Differences & Repetitions

My latest essay, “Acknowledged Goods: Cultural Studies and the Politics of Academic Journal Publishing,” is now out in Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 7(1) (March 2010), pp. 3-25. In my opinion, it’s probably the single most important journal essay I’ve published to date. Here’s the abstract:

This essay explores the changing context of academic journal publishing and cultural studies’ envelopment within it. It does so by exploring five major trends affecting scholarly communication today: alienation, proliferation, consolidation, pricing, and digitization. More specifically, it investigates how recent changes in the political economy of academic journal publishing have impinged on cultural studies’ capacity to transmit the knowledge it produces, thereby dampening the field’s political potential. It also reflects on how cultural studies’ alienation from the conditions of its production has resulted in the field’s growing involvement with interests that are at odds with its political proclivities.

Keywords: Cultural Studies; Journal Publishing; Copyright; Open Access; Scholarly Communication

I’m fortunate to have already had the published essay reviewed by Ben Myers and Desiree Rowe, who podcast over at The Critical Lede. You can listen to their thoughtful commentary on “Acknowledged Goods” by clicking here — and be sure to check out their other podcasts while you’re at it!

Since I’m on the topic of the politics of academic knowledge, I’d be remiss not to mention Siva Vaidhyanathan’s amazing piece from the 2009 NEA Almanac of Higher Education, which recently came to my attention courtesy of Michael Zimmer. It’s called “The Googlization of Universities.” I found Siva’s s discussion of bibliometrics — the measurement of bibliographic citations and journal impact — to be particularly intriguing. I wasn’t aware that Google’s PageRank system essentially took its cue from that particular corner of the mathematical universe. The piece also got me thinking more about the idea of “algorithmic culture,” which I’ve blogged about here from time to time and that I hope to expand upon in an essay.

Please shoot me an email if you’d like a copy of “Acknowledged Goods.” Of course, I’d be welcome any feedback you may have about the piece, either here or elsewhere.

D&R readers in North America may not be familiar with Cultural Studies Review (neé The UTS Review [1995-2002]), but it’s one of the most innovative cultural studies journals around. Now it gets even better: CSR has gone open-access, with all of the journal’s content freely available online. Definitely check out the current issue and, while you’re at it, why not troll through the archive?

edited by John Frow and Katrina Schlunke
co-edited with with Clifton Evers, Andrew Gorman-Murray and Emily Potter

SPECIAL ISSUE CONTENTS:

• John Frow and Katrina Schlunke, Editorial, “Rural Cultural Studies”
• Clifton Evers, Andrew Gorman-Murray and Emily Potter, ‘Introduction: Doing Rural Cultural Studies’
• Lisa Slater, ‘Who Do I Serve?’
• Emily Potter, ‘The Ethics of Rural Place-Making: Public Space, Poetics, and the Ontologies of Design’
• Rob Garbutt, ‘The Clearing: Heidegger’s Lichtung and The Big Scrub’
• Michelle Duffy, ‘Sound Ecologies’
• Andrew Gorman-Murray, ‘An Australian Feeling for Snow: Towards Understanding Cultural and Emotional Dimensions of Climate Change’
• Deb Anderson, ‘Drought, Endurance and Climate Change “Pioneers”: Lived Experience in the Production of Rural Environmental Knowledge’
• Michelle Dicinoski, Poems: ‘Weights’ and ‘Measures’
• Kim Satchell, ‘Auto-choreography: Animating Sentient Archives’
• Tanya J. King, ‘Damming the Flow: Cultural Barriers to Perceived Procedural Justice‚ in Wonthaggi, Victoria’
• Rae Dufty, ‘Reflecting on Power Relationships in the ‘Doing’ of Rural Cultural Research’
• Lisa Slater, ‘“Calling our Spirits Home”: Indigenous Cultural Festivals and the Making of a Good Life’
• Melissa Gregg, ‘Available in Selected Metros Only: Rural Melancholy and the Promise of Online Connectivity’
• Ross Gibson, ‘Intimacy’

POETRY:

• Ouyang Yu, Four Poems: ‘Bad Blurbs’, ‘2009’, ‘“Australia”’‚ and ‘World Atlas: A Random Fragmentary Selection’
• Pam Brown, ‘Windows Wound Down’

ARTICLES:

• Ann Game and Andrew Metcalfe, ‘Presence of the Gift’
• Katelyn Barney, ‘Gendering Aboriginalism: A Performative Gaze on Indigenous Australian Women’
• Sarah Gillman, ‘Heroes, Mates and Family: How Tragedy Teaches Us About Being Australian’

