Article

Twitter, Book, Riot:
Post-Digital Publishingagainst Race

Theory, Culture & Society0(0) 1–25! The Author(s) 2020
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DOI: 10.1177/0263276419891573
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Nicholas Thoburn
University of Manchester

Abstract
This article considers today’s ‘post-digital’ political publishing through the material
forms of an experimental book, The 2015 Baltimore Uprising: A Teen Epistolary.
Anonymously published and devoid of all editorial text, the book is comprised
entirely of some 650 screen-grabbed tweets, tweets posted by black Baltimore
youth during the riots that ensued on the police killing of Freddie Gray. It is acrisis-ridden book, bearing the wrenching anti-black terror and rebellionof Baltimore 2015 into the horizon of publishing. Drawing on critical theories ofbooks and digital media, and bringing Saidiya Hartman and Frank Wilderson to bearon issues of publishing, the article appraises seven aspects of this book’s materiality:
its epistolary structure and rupture with the book-as-closure; its undoing of thecommodity form of books; the ‘poor image’ of its visual scene; its recourse
to facial redaction and voiding of narrative progression; and its destabilization ofreaders’ empathy.
Keywords
Afro-pessimism, books, materiality, publishing, race and racism, riots, Twitter

Introduction
How can a book be adequate to a riot against racial violence? I pose thisnot only as a problem of textual content, since many books havegrappled with riots on the plane of writing and conceptualization. The
original intervention I make here is to explore this problem in terms of abook’s materiality, at a time when books are at once displaced and transformed by online digital media. To that end, this article is an analysis ofan experimental, small-press book whose content consists entirely ofsome 650 screen-grabbed tweets. Titled The 2015 Baltimore Uprising: A
Teen Epistolary, the book courses with crisis. For the tweets in question
were posted amidst the riots that ensued on the police killing of Freddie
Corresponding author: Nicholas Thoburn. Email: n.thoburn@manchester.ac.uk
Extra material: http://theoryculturesociety.org/

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Theory, Culture & Society 0(0)Gray, a 25-year-old black man whose neck was broken while subject to aso-called ‘rough ride’, cuﬀed alone in the back of a police van careening
through the streets of Baltimore.
These tweets – by turns horriﬁed, enraged, elated, humorous, tactical,
analytic, and mundane – ﬁll out the book at the expense of almost every
editorial convention by which its political credentials would otherwise be
established. It lacks preface, afterword, promotional blurb, and identiﬁcation by editor or publisher; neither does it contain chapters, page numbers, place and date of publication, or an ISBN (International StandardBook Number). Yet these omissions are integral to what is an extraordinary intervention in contemporary political publishing, as the wrenching anti-black terror and rebellion that is carried in the book’s Twittercontent are taken up as problems internal to its published form.
I hasten to add that the medium of the book here serves not to limit
and enclose an otherwise dispersive communicative ﬂux, neither in theformal strategies of Baltimore Uprising nor in my analysis. I focus in on
this book in order to open out to what Rachel Malik (2008) calls the‘horizons of the publishable’. For Malik, a book is not best understoodas a self-enclosed artefact or a node in a communicative channel relaying
writing to readers. A book, rather, is a mesh of ‘various publishingprocesses – writing, editing, design, marketing, production – [that] intersect and conﬂict’, and that bear the textual, visual, genre, medial,
epistemic, legal, and commercial conditions wherein the horizons ofwhat can be published are governed in any given time and place (2008:710). For shorthand, this is the materiality of books, which includes but
is not limited to or determined by writing. While all books comprise suchmaterial forms, processes, and relations, they tend to be pushed aside
from our conscious encounters with books by habitual functionalities
and the overbearing social valuation of the immaterial textual ‘work’.
However, certain books draw their materiality into the frame of theircritical and aesthetic interventions, and Baltimore Uprising is one ofthese, as it intervenes in today’s horizon of political publishing.
To explore this intervention, I ﬁrst indicate how today’s publishinghorizon is ‘post-digital’, from whence comes my methodology, before
outlining the signiﬁcance and fraught nature of encounters between publishing and racialization. Context set, the article turns to Baltimore
Uprising, investigating seven features of its materiality, each bearing
and interrogating diﬀerent aspects of anti-black racialization and theBaltimore riots. In parts the analysis draws from an interview I conducted by email, in May 2017, with the book’s anonymous publisher.
I start with the ‘epistolary’ eﬀects of the book’s collection of tweets,
before considering its rupture with the book-as-closure, its undoing of
the commodity form of books, and the degraded ‘poor image’ of its
visuality, utilizing Maurice Blanchot, Theodor Adorno, and Hito
Steyerl. I then appraise the book’s recourse to facial redaction, its voiding

Thoburn

3of narrative progression, and its destabilization of readers’ empathy,
drawing on Saidiya Hartman and the Afro-pessimism of Frank
Wilderson, and attentive to how its rupture in book form is a rupture
also in civil society’s self-consolidating routes to redress.

Post-Digital Publishing
Today’s publishing horizon is ‘post-digital’, a term that ‘describes the
messy state of media, arts and design after their digitization’ (Cramer,2014). In this publishing environment, print media and books have been
displaced from cultural centrality, consequent on the rise, reach, andfunctionalities of online digital media, with all the changes in the production, circulation, and reception of text and image that this entails. But
too often we misunderstand the place of printed books here, viewing
them as the losing party in opposition to digital media, rather thanseeing how print itself has become digital. Print publishing is not determined today by a linear movement of obsolescence and succession, but is
intrinsically constituted with digital technologies, be it through compositional means of word-processing and wikis, networked and on-demand
manufacture and sale, algorithmic marketing, or debating and reviewing
platforms. Far from signaling the ‘death of the book’, these changes
actually open books to new futures, their forms, processes, and relations
taking new shape in today’s variegated media horizon.
The theory and practice of post-digital publishing seeks not merely todescribe, however, but to push publishing to become reﬂexively adequate
to this post-digital condition. Politically, this entails circumspection
toward narratives of digital deliverance that are key to the capitalist
conditions of (ever newer) new media, while challenging the medium of
the book as a longstanding nexus of numerous mechanisms of power andauthority (Ludovico, 2012). Central to my methodology here, postdigital publishing is also characterized by an experimental testing of disparate forms of textual media, the division between ‘old’ and ‘new’ media
ceding to synchronic juxtaposition and interplay. Where post-digitalpublishing has made less headway is in engaging with the politics ofclass and racialization. I foregrounded class dimensions of post-digitalpublishing in my Anti-Book (Thoburn, 2016); in what follows, problemsof racialization take the lead.

