else that happens when that recognition is formative to producing more. I came to you because of your work on collaboration: your book To Become Two¹ was shared with me, first as a very janky PDF, by a graduate student who knew I needed to know about it! I recognized so much in your writing that was so important to me. I reached out. We starting talking … and then … we decided to collaborate!

Alex MR: Your question leads to a discussion about the way that collaboration is a form of organizing. It’s a way of creating networks and connecting different efforts together. Different knowledge sets, different contexts. It creates the opportunity to use the resources, the power in one place in order to make change in another. I spend a lot of time on collaboration or alliances or networks for that reason. I believe in the international, connecting across different times and places. These problems are so wicked. They’re so deep, they’re so wired and big. How do we address that? We have to do it through getting as many people involved as possible.

Alex J: And yet staying small, do you think?

Alex MR: It’s always totally local and these very minor actions do have big effects. I mean, this is a blog post. It’s not going to be published in the New York Times, and yet it really does matter. It has big effects in the world, not because it reaches a mass audience, but because the intimacy of it creates these connections that last and that actually have an impact. They’re not fleeting.

Alex J: It’s so funny, Alex, because we have developed this twin language and a twin process that we will take up to produce our co-edited book with pairs of co-author twins because we’re both Alexes, and we’re both Jews trying to make sense of that in this time, and we’re both lesbian moms, and we’re both media praxis fanatics (albeit from different generations and continents). As often happens between us, you’re ventriloquizing things that I’ve just written during this timebound blogging practice in the interval between election and inauguration, and you haven’t even read it. It’s quite eerie to me because I’ve been thinking about how to credence the unknown and imagined “audiences” of the internet. Here I am, back on my previously dead old blog, and it is a very local and quite familiar practice. There’s such a felt intimacy produced in this kind of “publishing” and I have come to understand that I need this practice right now. Yes, a “selfcare” practice but not by way of bubble baths or shopping. Rather, I am rendering a protocol that allows me to talk to you and a small public in a very serious way. I think that social media has largely unwritten what that kind of publishing means. Now our words are garbage, expendable; they are not meant to hold much weight. And as short as this post is going to be, you can feel already that it’s holding weight, it’s holding space, the space that we produce together, and have ever since we first met on Zoom. All this has had a weight. Or better put: an electric tenderness.

Alex MR: Oh my gosh. I always use the word electric to describe that. I know exactly what you’re talking about. I think about that difference between social media and the blog as being about correspondence. The blog has a really direct genealogy to the early modern Republic of Letters. You would have encounters like we’re having right now—a face-to-face encounter where you feel that electric energy in the here and now of you and me together. Afterwards it becomes written in the Republic of Letters. People would have these encounters and then they would write to each other to continue that conversation, and then they would actually get letters from other people that they had received and enclose those in the same envelope. So it was a way to follow on from my conversation with you, “I actually had this conversation with someone else which relates to that, and I’ve enclosed the letter for you to read.”

And that was a form of publishing. It was a way of passing things around, distribution. And I think of that as a figure for how I like to operate in general: moments of encounter that can be extended over time and space and include people that we didn’t know before in that process, but come to know through the structure of it. And that’s what I meant by that vast network being made up of electric encounters that then connect with each other, but never depart from the tenderness and beauty of the one-on-one encounter or conversation. So it’s always an immersion in two voices/two listeners.

And the other thing that I was thinking of was storytelling. I came to you with this almost naive desire to talk about storytelling, and you were like, “listen, this has just been so commodified. How can you be so naive? You’ve got to think about this.” Then I started thinking about the Instagram story as the ultimate commodity of our times. How it’s a fake. It’s not a real story. It’s the image of a story. It’s being sold and people want to buy it is because that’s what we actually need, the bonds and the connections that come from that in-person inheritance of our past. This is what people are trying to sell, and yet it’s something that cannot be bought and sold: a format, as a tradition, as a way of being together, which is about carrying on knowledge and creating it and sharing it.

Alex J: The platforms rethink and reactivate these human skills, needs, and practices as something that takes almost no effort. So, we need to reclaim the time and the space that we need to tell and receive a story, not as a route to consumerism or brands, but to the other. I’m not against story per se.² I’m against the corporate structuring of something that has taken up every form possible and needed, as many forms as there were different audiences.

I’m going to go off of Instagram and Facebook for a week at the end of this practice because, at least here in the United States, we are going to go dark on Meta© platforms when the new President arrives because oligarchs are supporting his and other’s moves toward fascism and violence. Yes, I write these things on my blog, but then I poorly move them on to social media. But is that “poor” because I don’t get some requisite signal of likes, shares, or followers? I dunno.

 

I anticipate the end of this project being in that darkness, which is a different kind of light, one that forces me to use letters, Zoom, and this old blog to better listen to stories, friends, collaborators, and twins with an attention to and awareness of the other, and to make, publish, and read only as much as we need and can carry.

1. Alex Martinis Roe, To Become Two: Propositions for Feminist Collective Practice, Archive Books, Berlin, 2018. ↩︎
2. We are referring to my work with Alisa Lebow and others in response to our “Beyond Story Manifesto,” and related special issue of World Records, V. 5: https://worldrecordsjournal.org/category/volume-5/. ↩︎