REVIEWS:

• Margaret Henderson on Angela McRobbie, The Aftermath of Feminism: Gender, Culture and Social Change
• Adrian Martin on Stuart Cunningham, In the Vernacular: A Generation of Culture and Controversy
• Deane Williams on Ross Gibson, The Summer Exercises
• Dimitris Vardoulakis on Nick Mansfield, Theorizing War: From Hobbes to Badiou
• Sarah Cefai on Samantha Holland (ed.), Remote Relationships in a Small World

ABOUT THE JOURNAL:
Cultural Studies Review is a peer-refereed open-access e-journal published twice a year (in March and September) by UTSePress. This is the journal’s first issue as a purely on-line publication. You can view the journal here: http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index.php/csrj. Access is free, but you do need to register. Once you have done this, you can read the current issues, receive publication alerts for all future issues, submit articles for consideration on-line and, if you are willing, record your research interests for our referee database.

Register now, and keep up to date with the latest high-quality research and innovative writing in the realm of cultural studies. Queries: csreview@unimelb.edu.au

I’m beginning a new project that explores the relationship of religious book publishing to mid-century (i.e., the 20th) liberalism in the United States. What better way to begin, I thought, than to read Lionel Trilling’s The Liberal Imagination (1950)? There he makes the controversial claim that liberalism was “not only the dominant but even the sole intellectual tradition” prevalent in the United States at the time that he was writing. That much I expected to find in the book; what I got was so much more — an education, really, and a glimmer of one of the paths-not-taken of U.S. cultural studies.

One of Trilling’s themes is untimeliness, and indeed the term aptly describes his own work. He perceptively anticipated many theoretical developments whose “discovery” most would attribute to English and French intellectuals working decades later. Take his definition of culture, for instance: “Culture is not a flow, nor even a confluence; the form of its existence is struggle, or at least debate–it is nothing if not a dialectic” (p. 9). Sounds a lot like E. P. Thompson to me. Or consider this passage, which almost could have come from Michel Foucault’s Archaeology of Knowledge:

Yet another thing that we have not understood with sufficient complication is the nature of ideas in their relation to their development and in relation to their transmission. Too often we conceive of an idea as being like the baton that is handed from runner to runner in a relay race. But an idea as a transmissible thing is rather like the sentence that in the parlor game is whispered about in a circle (p. 191).

Trilling also argues that literature produces ideas, or philosophy, an argument that brings him within shouting distance of Deleuze. There’s more: he was anti-relativist, believed in the activity of audiences, and understood well the relationship of knowledge production and social control.

But it’s not enough simply to locate Trilling as an unacknowledged forebear of some of our more contemporary theoreticians. It’s also crucial to understand his intellectual style. Trilling could say more in a single, pointed sentence than most highly skilled writers can say in an entire essay, maybe even a volume. What’s more, he did so with the barest minimum of theoretical terminology or jargon.

So, for example, while it’s clear that he drew near to what, two decades later, would become the Foucauldian understanding of discourse, never did he long to coin a phrase to describe self-propagating communication. Trilling insisted that we engage not with catchy theoretical words that one could either “use” or “reject” depending on one’s allegiances. Instead, he demanded that we engage with the full substance of his arguments and reasoning.

Is his having done so a cause of the present abandonment of his work? Did Trilling expect too much of us, his readers and interlocutors?

A partisan of liberalism Trilling may have been, but in all affairs of the heart, mind, and politics he seems not to have been an ideologue. This is reflected, for example, in his discussion of literary criticism, where he deftly navigates the Scylla of historicism (or conditionalism) and the Charybdis of New Criticism. Ultimately he upholds the value of both, but in a masterfully dialectical way in which the one exposes the weaknesses in the other, ultimately opening up both to repair.

Trilling worked at a time when academics, for better or for worse, still were able to write “without apology or self-consciousness” (p. 253). There is evident in his work a deference to tradition and a sense of accountability to what others may hold dear, culturally or politically. Yet there remains a boldness to his work, even a brashness, that would seem almost unimaginable in academic discourse today.

In Trilling’s worst moments, as in his discussion of homosexuality and the Kinsey Report, the change of tone is a welcome one. But in Trilling’s best moments, which are far more numerous, one can register not only the tenderness with which he approached those with whom he disagreed, but also the lack of graciousness endemic to our own critical conversations today.

