The book as a performance

The book bears the weight of the codex that has crossed empires, religions, and revolutions, but each time it opens, it stops being a monument and becomes an active instrument. Between hands and eyes, it organizes rhythms, distributes pauses, and demands movements: reading, more than a simple act of deciphering signs, is a performative practice where matter, language, and attention come together.

The British artist Fiona Banner approached this concept in a radical way with The Nam (1997). Published by her own imprint, The Vanity Press, the book compiles over a thousand continuous pages transcribing six war films — Apocalypse Now, The Deer Hunter, Platoon, Full Metal Jacket, Hamburger Hill, and Born on the Fourth of July. Banner replaces the cinematic image with a relentless verbal stream without punctuation or narrative structure. The result is a tiring flow that makes reading a test of physical endurance. The large block of pages acts as a portable sculpture that requires both eye and muscle effort. Reading The Nam resembles an endurance performance, a concept Marina Abramović explored by pushing the body through extended durations and repetitions to its limits. Like Abramović’s performances, time and effort here become material: Banner turns the book into a temporal and spatial installation where cinema, sculpture, and the reader come together.

Ed Ruscha had already suggested, in Every Building on the Sunset Strip (1966), a folded paper route, experienced as if it were an urban walk compressed into a photographic sequence. Dieter Roth pushed this idea further by incorporating food into books: Literaturwurst (1961) turned existing works into meat sausages; other volumes included chocolate, cheese, or spices, breaking down over time. Decay became a creative force: each copy existed as a changing organism, more like ephemeral sculpture or dissolving choreography than a stable archive. Hanne Darboven, in turn, created an archive of duration in Kulturgeschichte 1880–1983 (1980–83), where thousands of pages repeat dates and arithmetic formulas, forming a visual and sonic score in which reading becomes a heartbeat.

Literary theory has offered frameworks to understand this performative vitality. Roland Barthes, in The Pleasure of the Text (1973), described reading as sensorial friction: rhythm and pauses function like caresses and jolts flowing through the reader. Jerome McGann, in The Textual Condition (1991), demonstrated how typography, pagination, paper, and circulation influence the material staging of any edition. Johanna Drucker, in The Century of Artists’ Books (1995), broadened this view, depicting artists’ books as graphic choreographies where each page turn is a gesture on a paper stage. These insights converge on the idea that the book both conveys meanings and activates bodies, times, and spaces within an editorial scene.

To see the digital as a static archive and the analogue as a performative body is to subscribe to a binary view that diminishes the vitality of both. Recent studies demonstrate the opposite. The Experimental Book Object (Sjöberg, Keskinen & Karhumaa, 2023) showcases a series of cases where publishing is seen as a hybrid ecology, with print layered with digital elements that enhance the reading experience. Similarly, Materiality and the Digital World (De Cunzo & Roeber, 2022) examines digital inscription as a physical process, influenced by the wear of magnetic supports and technological changes, challenging the notion of immateriality. Martin Paul Eve, in Theses on the Metaphors of Digital-Textual History (2024), explains how the terminology used to describe the digital—virtual pages, cloud archives, margins, or blank spaces—carries performative grammar inherited from print rather than a logic of transparency. And Micha Cárdenas, in Poetic Operations (2022), reveals how digital artistic practices, intertwined with body and identity, intensify textual performativity by incorporating political and emotional layers. The digital, then, does not negate the performative; it redefines it in new ways, adding glitch, obsolescence, and overload. Analogue and digital do not oppose each other; they enhance one another.

Yet if Roth left pages to degrade in sausages and Banner pushed readers to exhaustion, contemporary editorial logic often does the opposite: it sanitizes, accelerates, and optimizes. Digital platforms promise immortal books, endlessly replicable and free of failure traces. Algorithms guide the flow of eyes like invisible metronomes, domesticated rhythms of reading. Where once editorial effort exposed the body to wear, digital publishing now tends to hide effort, turning the reader into statistical flow and transforming pages into data. The future of the performative book might lie precisely there: not in the clean immortality of code, but in embracing error, resisting time, and cloaking gestures that escape calculation—both on paper and on screen.

