several books, including Emma Goldman: Political Thinking in the Streets.
She applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, Letterpress Revolution: The Politics of Anarchist Print Culture, and reported the following:
Page 99 continues my discussion of the relations among Pearl Johnson Tucker, the partner of printer and editor Benjamin Tucker, who for many years edited the Boston-based journal Liberty, with her sister Bernice Johnson and with Agnes Inglis, the first curator at the Labadie Collection at the University of Michigan. In one of her letters to Agnes, Bertha wrote, regarding the informal relations connecting anarchists to one another, “The endless chain of fellowship is a source of satisfaction to me.” She described the assemblage of relationships within the anarchist movement with the striking term filament: “you and Alice [Furst] and the dear Ishills and the filament reaching out to your friends and my friends.” A filament, appropriately, can be a flexible carbon or metal thread that conducts electric current, or it can be a long, thin, organic fiber that is part of a plant or animal. Filament is a good image for the connective material – organic, inorganic , semiotic, and social – that branches across the anarchist landscape, connecting people and things in horizontal relations.Learn more about Letterpress Revolution at the Duke University Press website.
Page 99 is a surprisingly appropriate window into my book. The three women discussed here are examples of relatively unknown but politically significant participants in the anarchist movement. Anarchism’s big names, including Emma Goldman and Peter Kropotkin, frequently urged the public to appreciate the movement’s lesser-known contributors, yet the spotlight frequently stays on the better-known people. My book is trying to shift that focus: I want to portray not just influential individuals but influential relationships among people and things that make up the collective presence of anarchism. Bertha’s image of a filament is perfect for my purposes because it can be organic or inorganic connective tissue. It resonates with philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s idea of assemblages as horizontal networks of relationships through which forces flow.
The epistolary filaments among these three women, who corresponded for decades about their shared archival work in their respective anarchist libraries, light up anarchist assemblages. Material practices can embody ideas. As I have gotten closer to these and other anarchists’ understanding of their work, I’ve come to see that people were not the only meaningful agents of anarchism. Non-human and non-organic entities brought their own energies to the movement. Political theorist Jane Bennett calls this thing power: things interacted with people, they enriched the sensorium of anarchism’s political culture. The presses, ink, paper, and publications were actants in the movement, contributing to the sensorium. Mutually touching and being touched is a creative opportunity for political practice. I speculate that the anarchist movement was successful in creating many alternative sites of prefigurative politics, including schools, unions, workshop, and publications, in part because there was so much potent thing power in their immediate surroundings. When people make things together, and are made by things together, a resonant political energy can emerge.
--Marshal Zeringue
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