Before getting down to business with the TOC for the latest issue of Culture Machine, I thought I’d put in a plug for Gary Hall’s latest effort. It’s called Digitize This Book! The Politics of New Media, or Why We Need Open Access Now (U of MN Press, 2008). The text is something of a manifesto for why Gary does what he does as editor of Culture Machine. It’s also so much more. I’d recommend the book highly to anyone navigating their way through the academy and its atavistic publishing apparatus.

CULTURE MACHINE 10 (2009)
http://www.culturemachine.net

PIRATE PHILOSOPHY
Tenth Anniversary Issue, edited by Gary Hall

This tenth anniversary issue of Culture Machine explores how the development of various forms of digital culture and ‘internet piracy’ is affecting notions of authorship, intellectual property, copyright law, publication, attribution, citation, accreditation, fair use, content creation and cultural production that were established pre-internet. Contributors address the theme of piracy in the content and/or by playing provocatively with the form of their texts.

The ‘Pirate Philosophy’ issue features:

• Gary Hall, ‘Pirate Philosophy (Version 1.0): Open Access, Free Content, Free/Libre/Open Media’
• Adrian Johns, ‘Piracy as a Business Force’
• Jonas Andersson, ‘For the Good of the Net: The Pirate Bay as a Strategic Sovereign’
• Don Joyce, Negativland, ‘Vapor Music’
• Kembrew McLeod, ‘Crashing the Spectacle: A Forgotten History of Digital Sampling, Infringement, Copyright Liberation and the End of Recorded Music’
• Alexander R. Galloway, ‘Debord’s Nostalgic Algorithm’
• Mark Amerika, ‘Source Material Everywhere: The Alfred North Whitehead Remix’
• Gary Hall, Clare Birchall and Pete Woodbridge, ‘Liquid Theory TV’
• Gary Hall and Clare Birchall, ‘New Cultural Studies: The Liquid Theory Reader’

The Culture Machine journal publishes new work from both established figures and up-and-coming writers. It is fully refereed, and has an International Advisory Board which includes Geoffrey Bennington, Robert Bernasconi, Sue Golding, Lawrence Grossberg, Peggy Kamuf, Alphonso Lingis, Meaghan Morris, Paul Patton, Mark Poster, Avital Ronell, Nicholas Royle and Kenneth Surin.

Culture Machine welcomes original, unpublished submissions on any aspect of culture and theory. All contributions to Culture Machine are refereed anonymously. Anyone with material they wish to submit for publication is invited to contact:

Culture Machine c/o Dave Boothroyd and Gary Hall
e-mail: gary.hall@coventry.ac.uk and d.boothroyd@kent.ac.uk

Culture Machine is part of Open Humanities Press: http://www.openhumanitiespress.org

For more information, visit the Culture Machine site at: http://www.culturemachine.net

You may not know this, but one of my ongoing side projects revolves around the idea and practice of translation. I’ve written about it in a short chapter in the volume I co-edited called Communication as…: Perspectives on Theory. (Surprise, surprise–my contribution is called, “Communication as Translation.”) I’ve also presented some other work on the subject here and there at various conferences.

Anyway, I was pleased to receive an email announcement this morning alerting me to the latest issue of the journal Transversal (pictured above), whose theme is, “Talks on Translation.” Definitely check it out.

Like Traces (Hong Kong University Press), which is easily one of the most thought-provoking book series in cultural studies today, Transversal publishes all of its articles in multiple languages simultaneously. The result is a remarkably multilingual and heterodox forum for intellectual exchange about culture, politics, and the politics of culture.

In contrast to most books and journals in cultural studies and beyond, these publications don’t merely pay lip service to principles of difference, decentering, and globalization. Instead, they embody them. They do so by compelling authors, editors, and readers to engage a diverse global intellectual community, with all the difficulties and opportunities that entails.

Remarkable stuff.

Last May I posted a short snippet of a paper I was working on to the Differences & Repetitions Wiki. It was called “Acknowledged Goods: Cultural Studies and the Politics of Academic Journal Publishing.” The title summarizes the principal focus of the piece. Essentially I wanted to ask: why hasn’t the field of cultural studies given its instruments of scholarly communication–journals especially–more critical scrutiny?

I was encouraged by the many comments and questions I received in response to the two pairs of paragraphs and tables that I had posted online. I kept plugging away at “Acknowledged Goods” into the summer and finished a draft sometime in late June. I’ve been meaning to post the completed piece to D&R^W, but unfortunately other responsibilities have gotten in the way.