Race and Publishing
Approaching racial terror and riots through the lens of experimental
publishing may look like a depoliticizing abstraction. Certainly, thestructural and physical violence of racialization is immediately pressing
in ways that issues in publishing will rarely be. Yet publishing has playeda signiﬁcant role in shaping the conditions, experiences, and formsof racism and struggles against white supremacy (Jackson, 2010;

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Theory, Culture & Society 0(0)Young, 2010). Take the terrifying example of lynching photographs,
circulated in the United States as printed-postcard souvenirs for whiteﬁlial bonding well into the early-20th century, or the Southern states’
laws against teaching blacks to read and write, passed into new statute up
to the 1840s. Switching the perspective to resistance, consider the role of
Abolitionist tracts, the publishing genre of ‘slave narratives’, or anticolonial works like Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth in galvanizing struggles against racial violence. This is not to suggest that
resistance to racism has taken shape through publishing without complication. In slave narratives, for instance, enslaved people sought to‘represent themselves as ‘‘speaking subjects’’’ toward ‘destroy[ing] theirstatus as objects, as commodities, within Western culture’ (Gates, 1988:
129). But these narratives succeeded, Ronald Judy (1993: 88, 97) argues,
only insofar as they conﬁrmed Western modernity’s principle that‘writing [is] the sole avenue to humanity’. They hence fashioned‘Negro’ subjectivity on the interdiction and invalidation of the‘African’, voided of which the achieved subjectivity was ‘nothing somuch as an investment in the terms of philosophical reﬂection: writing’.
Publishing, then, is at once a signiﬁcant terrain of black resistance to
racial violence and one that is fraught and ill-ﬁtting, such that Cornel
West writes, ‘the ‘‘ur-text’’ of black culture is neither a word nor a book,not an architectural monument or a legal brief. Instead, it is a guttural
cry and a wrenching moan’ (cited in Wilderson, 2010: 109). If we canunderstand this ‘guttural cry’ as operative within the materiality of
publishing, it is also shaped through publishing. As the examples above
indicate, the articulation of race and publishing is not the mediation of
pre-given racial forms (whether as biological essences or guttural cries ofresistance), but is generative of them. The same is true of social media,
such as Twitter. The racially charged hashtags, vernaculars, and calland-response linguistic play that constitute ‘black Twitter’, for instance,
are a ‘technosocial production of race’, as Sanjay Sharma (2013: 47)
argues. And Black Lives Matter (2013–), the social movement against
police brutalization and murder with impunity, famously coalesced
through a Twitter hashtag, ‘#BlackLivesMatter’ (Mirzoeﬀ, 2017).
As the reach and impact of these last two examples suggest, Twitterand other social media are the ascendant platforms in the medial production of race today, not print publishing and the codex book. Yet
Baltimore Uprising is no less contemporary for this. Not only constructed
through the post-digital juxtaposition and interplay of Twitter and thecodex, it interrogates today’s horizons of political publishing through anarray of forms, processes, and relations, where the conditions of racialization and riots wreak havoc on the book. The ﬁrst of these that I consider, the epistolary form, might seem anachronistic, but theappropriation of old forms in new contexts is a post-digital move that
here has forceful eﬀect.

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5

An Epistolary of Tweets
To provide an image of the physical book to carry in mind as I unpackand complicate its materiality, Baltimore Uprising is a pocketsize codex,
monochrome throughout, with a tape-covered spine, comprising 272
staple-bound pages, and has non-standard dimensions of 11  14  1 cm.
On ﬁrst encounter, it has recognizable genre features, the main title andriot-scene cover recalling social-movement books on urban uprisings(Figure 1). But the degraded quality of this cover image is less thantypical, a point I return to, and the ‘epistolary’ of the subtitle throws
us. The epistolary form, typically comprising a series of ﬁctional private
letters between intimates, has often been associated with scenes of

Figure 1. The 2015 Baltimore Uprising: A Teen Epistolary. First edition.

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Theory, Culture & Society 0(0)heightened emotion, even with social revolution. But it is a surprise
indeed to see it naming a contemporary book on uprising, and, given
its elevated cultural associations, to ﬁnd it attached to the ‘low’, commercial term of the ‘teen’. Evidently an estranging eﬀect is intended, aneﬀect that is in fact integral to the epistolary form, which ‘by deﬁnition
stages the production of writing’ (Kauﬀman, 2000: 203).
The epistolary novel in its classical, 18th-century guise mobilizes two
nested but competing connotations of the letter (Heckendorn Cook,
1996). On the one hand, letters were considered to be the most authentic,
direct, and transparent mode of written communication, qualities
secured in the epistolary novel’s conceit that it presents direct access to
private correspondence. On the other hand, ‘the letter was simultaneously recognized as the most playful of and potentially deceptive offorms, as a stage for rhetorical trickery’ (1996: 16). The staging ofthese intimate and estranging connotations would often inform an epistolary novel’s editorial text – for example, the ﬁctionalized editor’s preface and publisher’s note to Dangerous Liaisons serve to both assert andironize the veracity of the book’s ‘real’ letters. In Baltimore Uprising,both these intimate and estranging features of the epistolary form are
mobilized, the book serving at once to heighten proximity to the communicative scene of the tweets and to focus critical and reﬂexive attention
on its medial conditions and qualities. Here, however, these epistolaryeﬀects are facilitated by the absence of prefatory text.
Experientially, the most immediate eﬀect of this absence is to pull thereader into a direct engagement with the tweets themselves, since onturning the cover one immediately tips into their ﬂow, without a colophon of a pause, much less an introductory pre-fashioning of the content.
Assembled here are some 650 tweets – or screen-grabbed copies of tweets,
conveying a strong impression of their visual particularity – set out inchronological order, save for one out of sequence on the ﬁrst page andsome repositioning at the end. The ﬁrst tweet is a brutally frank declaration in text and image of the facts of Freddie Gray’s death (Figure 2).
The sequential ﬂow then commences the day Gray died (Figure 3) andcovers the two-week period of the main swell of the riots. They present
readers with a raw communicative scene of immediate response to
Freddie Gray’s killing, to the racialized terror of Baltimore policing,
and to the ensuing riots, from young black inhabitants of the citycaught up in the uprising, as participants and as observers of theevents through social media and television.
I consider the particular content and qualities of the tweets as this article progresses, but I want to do so by according them proper speciﬁcity inthe form by which they are encountered. For readers do not experience thetweets as such – streams of data, expression, aﬀect, and association modulated by smartphones in real-time in the midst of riotous events – butscreen-grabs of these, appropriated into the pages of a codex book.

