Jim Fleming

TL

When I first met you, I took the train from Soho to Brooklyn and tried to envision a past New York City—it’s basically a cliché now—thinking about the obvious transition from crumbling, buildings-on-fire to wealthy playground. Are you from New York City? Have you always lived in Williamsburg?

JF

I’ve lived here for forty-two years. It has been basically gentrified all over so many times it is barely recognizable. I moved to New York in the summer of 1979 from Iowa City, Iowa. I almost finished a PhD in literary theory. My dissertation was in Marxist aesthetics and semiotics, but I dropped out—I had reservations about the ivory tower. I dipped into media practice when I was in school, like radio broadcasting, book reviewing, and editing a daily newspaper. I always felt more comfortable and engaged in communal interactions via media practices.

TL

Did you grow up in Iowa City?

JF

No. I was born and raised in a small-town called Clear Lake, Iowa, which at the time was about three thousand people. I went to high school in the adjoining city called Mason City—this is about half way between the Twin Cities and Des Moines. When I graduated from high school, I decided to attend the state school.

TL

How did you go from small-town Iowa to Marxist aesthetics?

JF

There were only two books in my family house growing up: an information almanac and Sinclair Lewis’ Arrowsmith. My parents were not readers. My father had a fifth-grade education. My mother went to one year of beauty school. We were a lumpen family. We aspired to the working class. But finding books in the Clear Lake library was such a joy. In junior high school, the Existentialists excited me. I read Camus, Sartre, Kierkegaard, and other writers generally classified as Existentialist. My father, who was twenty-years older than my mother, became a traveling salesman selling bakery supplies. I’d often travel with him on the upper routes of the Midwest. I became a very avid reader. My father was in his mid-forties when I was born. He had a varied career—very picaresque. He was orphaned at age nine. In the mid ’60s, he started his own bakery business, which failed promptly. He made this choice almost simultaneously with the decline of all bakeries in small towns throughout the Midwest. When he started this business, every small-town had a bakery, but supermarkets knocked out all of the small neighborhood groceries, and now supermarkets were putting in their own bakery divisions, so all the small-town bakeries went out of business. My father started his business exactly at this turning point. His business went bankrupt. It was a formative, radical event for me, because he clearly suffered enormously from this lack of foresight. He was very hard working, but he was blindsided from this precarity.

TL

So, you enrolled into University of Iowa and found a community of like-minded people, except academe was not for you, so you moved to New York City in 1979.

JF

Yes. When I came to New York, I thought I would try and find a job in book publishing—a sort of bridge between an active life in media and the academy. I didn’t know anyone in the publishing business, but I eventually got a job with a tiny publishing house called J.F. Bergin in 1980. I commissioned an anthology on German Expressionism called The Passion and Rebellion: The Expressionist Heritage; Antonio Negri’s first book in English, Marx Beyond Marx; The Crisis in Historical Materialism by Stanley Aronowitz; Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz’s Indians of the Americas; and a couple books in Feminist anthropology.

TL

You published all of these in one year?

JF

Yes. Ever since I’ve published roughly fifteen books a year. I was the only employee for J.F. Burgin. It was that small. Jim Burgin had been a traveling salesman for Praeger publishers. He decided to start his own business after working for Praeger. They had been an independent publishing house, but CBS education eventually bought them. After a year or so of being the only employee and essentially packaging books for Praeger and Burgin, I realized I had taught myself how to do it and could do this myself. I began packaging some books solely for Praeger. I packaged the book, A Promise of Solidarity, about the Polish solidarity movement, and a number of others. At a certain point, I was able to keep the rights for the paperback versions of these books.

TL

Interesting. So, you absorbed everything you needed to learn to start your own publishing house by retaining paperback rights and republishing under Autonomedia. How did you curate these books? Did you already have a strong relationship with writers and translators?

JF

Yes. I was restive about the ivory tower or a job in academe, but I did have a lot of contacts. I was a fairly serious student. I used these contacts to package a number of books from the start; they were always in radical politics and culture. Praeger was interested in a number of these, so I bootstrapped Autonomedia to these projects. Then I republished them later.

TL

When did Autonomedia begin?

JF

I incorporated Autonomedia as a non-for-profit in late 1983. As a student, I was a big fan of Semiotext(e), so when I came to New York I investigated Semiotext(e) and found I knew some people who had ties to projects that were pending.  Semiotext(e) started at Columbia University. It was affiliated with the French department at Columbia with the faculty advisor, Sylvère Lotringer, and a bunch of graduate students. He was ten years my senior. Semiotext(e) from 1972 to 1979 was an irregular, more or less annual periodical. Some of these issues were very influential to me. I remember subscribing to Semiotext(e) when I was a young graduate student. By ’79, the graduate student collective, which was the heart of that project, dissolved, mostly because they were graduating and moving on. The project was essentially ending. I started working with Sylvère at this point. He was facing the dissolution of the original group and talking about the dismantling of the avant-garde. He thought the project was coming to an end. I started publishing around this time with Autonomedia, so I convinced Sylvère to keep it alive; I suggested we start a book series.