Until now, that is. I’ve finally managed to get “Acknowledged Goods” properly formatted for the wiki, so at long last you can read the whole essay by clicking here. Since this is a longer and much more nuanced version of the work I posted back in May, I’m still very interested in hearing your feedback. Indeed, “Acknowledged Goods” remains a work in progress, so your comments, questions, and concerns will only help as I keep tweaking the piece.

I hope that you enjoy “Acknowledged Goods” and, more important, that it spurs you to action. Academic journal publishing is at a critical crossroads right now, and cultural studies ought to weigh in on its present and future directions.

Well, at long last, I’ve finished my essay, “Acknowledged Goods: Cultural Studies and the Politics of Academic Journal Publishing.” I’ll be posting a full draft of the piece to the “Acknowledged Goods” page on the Differences & Repetitions Wiki. The wiki formatting will take some time, however, and for now, I have to direct my energies toward revising an essay on Harry Potter and the simulacrum. Once the full version of “Acknowledged Goods” is up on D&R-W, you’ll be sure to hear about it. For now, comments, ratings, and other feedback on this excerpt are welcome here.

…Most of us probably have done it at one time or another. By “it” I mean signing a publication agreement for a recently accepted journal article without reading the document carefully, or without pausing to consider the meaning and consequences of all the warrants, indemnities, and clauses ending with those ominous sounding words, “in perpetuity and in any form.” Like me, you probably resigned yourself to committing to the agreement, since the publisher told you, perhaps through a low-level editorial contact at the journal, that publication of your piece was contingent on your doing so without delay. Signing on the dotted line is “policy” she or he probably told you, politely but firmly, and if you do not do so promptly, you are liable to hold up production on the issue in which your work is scheduled to appear. Worse, if you hold out for too long, you risk having your essay dropped altogether. And so begrudgingly you sign, because keeping the process moving along would seem to outweigh whatever benefits might come from making an issue of it.

To me, this is among the most profound—and profoundly alienating—moments of academic labor. I mean this in both the Marxian sense of “alienation,” in which participation in the system of objectified wage labor existentially impoverishes of one’s species-being, as well as in the more strictly legal sense of the term, as defined by Margaret Jane Radin: “a separation of something—an entitlement, right, or attribute—from its holder.” Beyond these definitions, the ritual signing of journal publication contracts is alienating in at least three specific ways.

First, the extreme sense of urgency that tends to surround the whole process is incommensurate with the time it takes for most academic articles to appear in print. In my experience, this interval can last anywhere from six to eighteen months from the day I sign a publication agreement; in rare cases it has been shorter, and I know of myriad instances in which it has taken even longer. The atmosphere of last-minute-ism may help keep the publication process running smoothly. On the downside, it can preempt academic authors from reflecting critically on the legal documents we are charged with signing, which can in turn lead to the hasty forfeiture of key rights and entitlements—assuming we are even aware of them.

Second, the process cultivates a habitus in which we are perpetually disposed “to take one for the team.” Practically no one wants to be the curmudgeon responsible for delaying an entire journal issue while trying to negotiate terms of publication. Publishers recognize this. Consciously or not, they leverage this goodwill by persuading authors to sign away our rights in the name of a collective interest (i.e., timely publication). They do so by capitalizing on an incentive structure in which, ironically, a desire to be perceived as “collegial” and “professional” compels academic authors to deprive one another of the chance to question journal publishers, attorneys, or others about the legal ramifications of publishing our work.

Finally, the contractual moment alienates us scholars from the products of our labor. It customarily involves the transfer of key rights (e.g., ownership, duplication, derivation, etc.) from author to publisher, in whole or in part, in exchange for a variety of value-added services (e.g., typesetting, copyediting, marketing, etc.) and indirect rewards (e.g., promotion, tenure, professional recognition, etc.). Those benefits notwithstanding, signing on the dotted line transforms our labor into economically valuable intellectual property and, down the line, capital—assets publishers use to compete with one another in the marketplace. Our signatures allow journal publishers to disavow liability in matters of copyright infringement, obscenity, and so forth, moreover, thereby endowing them with deep ownership rights over material for which they accept only shallow legal responsibilities. An added “bonus” is that academic authors typically must shoulder all of the costs related to reproducing copyrighted images, song lyrics, and related materials, even though it is the journal publisher who reaps any financial rewards. In these cases, we are not merely giving our labor away, essentially for free; we are effectively paying a third party for the “privilege” of doing so.