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7

Figure 2. First page of The 2015 Baltimore Uprising: A Teen Epistolary. First edition.

Twitter is clearly an epistolary medium of a sort, but in its appropriation by other publishing media it easily cedes its epistolary qualities,
sometimes with troubling political results. The search method employedin the making of Baltimore Uprising is revealing in this regard. Socialmovement research on and with Twitter has tended to focus on thetechno-social capacity of the hashtag, Twitter’s ‘inline metadata’ function that aggregates and organizes the multiplicity of tweets in trend
patterns and ‘ambient aﬃliations’ among users (Zappavigna, 2011).
See, for example, the numerous articles on the 2014 Ferguson riots,that ensued on the police killing of Michael Brown, which are basedon statistical analysis of the hashtag ‘#Ferguson’ (Barnard, 2018). It is
all the more striking, then, that the publishers of Baltimore Uprisingproceeded in their Twitter search, conducted during the course of theriots, by excluding trending hashtags, instead homing in on local landmarks, malls, high-school proms, store names, and idiosyncrasies of theriots. They found that trending hashtags operated at a scale removed

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Theory, Culture & Society 0(0)Figure 3. Pages of The 2015 Baltimore Uprising: A Teen Epistolary. Second edition.

from the communicative scene of the uprising, and that at this scale
Twitter served those from outside Baltimore who would appropriate
the riots to their own ends – journalists driven by corporate news
agendas and sanctioned interpretative frames, but also ‘activists trying
to boost their own social capital by ‘‘explaining’’ what everything meant
and the motivations of all the kids on the ground’ (interview with the
publisher, 2017). A variation of this point is well made by one of thebook’s tweets: ‘White and non-black people literally capitalizing oﬀ of
our experiences for a couple hundred retweets it really rubs me thewrong way’.
In contrast, Baltimore Uprising’s engagement with Twitter draws out
Twitter’s epistolary intimacy, serving to keep readers close to ‘what the
kids on the ground were actually saying and feeling’, to produce ‘a recordof the uprising [from their] perspective’, a perspective systematically
excluded from public discourse (interview with the publisher, 2017).
Explanatory, this epistolary record is also aﬀective, as racial terror andvertiginous uprising cleave through the words, emojis, and images, conveying the tremor of lived experience that is typically ﬁltered out of political publishing and theoretical systematization. That is not to say
Baltimore Uprising is a comprehensive record, clearly, or that it is without interpretation. Rather, interpretation is engendered by proximity to
the tweets, in all their expressive complexity, as I ﬁrst pursue throughtheir articulation of the riots.

Thoburn

9Book of Riots
Unstewarded by editorial narratives and schemas, the riots erupt throughthe book’s content (as I brieﬂy consider now) and its form. Two intertwined themes are paramount: attacks on the police – in language, as wehave seen already, and in practice, with the trashing of police vehicles
featuring prominently in the tweeted photographs; and collective looting.
Looting provides the book’s strongest pacing element, from a tweet calling to ‘destroy’ the Mondawmin Mall, where confrontation between
young people and police proved to be the uprising’s trigger event,through numerous images of looters, cleaned-out stores, and a panoplyof looted shoes, hair weave, soft and alcoholic drinks, breakfast cereals,
and so forth (Figure 4). Wrested from spatial and commercial order, thisdisrupted commodity scene conveys an imperfect constellation of appropriation and exuberance, needs met and excess, and deﬁance of the subjection to penury, debt, and police violence that are the social conditionsof the commodity form.
It is the prominence and qualitative depth of these two themes that
leads Joshua Clover (2016a) to extol Baltimore Uprising as ‘the ﬁrst greatbook to come from the last great riot in the United States’, an acute
expression of today’s racialized class condition of ‘surplus population’.
In this thesis, workers’ expulsion from formal labour markets by the
secular decline in industrial labour sees struggles pivot from production

Figure 4. Pages of The 2015 Baltimore Uprising: A Teen Epistolary. Second edition.