In this logic, the interval takes on a crucial role. Each margin, fold, or pause controls the rhythm of reading and builds anticipation of continuity. It is in this moment that the text gains momentum, when body and meaning align to move forward. To view the book as a performance means recognizing that it shares the principles of theatre, including a sequence of gestures and a staging in time. The difference lies in how the book evokes the scene with each reading, without a collective audience, but with a personal and repeatable intensity. Editorial performativity, therefore, is not judged by spectacle but by activating a sense of time that engages the reader with each page, countering the logic of sanitization, against algorithmic statistics, favoring a book that is consumed, worn, and reappears as a fertile remnant.

Fragility as Editorial Force

Fragility is not a flaw but a characteristic of publishing. Every book contains the potential for its own decay: pages that tear, covers that come loose, prints that fade. This physical vulnerability embeds time into the work itself, turning reading into an act that involves risk of loss. The book, rather than being a fixed monument, is a body vulnerable to deterioration.

Experimental editorial practices have heightened this aspect. Dieter Roth, by integrating food into his books, embraced decomposition as an aesthetic force. Other artists examined wear as a form of language, transforming fragility into creative strength. Each fold, stain, or material imperfection becomes an inscription of a specific moment, a trace of instability as form.

In academic fields as well, fragility has been seen as a productive state. Walter Benjamin, reflecting on the aura of the artwork, recognized the uniqueness that exhausts itself through repetition. Jacques Derrida viewed in différance the fundamental instability of writing. Fragility here is not a lack of strength but a promise of change, an interval that creates room for new interpretations.

This condition extends into the digital realm. Yuk Hui, in On the Existence of Digital Objects (2016), shows that digital existence always relies on technical infrastructures and social contexts, making it vulnerable to obsolescence, hardware failures, or protocol changes. Lisa Gitelman, in Paper Knowledge (2014), points out that no medium is neutral: whether paper or digital files, every inscription is contingent and susceptible to collapse. Wendy Chun, in Programmed Visions (2011), illustrates how the digital is maintained by volatile memories that require constant reprogramming, exposing a fragility masked by the promise of permanence. And Matthew Fuller and Andrew Goffey, in Evil Media (2012), emphasize that every digital system contains unseen microprocesses, glitches, delays, and corruptions, which are also performance factors. Fragility, therefore, is not exclusive to print; it appears equally in ink stains and corrupted files, in worn paper and outdated servers.

The history of Soviet samizdat clearly illustrates this logic. From the 1950s onward, forbidden texts circulated on carbon-copy sheets, repeatedly typed until the last copies became almost illegible. Each ink smudge and typographic failure, rather than discrediting the message, made it more powerful. The weakening of the medium was transformed into a reinforcement of political urgency. Anna Akhmatova’s Requiem survived because it was memorized and recited by friends, turning bodily memory into a living editor. Varlam Shalamov, in Kolyma Tales, documented the Gulag experience on fragile papers that circulated secretly before reaching readers abroad. In these underground networks, the instability of the medium matched the strength of the testimony: writing and reading became a shared risk.

In the art world, Germano Celant described Arte Povera as a trust in the minimal, the leftover, and the transitory. In the 1960s, artists like Michelangelo Pistoletto and Jannis Kounellis used simple materials — rags, coal, earth — to highlight the tension between the fleeting and the lasting. That idea extended into publishing. Designer and essayist Silvio Lorusso, in What Design Can’t Do (2024), proposed a “design of withdrawal,” where economy of means is seen not as a lack but as a strategic choice. The delicate book, printed in small quantities with simple bindings, rejects the promise of stability: its fragile materiality represents the very possibility of resistance.

Between the worn paper of samizdat, the residues of Arte Povera, and Lorusso’s editorial speculation, a genealogy of publications emerges that does not fear collapse. With every worn copy, with every fading print, another form of vitality is confirmed, rooted in erosion and instability. Publishing recognizes itself as both a method of preservation and a process of transformation. The book that disappears creates memory through its very loss; the one that falls apart into fragments invents a community of readers willing to share the risk of its transmission.

It may be at this point that unstable publishing reveals its deepest reach: an essay of an epistemology in which knowledge circulates through mobility, in constant displacement. Disappearance acts as an operator of reconfiguration. What is preserved is the energy that emerges from transmission between hands, bodies, and heterogeneous times, rather than an immutable integrity of the work.

