At the second workshop of the New Ways of Reading series at Framer Framed, Amsterdam, this October 2022, we tussled together with the possibility of collective editing. This was a workshop to imagine more experimental forms of online publishing, ones that “expand the room for reflection and collectivity.”¹ Participating in the workshop were writers, editors, researchers, but also those who simply love to share their thoughts through reading and writing. Gathered in front of a drawing board, we mourned the fact that it is increasingly rare for someone to write comments under an online article/review nowadays. The textual, at least in the digital realm, seems to have lost its charm for interaction.

Or has it? What came to mind was Nara Zoyd (1996-98), an early digital artwork created by Dutch media artist Yvonne Le Grand in 1996 on a collaborative filtering community website Firefly.² Le Grand wrote weekly episodes about Nara’s adventures and asked her readers to send in their responses through email. Her later episodes sometimes incorporated stories of people with whom she interacted in the email exchanges. I first encountered Nara Zoyd during my research at the media art platform LIMA, approaching the work primarily from its ‘networked’ register—how one link leads to another, one story turns to a different page. It didn’t occur to me until the workshop that Nara Zoyd’s way of becoming—the threads before their formation into a network—offers an exciting prototype of collaborative editing. An unfulfilled utopian project in the early Internet age.

When we think about collectivity in editorial practices, the first question we tend to ask is how to incorporate/highlight diverse voices in forming the text. We desire for the transparency of the collaborators, the individual nodes in cooperation. Part of why Nara Zoyd created a fascination amongst thousands of fans back then, however, lies in the anonymity of the digi-persona, and by her virtue, the hindering of the participants’ editorial traces. Nara Zoyd is at once the embodiment and effacement of the collective labor at play. When the participants read themselves in her voice on the website, a strand of understanding would be established between the two bodies and two alone. For the other readers, this secret editor would remain anonymous in the shadows. What the anonymous space affords here is the take-off of imagination. It allows one to wonder about other possible ways of composing a text, the unchosen narrative pathways, a different ending.

If the online world — due to its virtuality — brings out this anonymity most effectively, it is certainly not the only realm to do so. The margins of a second-hand book constitute another locus: the shooting arrows, the half-baked thoughts, the big and small mark-pen circles like ripples in the lake of letters. It feels like being close to another person’s world, intimately, carefully, humbly. The absence of the addressee gives them a specific power to guide and orientate us through the text without dominating our interpretation. They occupy a non-intrusive position of ‘being with’ in our reading process.

The same can be said about the role of the translator, the interpreter, the surrogate speaker. Though the rise of Translation Studies as a field in the past ten years concurs with an urgency to bring visibility to this mediating role. It calls on us to challenge the absolute authority of the renowned writer and see his recognition as the cross-patching of numerous translational tongues and distribution networks. Part of me appreciates this move. Another part of me remains hesitant: I wonder if the appeal of the translator’s position is to some extent grounded in her invisibility, this uncomfortable seating in the shadows—the trouble. The condition of precariousness. When thinking about the production of a writing/art piece/project as a collective practice, there is the tendency of romanticizing such collectivity as a perfect, harmonious paradigm. What gets forgotten is the unromantic part of it, the endless re-writing, the chewing over of a phrase, the draft versions. For me, this is always the translator’s space, where she finds struggle and comfort at the same time. No matter how we make the Translator visible, the (other disenfranchised) translator(s) shall always perform their unromantic craft in the shadows.

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Three years ago during my study exchange in New York University, I attended a class on ‘Performing Absence’ at the performance studies department, where we discussed the various techniques of animating the concept of absence. One of the sessions was called ‘Performing Refusal,’ and we were reading Herman Melville’s short story Bartleby, the Scrivener (1853). Famous for his line ‘I prefer not to,’ the story revolves around Bartleby's sudden refusal to work as a scrivener for processing legal documents at a Wall Street firm. Using the office as his shelter, Bartleby was eventually arrested and put in the so-called Dead Letter Office to clear up undeliverable mails. The small writing exercise for us was to “write one of the dead letters that Bartleby might have destroyed.” It is a vulnerable and ruthless task, to create something with the expected fate of destruction.