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Theory, Culture & Society 0(0)(the ‘strike’) to social reproduction and commodity circulation (the‘riot’), taking shape against the nexus of policing, ghettoization, debt,
and prison, whereby populations superﬂuous to production are racialized
into abjection to the point of death (Clover, 2016b). Clover’s broad
historicization of the book is apt (though what follows implies its
historicization also via the competing analytic of Afro-pessimism, antiblackness indexed not to changes in labour but to the persistent ontological structure of the slave as commodity object). Yet in appraising
Baltimore Uprising by the socio-political horizon of race and class evident
in its tweets, Clover says little about its singular achievement as a book,how race and class irrupt in its material forms. It is to this that I now
return, provoked by the second feature of epistolary form, as our intimate encounter with the book’s tweets is jostled by an estranging unease at
the absence of expected editorial marshalling.
Useful here is Blanchot’s work on publishing in the wake of May ’68.
Renowned as a critic of the totalizing, encyclopaedic pretensions of thebook form, it is seldom noticed that Blanchot advances this critique inrelation to our speciﬁc problem of social uprising. I refer to his anonymous writing in Comite´, the single-issue journal of the Student-Writer
Action Committee, the May ’68 coalition of Blanchot, Marguerite
Duras, Dionys Mascolo (who later identiﬁed the texts authored by
Blanchot), and some 20 others.
Like Baltimore Uprising, Comite´ was published shortly after theend of the uprising to which it pertains. Indeed, it was the plethora ofbooks that ensued on the cessation of ’68 that prompted Blanchot’s
inquiry here into the politics of publishing form. Whether as epitaph,commentary, analysis, panegyric, or condemnation, these books, heargues, all contributed to the same end: the summation and closure of
the uprising, an eﬀect consequent of the book’s totalizing form. Political
publishing required instead media that could prolong this ‘arrest of history’, that could bear and extend its rupture through their material
forms:
everything that disturbs, calls, threatens, and ﬁnally questions without expecting an answer, without resting in certainty, never will we
enclose it in a book, which, even when open, tends toward closure, areﬁned form of oppression. . . . No more books, never again a book,so long as we maintain our relation with the upheaval of the rupture. (Blanchot, 2010: 95)
Blanchot ﬁnds such ruptural media in tracts, posters, bulletins, andmurals. Unlike the post-hoc books, these forms were produced withinand circulated amidst the unfurling of ’68, but their critical adequacy
to the uprising resides above all in their fragmentary, ﬂeeting, andincomplete nature, in their ruination of totalizing, encyclopaedic

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11

enclosure: ‘Tracts, posters, bulletins, words of the streets, inﬁnite
words . . . They do not say everything; on the contrary, they ruin everything’ (2003: 95).
It is reasonable to ask if Baltimore Uprising is not a work of closure in
Blanchot’s terms. It is a book after all, and one that selects from andbinds a surfeit of ﬂeeting fragments of communication. Yet I want toargue that this book is precisely a work of fragmentation and rupture,engendering qualities of the riots in its ruination of the book-as-closure.
The absence of interpretative text, editor’s name, and publisher details
again plays a role, for Baltimore Uprising in this way blocks the passage
readers would otherwise be oﬀered away from the uprising to an anchoring authority or interpretive summation external to its tumult. Readers
are instead held to the fragmented and ruptural communicative milieu of
the riots, a move compounded by the absence of chapters and page
numbers, the visual, cognitive, and proprioceptive screens throughwhich the tweets would be ordered and paced by a conventional book.
This has temporal qualities, the book a fragment of ruptural time. The
fragmentary and incomplete nature of each tweet, and of readers’ movement through the tweets, bears the rupture in continuous time that is an
intrinsic quality of being caught up in a riot. The tweets occasionallyfollow short conversational streams and carry recurring motifs, but theseappear in disjointed series, imperfectly indexed to speciﬁc features of theunfolding, lurching events, for which readers are unprepared. As a review
in Baltimore’s City Paper put it, the book’s tweets ‘send us back to thosedays when we didn’t know what was happening or what was going tohappen next’ (Soderberg, 2015).
The aﬀective qualities of ruptural time are also in ascendance. The
tweets convey rushes and tipping points (‘THEY ARE REALLYRUNNING THROUGH MONDAWMIN JUST STEALING SHIT’),eddies and lulls (‘U gud?’ ‘Yeah you home?’ ‘Yea’). There is much awed
disbelief (‘When shit happened in ferguson, we ALL said this would
happen if it came here. Still seems so surreal’) and a groping eﬀort tograsp the magnitude of events by recourse to the heightened aﬀective
scenes of video games (‘Told Yall . . . GTA 6: Baltimore Trenches!’),movies (‘This better than the actual Purge Movie’), and television(‘This ain’t the television stuﬀ no more it’s right here in Baltimore City’).
The fragmentary and ruptural quality of Baltimore Uprising is carried
too by its physical form. Its ﬂimsy paper covers, staple-binding, tapecovered spine, and the degraded monochrome of its photocopied pages
convey a feeling that its coherence as a complete and integrated artefact
is barely achieved, that it is a momentary concrescence, a fragment
among fragments. Even its status as a book is in doubt, seemingly existing in ‘a gray area between book and nonbook’, to borrow Kate
Eichhorn’s (2016: 44) characterization of unauthorized volumes ofbound photocopies. There is more to the book’s physical and visual

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Theory, Culture & Society 0(0)design, but I move now to consider this through its challenge to publishing’s commodity forms.

Anti-Commodity Book
Unlike the commodities encountered in Baltimore Uprising, this book is
not consumed as a looted commodity. Nonetheless, it is a signiﬁcantinterruption in the commodity form of books. Adorno (1992: 21), in
his late essay ‘Bibliographic Musings’, argues that the book as commodity ‘sidles up to the reader’. Through marketing mechanisms, exaggerated
formats, and loud colours, commodity books come to exist not forthemselves in their expressive uniqueness, but ‘for something other’ intheir generality, units of exchange always ‘ready to serve the customer’(1992: 21). His analysis recalls Marx’s swipe at the debasement ofmaterial culture that is attendant on the commodity form: ‘Private property’, as it abstracts from the qualities of objects to turn them into carriers of exchangeable value, ‘alienates the individuality not only of people
but also of things’ (Marx and Engels, 1974: 102; emphasis added). In
contrast, Baltimore Uprising severs the formal means to universal
exchangeability, allowing its particular material qualities to come forward unconstrained by the demands and circuits of marketing, whichin our time of consumer-proﬁling algorithms have moved on apace.
However, unlike the austere designs of books favoured by Adorno,
where ‘literary publishing houses with strict standards’ hold vainly to a
book-form supposedly prior to its commodity debasement (1992: 20), theparticularity of this book makes no prelapsarian appeals. Its politicalmateriality is wrought from the commodity conditions of contemporary
publishing.
The lack of an ISBN cuts Baltimore Uprising from the global logisticalmechanism of commodity books, and the absence of publisher details
and editor name further limits its market visibility and orientation
toward exchange. This anonymity also stymies a key means by whichbooks turn language into property and proﬁt. For it refuses the authorfunction, historically co-emergent with the function of publisher, which
serves as a ‘creator of scarcity’, ‘an interior space introduced into an
exterior ﬁeld of discourse to create privileged nodes of value’ (Nealon,
2008: 76). Instead, we see the Twitter handles that are the text’s source:
The King, YoungestOfDaCamp, BL, and ItsTy2, to take a page-spreadat random. They serve not as spaces of authorial limitation and ownership but as moments in a collective, impersonal, and abundant ﬂow (thebook’s response to the monetization of this ﬂow in social media is considered below).
As to the manufacture and distribution of Baltimore Uprising, there is
no legitimate economic model here but a parasitical and gift relationship.
The book is produced without payment, using a ‘copy scam’ when timeThoburn

