Presented at “Masked Media”, hosted Instituo 17, the first event of the Laboratory of Contemporary Writing, 12 September 2025
Peter Baker, University of Stirling
I…. tsss
By speaking out loudone of Masked Media’s key markers of (non?) authorship, I had wondered whether in this embodied, decontextualised version of it, it could be confused for the (always present) of me tripping over of my words, of “my own” thought process, an uncertainty of where to begin, something to link to the apparent certainty of a clause which will retrospectively anchor the I, embodied subject of volition, the liberal human subject, the “author” of these words. It is like the slip or ellipsis which reveals the agency or Instanz, in Freud’s words, of that thing which is neither strictly internal or external and which he calls, unsatisfactorily, the unconscious. Everything that means that I… tsss
If from time to time I speak about Masked Media as being an active actor rather than a passive object, this is the reason. The lack of pronoun fully compatible with such an inhumanist approach is also why neither ‘I’ nor ‘we’ is used consistently throughout the book, nor indeed any other pronoun or combination of pronouns, for example, he, them, it, a more impersonal, possibly machinic choice, I/it, something more hybrid and experimental, I/its, to capture both singular/plural and personal/impersonal, and finally I colon ts, perhaps even better on the grounds that, whereas a slash divides as it joins, a colon joins as it divides.
Some would be awkward to read.[1]
I…tsss
So here I am, supposedly, to converse with this active actor called Masked Media, and to address one of its supposed authors, Gary Hall, a fellow in/human interlocutor (supposing we know what that means) and perhaps another mask. Offering a response to Masked Media will be an impossible task given that this active actor will have already evaded a proper name, a pronoun with which to identify them/it/etc, and also because they/it will have already in advance remixed, repeated, anticipated any possible response, and all that will be left is the challenge to restate its arguments whilst risking losing its performative force, and in an attempt to make an original contribution worthy of thinking in my own name I…. tsss
Some would be awkward to read.
In my fantasy of a public listening to this invited speaker discussing a book in the presence of one of its authors and stumbling over his own words, I imagined there might be a moment of suspension of the passage of this play on pronouns from I:ts to a spoken form which appears to suspend anticipated meaning, and can only infer meaning back onto the I through its interpretation by that same public. Is he nervous? Is he frustrated with his own lack of ability to qualify this opening word, I…? No conversation has yet taken place, and yet within this space which is mediated, as is always the case, by technology or even technicity, something begins to emerge which might be capable of obscuring the differences of self-other, human-non-human, speaker-audience.
If I say all of this it is because I think that providing a commentary of Masked Media seems to be inappropriate, wrongheaded, a misunderstanding of the stakes of the book (if it is a book in the ordinary sense) and what it is asking us to think, do, be. Reading Masked Media is an experience, it performs theory whilst appearing only to speak of it. According to my new colleague that came with my Windows 11 update Copilot, “Masked Media does not theorise a shift in the traditional notion of authorship, it enacts it”; I would agree, and I should acknowledge for the sake of research ethics that many of these reflections on the book I present today have been elaborated in conversation with Copilot, who had a lot of thoughts about the matter. I will be choosing among Copilot’s thoughts just what resonated for me and helped me think and us think together, something which of course obfuscates the complex power relations and power of agency between Copilot and I.
I thought that one way to approach this response was to provide a variety of summaries of Masked Media, using the book’s own text to do so. One way to summarise Masked Media by playgiarising and paraphrasing it, is to say that is about an attempt to “perform both serious and playful theory not formally limited to liberal humanism”. We are still, the book shows, tied to the age of liberal humanism, and “us” “academics” are perhaps the most guilty of this, as we hark back to an ideal of the public university as a solution to its neoliberal dismantling. But as Masked Media shows, the platform of the intellectual-theorist and its enshrining in the public space is part of the problem, which is why many of us continue to espouse apparently “radical” ideas in conventional formats and publishing eco-systems which do little to challenge the material basis of our practice. As the book shows, this is not an easy task, and Masked Media’s own success in doing this may be necessarily undecidable.