TL

I didn’t know Semiotext(e) almost ended with the periodicals.

JF

Sylvère did not really participate in the last four or five issues [Semiotext(e) USA, Radiotext, Semiotext(e) SF, Oasis, Semiotext(e) Architecture]. But he resurfaced for the series we named the Foreign Agent Series. Many of which were translations from French philosophers, but some were also from American, Swiss, or Italian authors. Between 1979 and 2000, Sylvère and I published about forty books under the Semiotext(e) imprint. These were basically published by Autonomedia. It became the publishing mechanism for a number of Semiotext(e) imprints.

Sylvère and I were coeditors of the Semiotext(e) books initially then Chris Kraus became a third editor, but I was also publishing other books just under Autonomedia. Sylvère was not a part of Autonomedia and this was a point of contention, because Autonomedia soon had a very active collective of about a dozen people, and Sylvère was not among them. He was not interested in anything other than Semiotext(e), but Autonomedia had a not-for-profit corporate form and Semiotext(e) did not. It had a small bank account, but it was never very substantial as a publishing entity. It was an irregular, annual journal.

TL

How did you keep these entities financially afloat?

JF

Well, I started by borrowing from my life insurance policy. I applied for a number of grants. We got some from the New York State Council on the Arts Literature program and some other programs. I was still doing projects for Praeger, which provided funding. It was always tricky. I never had a salary from any of this publishing work. It has never been financially viable. I taught for thirty-five years as an adjunct at Hunter College in the film and media department. I taught a number of courses in communication theory, propaganda, and of course semantics and semiotics, and some other media criticism courses. I had an income, albeit a small one, for thirty-five years. There was never any money for a salary for anybody at Semiotext(e) or Autonomedia.

TL

How did you meet Sylvère?

JF

I met him through a guy named Christian Merazzi, the co-editor of an issue called Autonomia, Post-Political Politics, which was devoted to the Italian Autonomia movement. Christian Merazzi was the engine of that project, but Sylvère and him were co-editors. I had learned of Autonomia and Toni Negri through a review in The New York Review of Books about Negri that must have been published around ’81. There was a review of Negri’s work when there was nothing in English. Negri was a very interesting figure to me because of the politics of the Autonomia movement. He was the most famous person in the movement and at the time in prison, because he was accused of kidnapping and murdering Aldo Moro, the Italian Prime Minster. And Sylvère clearly had finger on French philosophy, which was exciting; he’d been an acquittance of Felix Guattari and also Paul Virillo, Jean Baudrillard. He was known as an expert on French theory. I did get to know Guattari and Baudrillard. I previously met Jacques Derrida, because I studied with Gayatri Spivak, who was translating Of Grammatology. I also had been working with Ruedi Kuenzli, a well-known figure in Dada Studies.

TL

How did Autonomia influence Semiotext(e) and Autonomedia?

JF

French philosophy certainly had an engagement with Marxism, but it wasn’t traditional Marxism. It was more Althusserian, Post-Structural, so I suppose it was Post-Marxism. Marxism had long been a major element of French politics in a way that has not happened in the United States, mostly because of McCarthyism. The features in Marxism that were appealing to me were more renewed in the examination of French philosophy in the sixties and seventies.

TL

You and Sylvère shared this, which created a sort of catalyst to start publishing the Foreign Agent Series.

JF

Yes. The magazine wasn’t really Marxist in the same way Baudrillard, Guattari, Virillo, and Lyotard were moving on from a much more Marxist-centric view of politics. They all had been trained in Marxism, but their attachment was fraying, so it was an early Post-Marxist movement, or a challenging view. I did an anthology called Re-Thinking Marxism with a lot of the more traditional critics, so I also was re-thinking Marxism. I hadn’t rejected it, but I certainly found inflections in the Marxism that are nontraditional and nonstandard. Mostly influenced by the Autonomia movement and radical Italian feminism.

TL

How did you design the iconic covers of the Foreign Agent Series?

JF

There was this French book series with these back covers of fairly large type of an excerpt. I had designed a lot of covers for Burgin, including some with small type illustrations on the front cover. It’s exploding into big type on the cover. Around that time, the US passed a law called Foreign Agents Registration Act in the early eighties, maybe late seventies. It said if you were in service of a Foreign government, you had to register this fact with the US government, so I used a paragraph from the Foreign Agents Registration Act as this tiny secretive or conspiratorial type on the front for the series. I designed a poster as well that was called, “Foreign Agent Series: Strangers in the Night.” There were maybe thirty to forty little black pocket books.