13

and inclination allow (its ‘open edition’ currently numbers 200 copies
or so), and is distributed for free to friends and for a negligible priceat book fairs, with some Baltimore distribution ensured by an anonymously-posted batch to Baltimore’s radical bookshop, Red Emma’s(interview with the publisher, 2017). Free but scarce. This is an extraordinary conjunction, where scarcity, normally the preserve of economic
value, has a communist valence, increasing not the price the book commands but the allure of its breach with property forms.
I do not mean to suggest that these anti-commodity features of
Baltimore Uprising realize a wholly extra-capitalist entity. Online
search ﬁnds that it does in fact have a named publisher: Research and
Destroy New York City. Moreover, it was reprinted shortly after publication by an established radical publisher, AK Press, in an edition thatreintroduces features of commercial publishing (Figure 5). The reprint
still lacks identiﬁcation by editor and publisher, but is now perfectbound, sports a title on the spine, and has full-colour covers, an ISBN,
cleaner and less exposed Print on Demand pages, and is commerciallysold, including on Amazon (from whence any proﬁts are donated to ayouth-education scheme in Baltimore, the Algebra Project). At one level,
this edition is the recapture of an anti-commodity book by capitalist
forms, as is most stark in the visual appearance of the ISBN information

Figure 5. The 2015 Baltimore Uprising: A Teen Epistolary. Second edition.

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Theory, Culture & Society 0(0)on the back cover. With its bright-white box placed atop an image ofrioting black youth, this coded commodity language visibly fashions thebook into the order of uniform and value-bearing marketable commodities. Yet the reprint is not without merit. When the two editions arejuxtaposed, the reprint serves less to dampen than to amplify the anticommodity features of the original, while its commodity qualities remind
readers that anti-commodities are produced only through persistent
wrenching away from capitalist relations, not as islands of ever-liberated
form. Juxtaposition also has the eﬀect of confounding the notion of an‘original’ at all, for the ﬁrst edition, which continues to be produced,
looks and feels like a pirate copy of the second, and celebrates this, inbeing the more desirable of the two objects. True of the book as a whole,this quality of the degraded copy has a particular expression in the visual
scene of its tweets, to which I turn now.

Poor-Image Book
The degraded quality of xerox reproduction has long been celebrated inself-publishing (Eichhorn, 2016), though in Baltimore Uprising it is a
speciﬁcally contemporary response to certain features of online digital
media. One design approach would have been to lift the text of theBaltimore tweets and typeset them to the ‘rich’ typographic standardsof commercial publishing, with book aesthetics thus dominating themedial encounter. This is common to the proto-genre of Twitterbooks, such as Chindu Sreedharan’s (2014) tweeted Mahabharata, Epic
Retold, and is partially true of another book of tweets from a social
uprising, Tweets from Tahrir (Idle and Nunns, 2011). But Baltimore
Uprising takes a diﬀerent path, where the original visual form isscreen-grabbed from Twitter, then pasted, laser-printed, and photocopied into a codex book. The visual scene of Twitter is thus maintained anddominant, but in the manner of a degraded copy – an articulation in
publishing of what Steyerl (2012) calls the ‘poor image’.
‘Perfect images’, Steyerl writes, are the high-end visual products ofcommercial media, bearing infrastructures and evaluative paradigms
that produce, broker, and protect them as image and commodity. Poor
images, in contrast, are substandard copies of substandard copies, themassive superﬂuity of low-resolution digital ﬁles that ﬂood throughglobal media channels. They are ‘distributed for free, squeezed throughslow digital connections, compressed, reproduced, ripped, remixed, . . . copied and pasted into other channels of distribution’ (2012: 32).
Such images are of course integral to the expansion and intensiﬁed capitalization of social media, conditioned by the velocity of circulation andcompression of attention that are requisite for its psychosocial and economic forms. But in their violation of ‘perfect’ aesthetic values, theirsuperﬂuity, and their impersonal, collective production and sharing,Thoburn