What came to mind immediately for me was the 1909 The Futurist Manifesto by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti. Canonical in art-historical courses on modernism, Marinetti’s writing struck me with visual richness as much as the militaristic violence and masculinist drive. I decided to devote the exercise to re-wilding the text: I began to imagine its various draft versions, the way Marinetti might have made nervous edits like the invisible reader who writes on the margin. I turned the coherent narratives into stumbling sentences, nuanced the modal verbs, and put out doubts about the order of each individual statement. I became an innocent hacker, untying the seams of an affirmative language.

Of course, this was an impossible exercise, one of the imaginative thrusts that must end at the Dead Letter Office. (Its impossibility does not diminish its value, though. The process of re-writing the script readily made a proposition of how things could turn out otherwise.) What also became clear to me was that as a translator/editor, I can never account for the endless trials of Marinetti—not as a confident writer, but a nervous editor—which was built on endless lines of conversations, encounters, experiences. My incapacity to return to the editorial script indicates something quite mythical and interwoven about the writing that any Reader, Editor, Translator, or Writer could not explain. The artist’s genius is not his own, but a mistaken term of the collective labor at play. To picture a future of collective editing, the metaphor of individual nodes and agents wouldn’t work; one needs the metaphor of water, stems, the wilderness.

In this sense, a level of anonymity and ambiguity is necessary for collective editing to work. Such a statement may strike a dangerous chord for some. For isn’t this anonymity and effacement of labor what the logic of capitalism depends on to function? The consumerist spotlighting on the product works at the cost of the human and non-human efforts that went into its production. It abstracts alienate them into measurable time and calculable money, eschewing the making process and the lived experience of the workers.

But making visible these processes of labor is not enough as an act of resistance. It still complies with a way of thinking that places more value on what is visible. Sophie Lewis, in her book Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism Against the Family, pinpoints this compliance on a different but relatable topic of gestational surrogacy. Responding to both socio-economic and emotional exploitation of surrogate motherhood in the global reproductive economy. Lewis’ argument did not stop at the simple stance of anti-surrogacy. This is because the fundamental problem lies precisely in the unsaid rule of thumb that desires and exploits the surrogate mothers: the “stratified, commodified, cis-normative, neocolonial” conception of pregnancy that only recognizes the ‘real mother’ based on genetic kinship.³ What Lewis proposes instead is to relocate the carrier of reproduction from the individual mother to the embodied matter of amniotic fluid in the fetus: “Our wateriness is our surrogacy. It is the bed of our bodies’ overlap and it is, not necessarily — but possibly — a source of radical kinship.” Here, the perception of surrogacy flips from a problem to be solved towards an optimal condition of being. We are always held by other bodies amidst our claim to individual integrity. And moreover, these holding bodies evade measurement and fixation. They are watery, indecipherable from each other.

Borrowing Lewis’ argument, I wonder if the translator(s), editor(s) and reader(s) occupy a similar position of the surrogate body, writing alongside the writer who gets the credit and the capital. To bring power to this surrogate position is not to grant it the same level of authority, but to shift the parameters of value from authority to surrogacy — this shadowy, invisible, collective backstage of ambiguous wonders. By all means an unromantic site — fragile, multilateral, whose craft does not turn out well all the time. Bartleby’s gestures of refusal landed him in the Dead Letter Office after all. In the two-year lifespan of Nara Zoyd, Le Grand also reflected on the increasing difficulty of untangling her online persona, Nara, from her physical being, which led to the termination of the project: “through online communication we can start seeing a relational connection between the selves inside and outside of us.”⁴ But what if someone wrote in their email to le Grand with the simple note of ‘I hear you in your struggle’? What if there were not only one Bartleby, but hundreds and thousands to voice their refusals?

The collective calling: as much as we are already surrogate scripts for each other, we do need each other—the communities far and close, the anonymous entries of care, the diachronic co-reader at the margins of the page — to affirm ourselves in this watery position and hold onto it together.