Now that you're ready for the real thing

This chapter draws on Higgins’s experiential reading of the ccV TRE Fluxus newsletter’s February issue from 1964, republished by the New York-based publisher Primary Information in 2024. In doing so, Higgins situates Edward S. Reed’s theorizing of primary, sensory information (for Reed, a cornerstone of education in the “information age”), in dialogue with the expanded texts of Fluxus’s time—expanded in the sense that they, like the ccV TRE newsletters, modeled new ways of reading beyond conventional print layouts. In its historic sense, the ccV TRE newsletters served both pedagogical and political functions, with the aim of sensitizing the reader to a world increasingly mediated through mass media. By linking publishing with conservation, Higgins poses the act of republishing as a means of perpetuating Fluxus’s contemporary relevance, and, further still, of extending Fluxus’s life in the present.