15

poor images, Steyerl wagers, might recover some of the image’s ‘politicalpunch’. This is the possibility of a ‘new aura’ of the image, ‘no longer
based on the permanence of the ‘‘original’’ but on the transience of thecopy’, a politics of the image that ‘is no longer anchored within a classicalpublic sphere mediated and supported by the frame of the nation-state or
corporation, but ﬂoats on the surface of temporary and dubious data
pools’ (2012: 42).
It is clear already that Baltimore Uprising directs readers to such ‘poor
image’ features of Twitter’s use amidst the riots. Yet its own realizationof the poor image is not in that scene as such, but in its ripped andremixed appropriation of tweets in the book, which is as much a rendering of the medium of the book to the impersonal, collective, and valueviolating terrain of the degraded copy. The book’s poor-image tweets
have a mocking or menacing eﬀect on the perfect image of Twitter’s
clean, unifying, and innocuous interface, that visual scene epitomizedby the infantilizing baby-blue dove that is Twitter’s corporate logo.
They also trouble the value paradigm of Twitter. The tweets have been
appropriated, without permission or license, and, in contrast to the adtech economy of social media, the attention they attract in this book has
no payoﬀ for commercial data-capture and audience brokerage.
However, the politics of the poor image at play here is most acute inits dimensions of class and racialization.
‘The poor image’, Steyerl continues, ‘is a rag or a rip; an AVI or a
JPEG, a lumpen proletarian in the class society of appearances, ranked
and valued according to its resolution.’ ‘Poor images’, as she alludes to
Fanon’s ﬁgure of anti-colonial uprising, ‘are the contemporary Wretchedof the Screen’ (2012: 32). It is a compelling association, where poor
images, to recall Clover, share with racialized surplus populations thequality of wretched and nebulous superﬂuity. In Steyerl, this association
remains gestural, but in Baltimore Uprising the racial and class politics ofpoor images take concrete form. For it is precisely as poor images thatblack populations in the United States and elsewhere have been renderedvisible in the present moment, the myriad ‘low-resolution photographs
and videos that captured the particular set of appearances that can becalled Black Lives Matter’ (Mirzoeﬀ, 2017: 21). It is a visual scene overwhelmingly comprised of the documentation of police assault and killingof black people. Yet it provides no means out of the abjection of racial
terror. From the videotaped police beating of Rodney King in 1991 to
the 2016 police shooting of Philando Castile, live-streamed as he died,
there are no convictions for the identiﬁable perpetrators. And the routine
circulation of these images through televisual news and social media not
only normalizes black suﬀering, where ‘terror resides within the limits ofsocially tolerable’, to borrow Hartman’s (1997: 63) characterization of
the scene of slavery. It also, as she continues, generates prurience, voyeurism, and self-consolidating enjoyment in the spectacle of violence and16

Theory, Culture & Society 0(0)suﬀering, these images becoming what Wilderson (2016) calls ‘themodern lynching photograph’. What this suggests is that even as thepoor image oﬀers a new political aura of the image, and a terrain of
appearance and struggle against racial terror, it remains a hostile terrain.
The poor image of Baltimore Uprising takes shape, then, as a construction against the racial abjection that its degraded, impersonal, and collective quality does not in and of itself overcome.

Eye Service and Redaction
The abjection of police violence is in part countered in Baltimore Uprisingby its clear-eyed focus on black rebellion, but not all its work against
anti-blackness is performed this way. Its images also force one’s gazeupon this abjection. It is a gaze that is not returned. Readers cannot
miss that in most of the faces included in the book’s tweeted photographs, the eyes have been redacted (as have key identifying features of
the Twitter accounts). This was a provision on the part of the publishers
to preserve anonymity, and to be seen to be doing so, given the numberof tweets that feature or promote law-breaking activity. It is common to
the visual culture of radical political media today, but the sheer accumulation here of redacted eyes on black faces makes for unsettling viewing,
for in the historical and contemporary conditions of anti-blackness,vision is a highly racialized capacity.
Freddie Gray was ﬁrst pursued because he returned a police oﬃcer’s
gaze. He transgressed an informal code of domination and subserviencein law enforcement and the prison system that dates back through the‘reckless eyeballing’ of the Jim Crow period, when whites took black
looks to be a ready prompt for lynching, to chattel slavery, where ‘eyeservice’ was a punishable act, deemed reckless and as such a sign ofpotential revolt (Mirzoeﬀ, 2017: 88–9). Does Baltimore Uprising unwittingly repeat this violent prohibition of black capacity to look? Redacting
eyes is certainly a diﬀerent aesthetic procedure to that of a more prominent image associated with the moment of Black Lives Matter, where
black eyes were instead accentuated. In December 2014, following the
grand jury’s failure to indict the police oﬃcer responsible for strangling
Eric Garner, the Millions March in New York City was fronted by eightlarge placards that assembled together a breath-taking image of Garner’seyes, magniﬁed to reach across the width of the march (Figure 6).
Returning the gaze of a police-murdered black man, and at such scaleand collectivity, is a powerful political move, but I venture that the eﬀectof redaction in Baltimore Uprising is no less political. It works in a different way, though, with a diﬀerent critical sensibility. Whereas the deﬁant return of the gaze conveys an emerging public protagonism against
racial violence, facial redaction wards oﬀ the self-assuring feeling thatprotagonism has been achieved, even amidst uprising. It foregrounds

Thoburn

17

Figure 6. Placards of Eric Garner’s eyes fronting the Millions March, New York City,
December 2014. Photograph by The All-Nite Images. CC BY-SA 2.0.

instead the structural bar to black subjectivity that inheres in themonotonous persistence of racial violence, and hence the ruptural,root-and-branch transformation that will be necessary for its overcoming. It is a socio-aesthetic conﬁguration manifest also in the narrative
form of Baltimore Uprising and its mode of readership, the last two features of this book that I will consider.

Narrative Void
The narrative structure of Baltimore Uprising is usefully approached withthe aid of Wilderson’s (2014) reading of Assata Shakur’s ‘To My People’,her 1973 radio communiqué from prison, where she was held undercharges related to activity in the Black Liberation Army.
Communiqués aim to present revolutionary actions as legible andlegitimate, typically proceeding by a narrative structure of equilibrium,a point prior to oppression, through its destruction by capitalism orcolonization, and its reconstitution or reimagining as the result of struggle. It is a redemptive narrative structure facilitated by mediating objects
like land, labour, and custom, mediating objects that are the dialogic
terrain of struggle, whose uncertain outcome is the condition for narrative progression as such. (Communiqués by the Red Army Faction and18