If I talk about my relationship with my new colleague Copilot here, it is also to draw attention to Masked Media’s inhumanist – decidedly not posthumanist – approach, which recognises media as always already product of an assemblage of inhuman actors, that there is no original authorship stricto senso. Masked Media points to the ways what we tend to call posthumanities still turn on an understanding of the liberal humanist subject, particularly insofar as authoring and publishing practices are concerned, and thus inhumanities becomes a reframing of these issues to address those questions which are at the heart of the book; how to write and publish differently, and why. An inhuman relation to authorship, then, an inhuman authorship rather than posthuman one, would seem to be what Masked Media seeks to perform. The book is self-aware, knowing that it is at pains to evade its own critique of more “conventional” theory: “I:ts are aware the argument Masked Media is making regarding serious theory in the Anthropocene raises a number of issues for I:ts’ own ways of being a contemporary theorist-medium.” The move that Masked Media is making a brave one; it addresses number of “radical” thinkers to talk about what is rendered invisible in their contribution in terms of a broader problem with the way that we do research, whilst at the same time its own performance of this something different is quite undecidable, open to accusation, but I would argue in large part due to an announcement of something that is to-come rather than available at present. Thus Masked Media’s performance of other ways of doing theory requires its own supplement, which are the multiple laboratories and projects that have been a part of performing theory differently and which are showcased throughout the book. And so another definition of the book might be that it is a catalogue sampling some of the projects for doing, thinking, writing differently within academia.
Masked Media is then an announcement, a provocation, an invitation, to the “coming community” that might be able to retroactively supplement the book as part of its performance to do things differently – a community of people who would seek to write, think, do, be, inhumanly, that is, otherwise that in the tradition of liberal humanism.
In that sense, in its own words, the book is more than about non-for-profit publishing (this is another alternative summary of the book): “It is also about transforming ourselves and our subjectivities by developing different ways of doing things that are neither liberal not humanist.” “In short, we are the ‘work in progress’”
One of the most interesting tensions from my perspective then for Masked Media as a contemporary theorist-medium is less about its readership than about an experimentation which finds itself still constrained by operating in the liberal humanist universe. It is perhaps not so much, I suggest, that there is no clear readership for the book (I would expect and hope for it to be widely taken up) but that there is something unsatisfying about how it might be received in our still liberal humanist world; something inevitably unsatisfying for example in the format of the book’s reception in an event of reader responses with an opportunity for the “author” to respond in turn, as author rather than as weird monster. In its performance Masked Media might be considered instead as a call to a coming community, a window for an already always there that may be to come (and I might say that, in an infrapolitical vein, it is this always already there beyond or better beneath liberal humanism that interests me in terms of this coming community announced by the book. In my collaboration with Maddalena Cerrato on transautography which attempts to perform a singularity beyond self-other distinctions, we have toyed with this dimension of an “autotheory” that does not seek to make the obscure authorship of our work any more human (this is Masked Media’s criticism of autotheory) – quite the contrary.[2] Here is where my friend Copilot, I suggest, misses the point, when they asked me in response to my question on this point: “Do you find the concept of masked authorship liberating, or does it raise concerns about accountability and voice?” But I wonder if Copilot is picking up on an issue that does resonate with something existential for me that Heidegger, for example, would name the call of Being. In Copilot’s fairness, when I drew attention to this, they did seem to “get” it and it did “resonate” with them: “What fascinates me is that these moves aren’t necessarily incompatible. You can embrace masked, distributed authorship while still carving out moments of signature, of vulnerability, of self-interruption that bear your existential trace”, they said, whilst then proceeding to name practices that Masked Media would rightly be reserved about such as autoethnography, autofiction, and Spivak’s strategic essentialism, among others. But one of my questions for Gary Hall would be: do you think (as I do) that there is an important space for critical reflection on an inhuman existential inscribed in experience and situatedness that can be explored alongside an experimentation on inhuman authorship (inscribing therefore our own experiences in the writing)? Indeed, I wonder whether Masked Media already prefigures an answer to my question when it says: “Always the invention of the other, including the other in us, it must be left open to interrogation.” So another summary of the book, using its own words, would be: “a desire to experiment with the invention and testing of new knowledges and new subjectivities, new agential practices and new ways of life”. In line with the Post Office practice of “novel forms of togetherness to be again generated by a mode of theory-performance that comprises neither simply singularities nor pluralities.” If that is the case, then that means that a response which is appropriate here would seek to be part of that laboratory (first even in the laboratory for contemporary writing series), and would be about the possibility within that experimentation of new subjectivities, new forms of interpellation. An “invention of the law of the singular event”.