Orality, Body, and Failure

Reading is always an unstable exercise. The body adjusts without rest: it bends, contracts, shifts position to respond to the weight of the volume, the density of the images, and the oscillation of the light. Reading unfolds in a continuum of adaptations where vision, touch, inner hearing, and memory intertwine simultaneously.

Vision guides the gaze across the page, but this gaze acts like touch from afar. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, in Phenomenology of Perception (1945), described vision as a form of mediated touch. The reader confirms this at every line: the eyes move across the words like fingers exploring a surface. Bruno Munari made this idea clear in Libri illeggibili, started in 1949. Made only of colors, cuts, and textures, they required both a manual and visual reading, creating a dance where pages became objects to be manipulated.

Physical contact extends this idea. Dieter Roth, in the Literaturwurst series (1961) and other experiments with perishable materials, introduced food scraps, chocolate, and spices. The book stopped being untouchable, becoming matter in transformation, changed by the act of handling. What might seem like deterioration revealed itself as potential: the work came alive through rotting, fingers sticking to pages, and the smell released by decaying paper.

Yet reading is not fulfilled only through the visible or tangible. Paul Zumthor, in La lettre et la voix (1987), explained how every text holds resonance, even when read silently. The voice remains hidden, ready to burst into the reader’s mind. Roland Barthes, in The Grain of the Voice (1972), called the “grain” the sonic texture running through words, more physical than semantic, closer to breath than to sign. Alison Knowles, associated with Fluxus, embodied that vibration in The Big Book (1967): a two-meter-high book that one crossed with the body. Each step made the hinges creak, each turn produced echoes and friction. Reading became a form of displacement, and the text no longer just stood before the eyes but enveloped the inhabited space.

The digital redefines this sonic and bodily realm. Jonathan Sterne, in MP3: The Meaning of a Format (2012), demonstrated that audio compression works by removing frequencies considered secondary, shaping listening through technical standards. Alexander Galloway, in The Interface Effect (2012), examined how interfaces control vocal experience by filtering and normalizing sounds. Voice recognition software, automatic subtitles, and digital assistants turn failures into processed data, but also into productive differences: hesitations, glitches, and distortions are not eliminated; instead, they transform into performative material. Digital orality thus becomes a space of experimentation where voice, error, and technique intersect.

Memory introduces another layer of instability. To read is to recall voices, to fill gaps with memories, to let a lapse reveal just as much as the printed word. Georges Bataille, in Inner Experience (1943), saw language as an entry to limit-states—zones where experience intensifies by touching the edges of the sayable. Kathy Acker, a key figure in New York punk literature born in 1947, explored this territory by creating books like Blood and Guts in High School (1978) or Don Quixote (1986) out of collages, diaries, and fragments borrowed from other authors. Each page became a graft, scar, or textual body exposing the vulnerability of memory and the power of deviation. In the digital world, memory works similarly: caches, file fragments, and overlapping versions act as technical lapses that prolong the vitality of failure.

The entire body participates in this theatre. Reading lying down redistributes effort across arms and shoulders; reading on a bus involves interruptions and jolts; reading rough paper leaves marks on the skin; reading musty volumes summons smell. Reading involves balance, breathing, and muscular resistance. Braille books demonstrate that vision can be replaced and that touch alone is enough to continue the process. Lygia Clark, in her Bichos (1960) and later in the relational objects of the 1970s, affirmed this same idea: works that required direct manipulation, exploration with hands, breathing, and contact with surfaces.

Translated into the editorial realm, this idea enhances the multiple meanings of the book. Pages that tear or creak, covers that resist touch, textures that guide tactile experiences, odors that mark encounters: all of these turn reading into a multisensory event. The reader, more than a simple observer, becomes a performer involved in a system of resistances and stimuli.

Failures multiply and define reading. Dispersed attention interrupts the sentence, body posture yields under the weight of paper, and the recollection of a passage slips away at the instant one tries to recover it. These lapses inscribe a creative dimension: each error opens a space of invention, each stumble generates new forms of connection between text and reader. The book offers zones of opacity, pauses, and discontinuities that sustain its vitality.