Theory, Culture & Society 0(0)the Provisional IRA are Wilderson’s examples, with the latter typical in
its aim to restore Irish territorial integrity.) ‘To My People’ is recognizably working with the communiqué form, but Shakur can identify neither
prior equilibrium nor plenitude restored. This is because the mediating
object here – which is simultaneously social, personal, and psychic, as
indicated in the second sentence by reference to her ‘slave name joannechesimard’ – has no aﬃrmable positivity but is, rather, the gratuitous andmonotonous violence of anti-black racism (Shakur, 2014: 71). I will takea moment to sketch this Afro-pessimist thesis.
For Wilderson, anti-blackness is the structural dispossession of subjectivity, a crushing condition born of chattel slavery, of being owned,
used, and traded as a replaceable and interchangeable commodity object.
The place of violence is key. Unlike the worker, who experiences violence
as contingent on some transgression, the slave is subject to gratuitous
violence, ‘for which there need be no rationale or limits and fromwhich there is no sanctuary’ (Wilderson, 2013: 184). It eﬀectively dispossesses the slave of subjectivity, of positivity in their being, ‘because it
positions the Black in an inﬁnite and indeterminately horrifying andopen vulnerability’. The slave condition is hence ‘a void of historicalmovement’ (Wilderson, 2010: 38). At the same moment, slavery is thenegative condition by which civil society deﬁnes and ever renews itself as
positivity: ‘[t]he slave is the object or the ground that makes possible theexistence of the bourgeois subject and, by negation or contradistinction,deﬁnes liberty, citizenship, and the enclosures of the social body’(Hartman, 1997: 62).
With emancipation, though the formal terms of slavery are abolished,
the slave condition carries over (hence the ‘pessimism’), embodied nolonger in the master-slave relation but in the condition of anti-blackness,
as ‘the structural determinations of enslavement were ‘‘epidermalised’’’,in Fanon’s formulation (R.L., 2013). It is a structural condition that ﬁnds
concrete expression in police murder with impunity; in the accumulationand spatial containment of urban ghettos; and in the for-proﬁt prison
network, where one in every three African-American men born today can
expect to be incarcerated at some point in their lifetimes and subsequently suﬀer debarment from work, welfare, education, and housing,a ‘New Jim Crow’ cloaked and fomented by the race-neutral discourse of
felony (Alexander, 2012).
Returning to Shakur’s communiqué, this is the ontological basis of its
narrative failure, where attempts at historical movement and collective
agency are crowded out by the relentless repetition of scenes of violence.
The communiqué’s ‘textual heat . . . is dispersed throughout an array of
bodily violations, horrifying images indexical of a structural rupture ofher capacity to lay claim to transindividual concepts, to mediating
objects’ (Wilderson, 2014: 24). However, barred from and negated by
the narrative structure of civil society and its leftist variants, the horror

Thoburn

19

of Shakur’s impasse also reveals a textual method adequate to the struggle against anti-blackness.
Wilderson observes that political works, books in particular, are notusually permitted to be devoid in this way of narrative progression. For
that would be antithetical to the narrative infrastructure of (white) historical movement, of which the book has historically been both agent
and sanctifying form (Thoburn, 2016). Even the most relentlessly criticalbooks hence ﬁnd themselves compelled by the values and institutions ofculture and publishing to provide an uplifting ending. Their writers ‘consciously or unconsciously peel away from the strength and the terror of
their evidence in order to propose some kind of coherent, hopeful solution to things’, thus integrating their vertiginous critique back into theworld as it is, bolstering civil society’s self-consolidating parametersof legible, coherent, and reasonable action (Wilderson in Hartman,
2003: 183).
Baltimore Uprising, however, like Shakur’s communiqué, is not thisway structured. It refuses world-consolidating routes to redress
and instead stays unﬂinchingly ‘in the hold of the ship’ (Wilderson,
2010: xi). The point is not to ﬁnd here a subjectivity bolstered bytrauma, but to ‘heighten [sensitivity to] social and political contradictions’, the wrenching conditions of the imperfect rupture that was
Baltimore 2015 (Wilderson, 2010). The book carries a repetitive loopof violence, a violence that ‘bleeds out beyond the grasp of narration’(Wilderson, 2014: 7). This is the violence of one man’s murder, but also
the intrinsic violence of the police, gratuitous, monotonous, and inﬂictedwith impunity: ‘it wasn’t no justice for the Martin kid [. . .] what makes ya
think it’s gone be justice for Freddy?????’ ‘@BaltimorePolice murderers
rapist racist thugs gang members’. There is no preface or epilogue to plot
progression out of this violence, and the content in numerous points
voids the putative routes to resolution presented by civil society, suchas democratic representation, legal process, or economic uplift: ‘They tell
us when we ‘‘vote’’ we are being heard. No THIS is an example of us
young people being heard!!!!’ ‘Stephanie [Rawlings-Blake, the city’s
Mayor] keep calling yall thugs . . . she wanna be white so bihhhhh’.
‘Downtown business revenue don’t help our communities or ourschools . . . I say fuck me burn everything’.
Toward the close of the book a sequence of tweets reﬂect with excitement the indictment of six oﬃcers for Freddie Gray’s death, understood
to be a consequence of the riots. But ‘CHARGES DOESNT MEANCONVICTED’, as one of the tweets checks this anticipation of a positive
resolution, to be proven founded the following summer when all theoﬃcers were acquitted or had their indictments dropped. The bookthen ends with a monotonous nine pages of tweets that register, without
closure, the death of Freddie Gray, a comment stream prompted by a

20

Theory, Culture & Society 0(0)tweet of his portrait and coﬃn which requests ‘Dont Scroll Down
Without Typing ‘‘R.I.P’’’.

