Book of Anonymity
2021Typology category
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Experimental aspects:
The Book of Anonymity is written in the tradition of author-less texts. Editing and contributing anonymously constitute experiments in anonymity that speak to the aggressive valuation regimes shaping contemporary artistic and academic knowledge productions alike. This is not to discount the usefulness of attribution, but to trouble the ease with which labour is still dissected, measured and attached to the nexus of person, value and knowledge. To name, one contribution insists is to “define people, things, as individuals, to mark them, hold them, hierarchize them, to press them into service and turn them into value.” Another contribution advocates and questions if an ethics of anonymity can engender the kind of care that individualised practices arguably strive for yet undermine. Not all contributions speak to such concerns directly but all consider what is at stake in the im/possibilities of anonymous expression, at a time of thick digital traces. Editing and contributing anonymously thus is a practical commitment to one of the red threads that criss-cross the kaleidoscopic accounts presented in this book.