TL

Did you ever imagine these books would have such an effect on culture?

JF

No, but these ideas are very compelling. They certainly didn’t change the world enough. They became influential mostly in the art world. The idea was to take these intellectual currents from Europe and distribute them in the world, hoping they’d resonate in the street. They all shared a resemblance to radical politics and culture.

TL

This fits your reservations about academia. Due to their curation and marketing, they reached a different audience.

JF

I thought I could be more influential outside the cloisters of academia.

TL

How would you describe the split that happened from you and Sylvère in New York City to Sylvère and Chris Kraus in Los Angeles?

JF

The split happened in 2000. For twenty years, Sylvère and I worked on Semiotext(e) titles together as coeditors, and I as the publisher. When Chris decided she wanted to be the publisher, her parents had run a small press in New Zealand, and Sylvère retired from Columbia University, we split up somewhat acrimoniously. I haven’t had many professional break ups, but Chris wanted to be the publisher of Semiotext(e), so they moved to southern California in 2000. During that time, the distribution of Semiotext(e) switched to MIT Press and I’ve been erased from the official history of Semiotext(e).

TL

Why do you say that?

JF

Chris and Sylvère published an anthology entitled Hatred of Capitalism that didn’t include any of the stuff that had been done with or through me. I’m not mentioned at all. I was not mentioned at all in Sylvère’s New York Times obituary. Chris and I were never big fans. Sylvère had a kind of imperialist style that was sort of off-putting to me, but I stuck it out for a long time. I guess one of the final straws was Chris’ I Love Dick. I was a fan of Dick Hebdige, who was sort of outed in that book. I didn’t want to be responsible. Dick Hebdige had a lawyer send her a cease-and-desist order to prevent the publication, which made me feel uncomfortable publishing that book. Our working relationship only worsened with time. I haven’t had many acrimonious divisions in my many decades of working in publishing, but Sylvère and I didn’t split on good terms. We sort of signed off on each other.

TL

Do you see value in Chris changing Semiotext(e), in terms of adding female or queer voices?

JF

Definitely. Sylvère and I published very few women in our series. Chris made a valuable, corrective role. I just didn’t like her personally. I was keen on Shulamith Firestone, who I got to know quite well, and a number of the other writers Chris included in her series. I was happy to publish the series. I just wasn’t pleased with Chris’ personal politics, particularly around I Love Dick, which I saw as unjust to Dick Hebdige.

TL

I see. Another important relationship I noticed, especially his involvement with Semiotext(e) USA and Semiotext(e) SF, is Peter Lamborn Wilson. You’ve also published a lot of his books and you knew him for a very long time till he passed away in 2022. Where does he fit into your vision as a publisher?

JF

I’ve published about fifteen books with Peter. I have a couple of others in the pipe. I will be bringing out, with an arrangement with City Lights, two new editions of his books that are out of print. I always felt more friendly and closer to Peter than I did with Sylvère. Peter had a lively set of interests that resonated with me. He was extremely intelligent even though he didn’t graduate with a college degree. In the early years of Autonomedia, there was a very lively editorial collective and we met weekly sometimes with thirty or forty people. I’ve now published far more books under Autonomedia than Semiotext(e).

TL

It seems Peter Lamborn Wilson’s Temporary Autonomous Zone and your books with Silvia Federici have a certain underground success.

JF

They’re also very important to me intellectually. I named Autonomedia in homage to the Autonomia movement. It had a kind of political presence throughout the seventies that say May ’68 in Paris didn’t have. The Situationist and the political work that came out of May ’68 was significant, but it never had the street political influence that Autonomia had in Italy. Of course, this was suppressed by the arrest or forced immigration of thousands of people. I felt closer to the Italian experience. I thought Silvia’s ideas and her feminist critique on fundamental Marxist ideas important, so I’ve done a handful of books on Italian feminism, some of which I’ve co-published.

TL

What is the connection between the strife of your father’s bakery business, the communal aspect of Semiotext(e) and Autonomia, and the important of publishing books? Or, perhaps a life in books, and your ability to sustain it, is a rebuke of your past, as well as a hopeful leap in the future—a service as a sort of catalyst. Maybe that’s the role of an ideal publisher.

JF

I think that’s true. For most of recorded history, the book has been the most important media form. It hasn’t lost that, but it does have less influence, but in terms of conveying knowledge I think it’s the most important form of media expression. I like film, music, and television, but the book is the best form for real thinking. The world has been saturated in media for centuries. It’s inescapable.

TL

Yet, you still publish books.

JF

I don’t think I’ll ever stop. There are times when I think that the political advocacy of long form media is diminished. That the short form has won the day in terms of popular expression. What I do has never been commercial viable. It’s a niche audience, but I still think it’s possible for small audiences to have an enormous influence on daily life. I still think that media is maybe the single biggest lever for political change.