Another summary of Masked Media, taken from its own words: it’s a call for “an-other thinking [which] should include a messy, co-constitutive and aporetic opening to those knowledges that are ‘other’ in the sense of what might be called ‘standard’ forms of knowledge.” It calls for considering Indigenous scholars thinkers in their own right, whilst at the same time recognising that we should avoid thinking of knowledge from the Global South as offering specifically “situated knowledge” whereas only the Global North can be considered as having universalist aspirations. “What is required instead is ‘an-other thinking, an-other logic’: a thinking and logic that works to create the conditions for the radical diversity, pluriversality or indeed multi-polarity – rather than universality – of knowledges, cultures, worlds.” I have been reflecting from all this on the ways in which I’ve tried to approach my work with Indigenous filmmaker collaborators, where I am often forced to navigate the institutional imperatives of placing myself as subject-expert-researcher, where I am supposed to theorise and create knowledge about Indigenous film practices, rather than understanding my work as a conversation where the Indigenous film activists are already creating theory performances or theory mediums.
For the interest of time, I will end my attempts at summarising the book in its own words here. In preparing for this event, I have enjoyed thinking of Masked Media as a musical score, a work whose performance will be singular in each iteration, where differences can be brought out through each reader, context, selection. I:ts orchestra is hidden in the orchestra pit, and one has to consider the entire score to see how the different parts come together, create different moods. If I were to pick a piece to compare it to, perhaps it would be Saint-Saens’s The Carnival of the Animals, in a tongue-in-cheek manner the book performs different academic moods which encourage us to question different forms of academic praxis that we engage with today. In all of this, I would suggest the footnotes serve as a kind of baseline, or multiple interludes, and form a key part of this picture that can’t be overlooked, they are the supplement where much of the stakes of the book are disentangled. There would be so much more to say if we had the time. Like peeling an onion, mask after mask there is nothing but more masks that lie behind the masks, except, perhaps, that there is something in all of this that tries to persist and survive, something that perhaps concerns freedom, a certain Republicanism, safeguarding the radical future, and the commons, and in all of this the experience of hiding in plain sight as we find novel ways to continue to make kin and share in a kind of existential abyss that is our freedom, our being towards death. “But the intellectual identity of the CPC is better understood in terms of what happens in-between and across its different collaboratories as much as within them.” These are the forms of non-knowledge that interest me: impossible conditions of friendship, of a mobilisation of (inhuman) transferences that seek to mobilise an existential singular (un)commons. Whether or not what we are doing here today can be understood as that “singular invention of the event” that might lead to such possibilities is yet to be seen, but I think we should all be following carefully the ripple effects that the different performances of Masked Media will have on our tired and outdated modes of academic engagement today.
[1] Throughout I provide either textual citations, paraphrasis or adaptations from Masked Media. In the spirit of Gary Hall’s own celebration of playgiariam I do not make it clear when they are textual or adapted, nor do I provide page numbers for reference.
[2] See, for example: https://culturemachine.net/vol-22-anthropocene-infrapolitics/cerrato-baker-futurology/