Undoing Empathy
For all this book’s achievements in constructing its material forms
through immersion in the communicative milieu of Baltimore youth, it
was not published from within their scenes and no pretence is made thatit might ﬁnd there a sizeable readership. Who, then, is this book for, andhow might they read it?
It is tempting to circumvent this question of readership by evoking therelative contingency of a book’s circulation, where Baltimore Uprisingwould be for anyone who chances upon it and is taken by its intervention. There is some truth in this formulation. But it draws explanatory
weight from an ideological structure integral to the bourgeois form ofbooks, where, as Leah Price (2012) argues, the autonomy of the possessive individual ﬁnds a complement to his freedom – supposedly determined only by his personal will and intellect – in the vaunted autonomy
of books, their circulation equally undetermined by base social relations.
Moreover, appealing to the contingency of this book’s readership would
contribute to publishing’s ‘dissimulated universality of whiteness’, eliding
confrontation with the patterns of racialization that structure white consumption of black expressive text (Young, 2010: 55, quoting Judith
Butler). It is regarding this problem, of the white reader of black expressive text, that Baltimore Uprising takes issues of readership into its form,
where it undoes the racializing structure of empathy.
The epistolary play of intimacy and estrangement that I noted at theoutset is further complicated by the bar of racial diﬀerence. Blackness
here unsettles white intimacy, as the white reader is drawn into the sceneof the tweets at the same moment that they are interpolated as separate,
not only as a party external to the communicative exchange, but also one
who encounters the tweets in self-consolidating distinction from its sceneof anti-black police terror. Given the ties of sentiment that are spun by
the epistolary form, we might have expected this bar to have been ameliorated in these pages with empathy, the book provoking a ‘bodily eﬀort
to enter through ‘‘speech, gesture, tonality’’ into another’s way of beingor life-world’ (Wilderson, 2013: 181). But there is a false universalization
with the gesture of empathy, and hence a violence, that renders theencounter on personal and not structural terms. At the personal level,
empathetic resolution for the reader can usually be achieved. But this is aliberal terrain of encounter, ‘the scale of abstraction [brought] back down
to the level most comfortable for White people: the individual and theuncontextualized realm of fair play’ (Wilderson, 2015: 407). At this level,
empathetic resolution obscures the structural diﬀerence of anti-blackness
as social order and individual experience, the level at which resolution

Thoburn

21

Figure 7. Page of The 2015 Baltimore Uprising: A Teen Epistolary. Second edition.

would need to be achieved to be meaningful. Empathy also carries atendency toward the ‘obliteration of otherness’, an ‘identiﬁcation withthe other only as we ‘‘feel ourselves into those we imagine as ourselves’’’(Hartman, 1997: 19–20, quoting Jonathan Boyarin). It is a move thatslides into the structural form of slavery, whereby the capacity to makeuse of blacks for the self-augmentation of white subjecthood and society
is realized whether that use is physical violence, fascination, or (in the
moment of empathy) the accumulation of moral virtue (Hartman, 1997).

22

Theory, Culture & Society 0(0)It is not that race abolition is achievable without a degree of empathy,or that empathy is wholly withdrawn from the form of Baltimore
Uprising. Rather, the empathetic encounter must be persistently
troubled, in favour of a wrenching structural critique that leaves thereader without resolution, provoked to the fraught task of problematizing their own structural relationship to racial violence, and reconﬁguring
the terms and practices of solidarity accordingly.
In Baltimore Uprising, this tangle of empathy and its undoing is mostevident in one of the tweeted photographs, where a young boy sits on a
man’s shoulders, holding a placard that declaims ‘Justice’ for Freddie
Gray (Figure 7). The fragility and innocence of life upon which empathetic relation is often drawn is here symbolized by childhood. But a jolt
disrupts white identiﬁcation, for the child’s placard also reads: ‘Fuck
the Police’. It recalls for me a 1960s documentary ﬁlm of black primary-school children in the Black Panther Party’s breakfast programmes, singing a song whose chorus goes: ‘Gun, pick up the gun,pick up the gun and put the pigs on the run’ (Olsson, 2011). Both makefor uncomfortable viewing, children not only awakened to murderous
violence but declaiming an agential discursive violence of their own, aviolence that is usually rendered illegitimate even when asserted byadults. Shifting from the personal to the structural scale, however,this tweet pushes the reader to see a vertiginous political truth in theyoung boy’s declamation. For anti-black terror transgresses generational division, as is attested in the United States by the recent
deaths of Aiyana Stanley-Jones, at seven-years-old, Tamir Rice, 12,
Trayvon Martin, 17, and Darius Simmons, 13, all African-American
children shot by police or white citizens.

Conclusion
Baltimore Uprising is a mesh of forms, processes, and relations that bearand interrogate today’s horizons of political publishing. A codex ﬁlledout with tweets, it responds to the displacement of books from culturaland medial centrality with a post-digital construction of disparate publishing materialities. Yet the horizon of post-digital publishing here ispolitical as much as it is medial. Apt for our time of concatenatingsocial crisis, this book courses with conﬂictual social relations, constructed as it is from the communicative scene of an uprising against
racial terror.
There is no necessity for the Baltimore tweets to issue in a book. And
compared to the riots themselves, this book is of little consequence. But
publishing is nonetheless a signiﬁcant terrain of racialization and its
resistance. In this terrain, today’s horizon of the publishable, Baltimore
Uprising is less a book about the uprising than of it. This book prolongs
the rupture into publishing form, as the temporal fragmentation andThoburn

23

aﬀective swells of the riots are engendered in the unmarshalled ﬂow oftweets; as it meets the looting of commodities with disruption of thecommodity book; and as it renders Twitter and book to the ‘poor
image’, today’s visual terrain of anti-black terror and resistance.
Baltimore Uprising has no self-secure identity, as is patent from its appropriated content, degraded visuality, and only-just-achieved physicalform. It is a wrecked book, racial terror and rupture wreaking havocon the book form. And there is no reconsolidation in narrative progression and uplift. Through recourse to facial redaction, refusal of narrative
emplotment, and disruption of readers’ empathy, Baltimore Uprising
voids civil society’s legible, legitimate, and world-consolidation routes
to redress. Instead, brokering neither prior equilibrium nor plenituderestored, it heightens sensitivity to crisis and contradiction. This bookcarries into the horizon of publishing the unbearable terror of anti-blackness, and the imperfect rupture with this world that ensued on the police
killing of Freddie Gray.
Acknowledgements
I am grateful for comments on this article to Nick Thurston, Stephen Zepke, three anonymous reviewers, and participants at the Document Practices symposium at the Artists’Writings and Publications Research Centre, University of Leeds, and the Publishing-ArtCommunism symposium at London’s MayDay Rooms.

ORCID iD
Nicholas Thoburn

https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3624-4579

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Nicholas Thoburn is Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the University ofManchester. He publishes on political media, cultural theory, social
movements, and architecture, and is author of Anti-Book: On the Art
and Politics of Radical Publishing (2016) and Deleuze, Marx and Politics(2003).