Sam Wooley

Sam Wooley was born and raised in Seattle. He currently resides in Brooklyn, where he works in a bookstore and studies communist and black radical thought, practices of autonomous collective life, and nonperformance.

Title of Project

The Writing of Nonperformance: Autonomous Printing and Publishing in Revolutionary Detroit.

Description of Project

My paper is a consideration of what I call autonomous print and publishing projects in revolutionary Detroit, 1967-1974. Autonomous, for how they attempted to disarticulate themselves from the racial capitalist publishing industry to establish channels for the circulation of printed material within and against the commodity and contract forms. Autonomous also for their particular relation to and articulation of Marxist autonomism. In the paper, I look at three of these print and publishing projects, the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement (and their newsletter series), the Detroit Printing Co-op, and Broadside Press. I understand these printed materials as not only examples of performative writing, writings which do something in the world, but attend to the writings’ close proximity to and circulation within modes of antipolitical nonperformance, specifically the riot and the wildcat strike, in order to complicate our understandings of performative writing. These materials reveal an ontology of print, if one can speak of such a thing, not oriented towards the performative enactment or production of revolutionary subjectivity or the building of democratic counterpublics, but the staging of an occasion for social gathering, the generalization the afformative social formations of the wildcat and the riot.

Project Inspiration

This essay was inspired by multiple organizing projects I participated in when I lived in Seattle, including a unionization campaign at the bookstore I used to work at and a mutual aid effort to distribute free books throughout the city. These organizing projects inspired questions that led me to the rich archive of print culture in revolutionary Detroit, questions which concerned the problematic relationship between unionism and the reproduction of capitalism, especially through the expansion of the contract form, and the possibility for the circulation of radical literatures to proliferate insurgent social movement. It is my hope that this paper will be the beginning of a longer project that considers the forms of collective autonomous life of revolutionary Detroit through the lens of nonperformance and attempts to critically grapple with the problems that adhere to the performativity of the contract form.

Areas of Academic Interest

marxism, black studies, performance and labor, poetics, print cultures