By navigating these hesitations, the reader prepares for another kind of noise — the one that surfaces when text moves across languages and digital systems. Just as the body’s failure reshapes reading, so too does translation, when faced with repetitions and shifts, produce productive distortions. The tension between remembering and forgetting anticipates the glitch-like space that will emerge in the next chapter, where linguistic failure becomes a tool for reinvention.

Iterative Translation and Editorial Glitch

To translate means to expose a text to its vulnerability. Each passage from one language to another shifts sounds, changes rhythms, and distorts images. The translator does not carry meanings unchanged: they produce deviations and excesses that reveal unexpected layers. Walter Benjamin, in The Task of the Translator (1923), described translation as survival — the text extends itself into a new language, deformed and renewed — the original lives in transformation.

Vilém Flusser embodied this destiny in a radical way. As a Czech Jew exiled in Brazil, he wrote in German, Portuguese, and later in English, never fully feeling at home in a single language. In Kommunikologie (1996), he describes communication as a realm filled with noise, where every message is inherently a translation. His fragmented, abrupt writing style not only illustrates this idea but also demonstrates how difficult it is to fix an identity within one language. For Flusser, living meant constantly translating oneself and embracing oscillation as a fundamental part of thought.

The concept of failure has expanded into digital culture. Rosa Menkman, in The Glitch Moment(um)(2011), demonstrated how transmission errors — such as distorted images, corrupted pixels, or sudden interruptions — can become aesthetic elements. The glitch, far from being an accident, represents a productive act, capable of creating spaces for innovation. When used in translation, it acts as an editorial method: subjecting the text to a series of automatic transpositions, allowing it to experience twists until it transforms into something unexpected. Failure becomes a source of creativity, a way of thinking through deformation itself.

Emily Apter, in Against World Literature (2013), emphasizes this idea by rejecting the false transparency of a universal translation. For Apter, each translation is a site of conflict, where cultural and political asymmetries that influence textual circulation are exposed. Franco Berardi, in The Uprising (2012), further explains that contemporary language, saturated by digital capitalism, appears as an overloaded mass, where linguistic glitches create space for resistance and invention. Additionally, Martin Paul Eve, in Theses on the Metaphors of Digital-Textual History (2024), demonstrates how digital metaphors have inherited the grammar of print, creating illusions of equivalence that the very act of translating turns into layers of noise.

One possible exercise is to put _Infinite Jest_, by David Foster Wallace, through a series of automatic translations: from English to Chinese, then Arabic, then Portuguese, and back to English. The result wouldn’t be the original, but a fragile hybrid. Fragmented syntax, broken metaphors, new images appearing from the chaos. Reading this “over-translated book” would be like witnessing an editorial act where the text rewrites itself through failure.

Printed precedents of this approach exist. Raymond Queneau, in Cent Mille Milliards de Poèmes (1961), arranged combinatory verses that enable infinite readings, as if each recombination were an internal translation. Caroline Bergvall, in Drift (2014), worked on fragments of the Anglo-Saxon poem The Seafarer, blending archaic English, modern languages, and graphic distortions until the text became illegible and new at the same time. Other artists explored material glitches: prints where matrices fall out of alignment, risograph books that produce smudges, overlays, and colors in false registration. Technical failure thus enters the page and leaves a physical mark of instability.

The practice of iterative translation thus treats publishing as a form of performance: something that should ensure the stability of meaning becomes a testing ground for mutations. The fluctuation between versions reminds us that in the digital realm, knowledge constantly shifts. Each file moves through networks, gathering compression and transfer noise, creating multiple versions that do not match each other exactly. Just as the reader, in the previous chapter, faces gaps in memory and physical missteps, the translated text shows that all knowledge is made up of imperfections that are spread out with each transmission.

Glitch-translation thus reveals an epistemological condition unique to the present: knowledge that is fragmented, each part simultaneously flawed and productive. This shift sets the stage for the next reflection, where illegibility stands as an active source of meaning, reminding us that every book contains areas that resist reading.

