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Radical Printshop Collectives (UK) 1968-98: Politics and technology
Last modified: 2011-06-30
Abstract
Relatively cheap and accessible, digital technologies have facilitated the citizen designer, journalist and film-maker not only in the production of alternative and critical discourses but also the potential to almost instantaneously connect to a global public. The activist amateur can use the same tools as the professional — and the living power of the virtual network is indisputable. However, little over 30 years ago direct access to simple printing technology was also perceived as facilitating political, contestatory and empowering alternatives to the forms and practices of dominant media and culture.
Between the late 1960s and early 1980s numerous ‘alternative’ printshops were set up across the UK, with the founding objective of producing, providing or facilitating the cheap and safe printing of radical materials. They were started by libertarians, aligned and non-aligned Marxists, artists, anarchists and feminists, and as such were constitutive of the fractured and fractious politics of the post-1968 left. Their politics informed prefigurative ways of working; flat structures, collective decision making, anti-specialisation and skill sharing.
These printshops, which by the mid 1980s were to number 30 in London alone, had all but disappeared by the late 1990s. Speculative reasons for this obviously include the emergence of desktop publishing (Zeitlyn 1992) and then the internet, as providing new autonomies for radical communications. However from my preliminary studies of archival texts and dialogues it can be argued that there may be a series of other interconnected reasons — gathered around challenges to the presses ideological relationships to printing technology. These challenges came out of shifts, both pragmatic and ideological, in the radical discourses that informed the printshops instigation. The period between 1968 and 1998 was not just one of technological change, but also one where the politics of feminism, autonomy, participatory practices and agitprop image-making underwent significant contestation and change. The proposed paper seeks to outline these challenges in relation to the printshops and thus begin to offer a viable explanation for their demise.
Alternative media studies is a steadily burgeoning field, however its history is much less developed and the radical printshop collectives, who brought their politics to both how they worked and print-media they facilitated appear, despite their prevalence (not just in the UK, but in other parts of the globe too), to be barely mentioned. More broadly then, this research project hopes, in small part, to begin to address this gap.
Between the late 1960s and early 1980s numerous ‘alternative’ printshops were set up across the UK, with the founding objective of producing, providing or facilitating the cheap and safe printing of radical materials. They were started by libertarians, aligned and non-aligned Marxists, artists, anarchists and feminists, and as such were constitutive of the fractured and fractious politics of the post-1968 left. Their politics informed prefigurative ways of working; flat structures, collective decision making, anti-specialisation and skill sharing.
These printshops, which by the mid 1980s were to number 30 in London alone, had all but disappeared by the late 1990s. Speculative reasons for this obviously include the emergence of desktop publishing (Zeitlyn 1992) and then the internet, as providing new autonomies for radical communications. However from my preliminary studies of archival texts and dialogues it can be argued that there may be a series of other interconnected reasons — gathered around challenges to the presses ideological relationships to printing technology. These challenges came out of shifts, both pragmatic and ideological, in the radical discourses that informed the printshops instigation. The period between 1968 and 1998 was not just one of technological change, but also one where the politics of feminism, autonomy, participatory practices and agitprop image-making underwent significant contestation and change. The proposed paper seeks to outline these challenges in relation to the printshops and thus begin to offer a viable explanation for their demise.
Alternative media studies is a steadily burgeoning field, however its history is much less developed and the radical printshop collectives, who brought their politics to both how they worked and print-media they facilitated appear, despite their prevalence (not just in the UK, but in other parts of the globe too), to be barely mentioned. More broadly then, this research project hopes, in small part, to begin to address this gap.