Journal publication contracts are magical documents indeed. They transfigure good knowledge into saleable knowledge goods, in a series of moves that implicate us in, while keeping us at arm’s length from, the noisy sphere of industrial production….

Quite some time ago, I drafted a short conference paper called, “Acknowledged Goods: Cultural Studies and the Politics of Scholarly Journal Publishing.” I’ve presented versions of it at the annual cultural studies conference we hold here at Indiana University and at the “Cultural Studies Now” conference in London (both in 2007). I’ll be presenting still another, more refined version of the paper at “Crossroads in Cultural Studies” this July in Kingston, Jamaica.

Since I’m done revising my book, I’m able to return to “Acknowledged Goods” and to begin developing it in earnest. To that end, I’ve placed a snippet of the paper-in-progress on the Differences and Repetitions Wiki, which you can access by clicking here. I’d appreciate any comments you may have. You can leave feedback right on the site or email suggestions to me directly (striphas@indiana.edu).

Currently, there are only two paragraphs and a couple of tables, so the material shouldn’t take you too long to read. The information about journal publishers and their subscription prices may surprise and even alarm you (or, maybe not, if you’ve been following the open access debates). I’ll be adding more to the document in the coming weeks. Stay tuned.

Sorry for not having written in awhile. I’ve just been swamped, really swamped. So in lieu of something more substantial, let me share with you a revelation I had as I was struggling to revise an essay I first drafted many moons ago: it was so much easier to write the piece when it was wrong.

As it happens, the revelation I just had about my own work reminds me of a pearl of fortune cookie wisdom I received after dining at a local Chinese restaurant here in Bloomington. It reads: “It is harder to ask the right questions than to find answers to the wrong questions.”

Indeed. And isn’t that an almost a perfect description of the work cultural studies is supposed to do? It sort of reminds me of something my mentor and friend Larry Grossberg once said. To paraphrase roughly, if it seems too easy, you’re probably not doing cultural studies.

Well, I’ve been back from the University of East London’s “Cultural Studies Now–An International Conference” for almost a couple of weeks. I’d intended to write sooner, but my head’s just been dizzy trying to process the event–and getting caught up. Funny, isn’t it, how you often need a break after returning from a trip?

Overall, the conference was a good show. Anything with a keynote by Stuart Hall is bound to be excellent, as far as I’m concerned. I also enjoyed the plenary sessions featuring Kuan-Hsing Chen, who talked about “Asia as Method,” and Ien Ang, who offered a provocative reflection on where cultural studies might be headed. I regret having missed Rosi Braidotti, though I’d never been to London before and, well, London was calling. The panels I attended generally were quite good, and for my part I was pleased to present my work-in-progress on cultural studies and the politics of academic journal publishing. Gil “Revolution on Stick” Rodman and Melissa “Home Cooked Theory” Gregg have posted their thoughts on the conference, so you might want to check out their responses, too.

As you can see from the subject header, this post isn’t really about London, or about “Cultural Studies Now.” It’s about the side-trip I made after the conference to Paris, France. It’s an amazing city, and it’s long been a dream of mine to go there. I wasn’t disappointed. The art museums, the food, the architecture, the people, the language–it’s just a remarkable place. I’ll have to go back sometime soon…and maybe next time my near non-existent French will be a bit more existent.

Last year, when I traveled to Italy, I made a point of swinging by Rome’s Protestant Cemetery, where the Marxist activist and political theorist Antonio Gramsci is interred. In the same spirit I tried tracking down the burial sites of some of my favorite French philosophers before heading to Paris. Unfortunately, I didn’t get very far. Michel Foucault apparently is buried somewhere in northern France, Jacques Derrida in a Parisian suburb. Félix Guattari may be interred at La Borde Clinic, where he worked, and who knows where Gilles Deleuze is?

Anyway, I did discover that France, unlike the United States, cares a great deal about its intellectuals. As such, the country has a habit of naming public places after the most prominent among them. I visited two such spots. The first was the Place Sartre-Beauvoir, which is a good-sized square located off the Boulevard Saint-Germain. There I had coffee at Les Deux Magots, which, along with Cafe de Flore, was one of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir’s favorite hangouts back in the day. I also dropped by the College de France, where I had the pleasure of stumbling across the Square Michel Foucault. I’m sure there must have been other, similar sites that I missed. Even so, it was a treat just to find these two. Both seemed to embody how people and their ideas can matter.

P.S. This is post #100 on Differences & Repetitions. Thanks to all for your readership, comments, and encouragement.