Mirror, Reverse, and Illegibility

The book can return to the reader their own image in negative. The printed surface does not merely show; sometimes, it requires a shift, a tilt, or an extra step for something to be revealed. The mirror plays a crucial role here. In Through the Looking-Glass (1871), Lewis Carroll guides Alice through the reflective barrier of the room, creating an inverted space where words appear backwards, like in the poem Jabberwocky. Reading isn’t instant: it needs the mediation of reflection and the reader’s physical stance before the page. The text exists, but its presence is subtle, accessible only to those who embrace the inversion of the gaze.

This operation appears again in Jorge Luis Borges, who transformed the mirror into a symbol of endless duplication. The reflection does not return the same, but opens the abyss of infinite multiplication, as if identity dissolves into copies. When this idea is applied to the publishing world, we see that a book can act as a surface that resists transparency: its meaning does not reveal itself immediately. Instead, it relies on external tools and the reader’s willingness to navigate zones of uncertainty.

Editorial experiments of our era have heightened the tension between the visible and the hidden. In SVK – Secret Visual Knowledge (2011), Warren Ellis and D’Israeli, working with the London agency Berg, created a graphic novel where part of the story was printed in invisible ink. Only ultraviolet light, included with the book, revealed the characters’ inner voices and secret comments. The physical format thus created a dramaturgy of surveillance: the reader, by using a flashlight, became part of the story. A few years later, Jordan Crane, in Keep Our Secrets (2012), used thermochromic ink: images and text appeared only when warmed, requiring skin contact to read. The Constellation Swatch Book continued this approach, printing stars invisible until exposed to ultraviolet light. In these examples, reading was no longer just about decoding images; it became an unpredictable experience, relying on specific material and bodily conditions.

These works do not merely celebrate graphic ingenuity; they reveal the fragile nature of the act of reading. The mirror reflects imperfect inversions, thermochromic ink reacts irregularly, ultraviolet light requires darkness to function, and even then, it leaves gaps. Reading is never fully completed, only approached in fragments. This partial impossibility is not a failure: it defines the experience itself.

Illegibility, in this sense, must be understood as an epistemological category. Every book has areas that are inaccessible: meanings that remain unactualized, passages the reader cannot decipher, layers lost over time. The illusion of total clarity is fiction. The mirror, heat, or light only dramatize this fundamental truth: to read is to face the intransmissible reserve that every text contains.

The digital realm extends this same logic. Geert Lovink, in Sad by Design (2019), explains how informational overload makes reading a saturated experience, where illegibility results from excess rather than absence. Hito Steyerl, in Duty-Free Art (2017), demonstrates how digital opacity can serve as a political resource: pixelated images, encrypted archives, and hidden documents create zones of inaccessibility that protect against the totalitarian gaze of platforms. Digital illegibility thus emerges as a critical reserve, a form of resistance against the demand for transparency.

The power of the book does not lie only in what it reveals, but also in what it withholds. Between the lines, in the shadows of the margin, in the fold that hides, a space of opacity exists. This space reminds us that knowledge is built as much through what is transparent as through what is at the edge, in the gap, in what cannot be fully understood. The performative book finds strength there: to turn unreadable parts into shared experience, to transform the challenge of reading into a form of thought.

The challenge that arises is both editorial and philosophical: how to create books that see this reserve of opacity not as a barrier to overcome, but as a creative space to explore? It is in this realm, between the readable and the obscure, that publishing can rediscover its most radical dimension.

Forbidden and Clandestine Publications

The book gains political significance when it crosses hostile terrains. For every regime of censorship, there is a change in how it circulates, and reading becomes a risky activity. A clandestine volume is not just a container for words; it is a body on the move, vulnerable to loss, shaped by secrecy and the trust between those in on the secret. Its physical form bears the mark of danger: pages hidden under clothes, disguised covers, margins that serve as hiding spots for signals of passage.

The trajectory of Ulysses by James Joyce, published in 1922, reveals this paradox. Declared obscene in the United States and the United Kingdom, it persisted for over a decade in copies smuggled from Paris, hidden in suitcases, and subject to border seizures. The editions from the Shakespeare and Company bookstore, printed by Sylvia Beach, became fragile talismans, carrying not only literary significance but also the mark of danger. Each reading was more than just deciphering: it placed the reader in a theater of risk, where opening the volume equaled transgression.

