What is your working title of your book?
The Production of Subjectivity: Conversations with Michael Hardt
Michael Hardt with Leonard Schwartz
Transcribed by Holly Melgard
Where did the idea come from for the book?
Andy Fitch and Leonard Schwartz first suggested it.
What genre does your book fall under?
Poetics, Poetry, Philosophy, Translation, Aesthetics, Politics, History, Fiction, Non-Fiction, Creative Non-Fiction, Fiction, Labor, Transcription, etc.
Which actors would you choose to play your characters in a movie rendition?
All the elves, extras and set crew from the movie Elf, plus the main characters Buddy (Will Ferrell) and his biological father (James Caan), but minus Zooey Deschanel, Santa and the rest of the characters with lines.
What else about your book might pique the reader’s interest?
I transcribed the three interviews and wrote the introduction for the book version.
Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?
It’s an eBook/chapbook just published this last week by The Conversant and available for free download on their site (http://theconversant.org/?p=3377)
I have a question: If the book was published during the time of your question since I was tagged, does the passing tense of the question a perk of the simultaneous internet-time-space-artifice, or an inquiry about my next-next book?
How long did it take you to write the first draft of your manuscript?
Well, the project as a whole occurred over the course of 7 years, but that’s not exactly how long it took to produce the written manuscript.
The interviews were first recorded for the show Cross Cultural Poetics in 2006, 2007 and 2012, broadcasted on KAOS Radio 89.3 in Olympia, WA, and also posted on Pennsound. Episode #112 is 53 minutes and 38 seconds, episode #134 is 43 minutes and 42 seconds, and episode #134 is 57 minutes and 50 seconds, but that doesn’t include the length of time for each distribution format in sound. Conducted over the phone, recorded in the studio, broadcasted on the radio, and hosted online, the total time in sound is quadrupled, making it more like 10 hours, 20 minutes, and 40 seconds, but that doesn’t include the accumulated time spent by the multiple producers in sound (interviewer, interviewee, show producers, radio producers, web editors, etc). Not including air-time time of the interviews on personal radios and home computers, or my playback time at regular speed or in slowed down while transcribing, but including the time of each producer in sound, that multiplies it by at least 10, which would mean it took more like 4 days, 7 hours, 26 minutes, and 40 seconds, but that doesn’t include the editing time of each sound-producer, which I can’t estimate because I wasn’t there.
Transcribing the three interviews, writing the introduction, regularizing, copy-editing, proofing, emailing, publishing incremental parts, and now describing it here in the interview at hand (also part of the packaging end of production), I maybe spent around 150 hours on it (not including now?). But including time spent by all producers of the written text makes this figure much larger.
The first interview was published in the Rain Taxi Review of Books summer, 2007 issue, the second was published in the Interval(le)s’ Fall 2008/Winter 2009 issue (II.2-III.1), both were republished by The Conversant who also put out the third interview this year, and then just re- released all three with an new introduction as one packaged book. I can’t account for the other producers (Leonard Schwartz, Michael Hardt, Andy Fitch, Cristiana Baik, John Cotner, and other editors, copyeditors, layout editors, web editors, etc at Rain Taxi, Interval(le)s, and the Conversant; and the unnamed printers, binders, ink and paper manufacturers, webhosts, web designers, etc), or the overall time they spent editing (omitting redundancies, re-punctuating, regularizing, citing, fact checking, copyediting, proofing, emailing, following cc’d email threads, repeating this process for various publishing occasions, etc), but I imagine the combined amount has been substantial. Quantifying the total time it took to the write the manuscript on the production end of the scale, which if it includes me also includes many more, maybe a ballpark estimate might be more like 8 or 9 years?
Who or what inspired you to write this book?
Leonard Schwartz asked me to transcribe the first interview back in 2007 when I was attracted to close-reading poetics of oral conversation through transcription, as well as the topics they discussed in the interviews. But through out the process, I was more just inspired by the formal imprinting of time spent: the packaging of attention paid through this genre of transcription. However, in retrospect of the process (domesticating the work for distribution), what drove my curiosity most, beyond their dialogues, was that the process provided me occasions to observe what appeared to be self-concealing labor/laborers constituting the production of subjectivity (in writing).
I’m interested in accounting for what Hardt calls this “the production of subjectivity” (or perhaps “affective labor”). Come to think of it, I’m sure this transcription process has, over the years, played some inspirational role in my dissertating on “Ubiquitous Poetics” (working title).
My tagged writers for next Wednesday are:
All of the above, plus book designers, list serve managers, software designers, computer engineers, meme makers, marketers, spam and spyware authors, terrorists, child pornographers, conspirators, hackers, transcribers, translators, bankers—any and all self-concealing, pervasive writing practitioners alike!
And Chris Sylvester.