The underground had already been explored by the Marquis de Sade, whose texts circulated in manuscript copies, kept in drawers or furtively passed in prisons. The first printed editions, produced in anonymous workshops, resembled anonymous bodies, exposed to the constant threat of destruction. The erotic and political violence of these writings demanded precisely that unstable condition: the book emerged as a shadow, surviving intermittently, dependent on the courage of those who preserved it.

In the Soviet Union, the practice of samizdat systematically shaped this vulnerability. Repeated copying of carbon copies caused cumulative wear: with each new generation, the letters lost clarity, and it was in this visual deterioration that the message’s urgency grew. Anna Akhmatova’s poem Requiem survived only in the recited memory of friends, who guarded it as if it were a talisman hidden within the body. Varlam Shalamov, in writing Kolyma Tales, based on his experience of the Gulag, turned the fragile nature of paper into a testimony of survival. In samizdat, instability was not an accident but a feature: publishing involved an inherent risk, as a form of material politics.

The Iberian dictatorships employed various concealment strategies. In Portugal, under the Estado Novo, books by Marx, Trotsky, or Althusser were produced in makeshift printshops, wrapped in innocent-looking covers to evade the watchful eyes of PIDE. In Spain, after the Civil War, republican copies were hidden in attics or disguised within everyday packaging. Here, the book transformed from a vessel of memory into a secret code: an object understood only through the silent agreement between giver and receiver.

Currently, clandestinity takes on new forms in digital space. Encrypted archives, decentralized repositories, and sharing networks like Library Genesis, Sci-Hub, or Z-Library expand the legacy of samizdat. Files that delete themselves, links that disappear, platforms that reappear under new names: circulation has become a constantly changing landscape. The digital does not remove risk; it shifts it. What was once hidden in suitcases is now concealed in anonymous servers, vulnerable to interdiction and collapse. Technical failures — broken links, outdated formats, interrupted access — become the modern equivalent of a charred page or worn paper.

Gary Hall, in Pirate Philosophy (2016), described this practice as a gesture that reimagines the sharing of knowledge by breaking intellectual property laws. Marcell Mars and Tomislav Medak, in the Public Library project, suggested an editorial ecology where every reader acts as a librarian, expanding collections outside traditional institutions. Sites like Monoskop and AAAARG exemplify this digital precariousness: servers that change addresses, files that vanish, access that is interrupted. Digital clandestinity thrives on this constant fluctuation, turning instability into a strategy for survival.

The artistic field has adopted this logic in editorial experimentation. The most notable example is The Piracy Project(Andrea Francke & Eva Weinmayr), started in 2011, which gathers more than 150 pirated, appropriated, and remade books. The project began with an open call and continues to accept contributions from authors, artists, and collectives who copied, altered, or remixed existing publications. The collection circulates in traveling reading rooms where the public can physically handle the books and engage in discussions about authorship, copying, and reproduction rights. In events like “A Day at the Courtroom,” lawyers from different jurisdictions debated with the audience whether each copy should be considered legitimate or illegal, highlighting the fluid boundaries between transformative copy and infringement.

Francke and Weinmayr also conducted fieldwork in piracy markets in China and Turkey, talking with vendors, collecting materials, and analyzing how these parallel networks respond to inequalities in access to knowledge. The research resulted in an online catalog with covers and explanatory notes for each copy, but without digitizing the books, emphasizing that the PDF cannot replace the materiality of the pirated copy. The project highlights the dual movement that characterizes modern piracy: it democratizes access and increases circulation, but relies on fragile and often corporate infrastructures, such as print-on-demand services (Amazon, Lulu, Blurb).

Clandestine publishing presents itself, in this context, as the social design of failure. It is not merely vulnerable: it organizes its own risk, transforms threat into energy, and converts instability into method. If in previous chapters reading appeared marked by lapses of memory, bodily interruptions, or linguistic distortions, here what emerges is a collective disadjustment. Clandestinity becomes a political glitch, not as an accident to be fixed, but as a productive fissure in the regime of circulation of knowledge.

The book, whether it lingers in shadow or redefines itself through piracy, returns to us a question no censorship can silence: what if its strength lies exactly in what the official world dismisses?