Differences & Repetitions

Because I know blog readership has a tendency to ebb and wane, I thought I’d remind all of you about this site’s companion, the Differences and Repetitions Wiki. I also have an exciting announcement to share.

I launched D&R^W back in November 2007, initially as an experiment in collaborative and distributed or “rhizomatic” writing — and antidote, I’d hoped, to the traditional, closed model of writing in the humanities. The first project, which is still active, began with an essay I drafted for a meeting of the National Communication Association. It explicates Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s enigmatic statement from their book, What is Philosophy?: ““We do not lack communication. On the contrary, we have too much of it. We lack creation. We lack resistance to the present.” Rather than letting myself have the final word, I decided to make it an open and ever-evolving project; anyone who wants to edit, add to, or otherwise improve upon the piece is welcome to do so, along the lines of Wikipedia.

Currently there are two more projects hosted on D&R^W: my piece on cultural studies and the politics of academic journal publishing, a slightly revised version of which should be appearing imminently in the journal, Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies; and my essay on audience labor and the Amazon Kindle e-reader. Although neither piece is set up for public editing, anyone is welcome to leave comments, questions, or feedback on the project site — anonymous or otherwise.

More than two years after launching the D&R Wiki, I’m happy to report that “We Do Not Lack Communication” continues to evolve. A pretty robust dialogue has also cropped up around early fragments of the journal publishing and Kindle essays, which I’d be delighted to see multiply on the fuller versions. Of course, this is all thanks to the many contributions of the D&R community. Please keep them coming!

It’s pretty clear to me that there many more possibilities for engagement on D&R^W, compared to your run-of-the-mill academic journal. And so finally, the big announcement: if YOU have a writing project that would (a) be of interest to readers of this blog and that (b) you’d like to see hosted on D&R^W, send me an email inquiry. Let’s open this thing up even more!

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.

This is probably one of the most intriguing developments in academic book publishing to happen in a long time.…

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A CALL FOR OPEN COLLABORATION FROM THE CULTURE MACHINE JOURNAL
http://www.culturemachine.net

Culture Machine is seeking open collaboration on the writing and editing of the first volume of its online Liquid Books series, New Cultural Studies: The Liquid Theory Reader: http://liquidbooks.pbwiki.com/New+Cultural+Studies:+The+Liquid+Theory+Reader.

The first provisional version of this volume — New Cultural Studies: The Liquid Theory Reader (Version 1.0) — has been put together by Gary Hall and Clare Birchall as a follow-up to their 2006 “woodware” edited collection, New Cultural Studies: Adventures in Theory (Edinburgh University Press and Georgia University Press).

From here on in, however, the idea is for this new online “liquid book” — to which everyone is invited to contribute — to be written and developed in an open, co-operative, decentralised, multi-user-generated fashion: not just by its initial “authors,” “editors,” or “creators,” but by a multiplicity of collaborators distributed around the world.

In this way, the New Cultural Studies Reader will be freely available for anyone, anywhere, to read, reproduce and distribute. Once they have requested access, users will also be able to rewrite, add to, edit, annotate, tag, remix, reformat, reinvent and reuse this reader, or produce alternative parallel versions of it, however they wish. In fact, they are expressly invited and encouraged to do so, as the project relies on this intervention.

It is hoped that the New Cultural Studies: Liquid Theory Reader project will raise a number of important questions for ideas of academic authorship, attribution, publication, citation, accreditation, fair use, quality control, peer review, copyright, intellectual property, content creation and cultural studies. For instance, with its open editing and free content the project decenters the author and editor functions, making everyone potential authors/editors. It also addresses an issue raised recently by Geert Lovink: why are wikis not utilised more to create, develop and change theory and theoretical concepts, instead of theory continuing to be considered as the “terrain of the sole author who contemplates the world, preferably offline, surrounded by a pile of books, a fountain pen, and a notebook”? At the same time, in “What Is an Author?”, Foucault warns that any attempt to avoid using the concept of the author to close and fix the meaning of the text risks leading to a limit and a unity being imposed on the text in a different way: by means of the concept of the “work.” So to what extent does users’ ability to rewrite, remix, reversion and reinvent this liquid “book” render untenable any attempt to impose a limit and a unity on it as a “work?” And what are the political, ethical and social consequences of such ‘liquidity’ for ideas that depend on the concept of the “work” for their effectivity: those concerning attribution, citation, copyright, intellectual property, academic success, promotion, tenure, and so on?

To find out more, please go to:
http://liquidbooks.pbwiki.com/New+Cultural+Studies:+The+Liquid+Theory+Reader

For a quick and easy-to-read guide on how to collaborate on the writing and editing of New Cultural Studies: The Liquid Theory Reader, please visit:
http://liquidbooks.pbwiki.com/How-to-Contribute-to-a-Liquid-Book

Clare Birchall and Gary Hall

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Above you’ll find a promo video for a Columbia University Press book called American Pests. Tomorrow I’m shooting one of these promos for my book, The Late Age of Print. I’m excited to do it, but at the same time I’m feeling a little daunted. I’ve done my best to avoid video blogging and indeed entering into the video age more generally. I guess it’s all finally catching up with me.

What’s intriguing about the prospect of shooting a video for my book–beyond whatever potential there may be for getting the latter noticed–is what the promo tells us about the changing nature of book authorship. Never did I imagine having to become a multimedia personality when I began work on The Late Age of Print. I certainly wasn’t trained for that in graduate school!

I suppose I was operating under what is, today, an increasingly antiquated understanding of authors and their work. That is, I had erroneously assumed that authors still could get away only with writing words and perhaps making an occasional public (i.e., “live”) presentation of their work. I should have known better, given the arguments and subject matter of The Late Age of Print. If university presses are on to making videos, moreover, then you can be pretty sure the era in which authors were strictly writers has just about come to an end. Video killed the radio star twenty five years ago. Today, video has just about finished off the reclusive book writer, too.

I’ll let you know how the shoot turns out, and once the promo is finished I’ll post it here. It will also be available on the Columbia University Press “channel” on YouTube.

Here’s some more good news about open access publishing in the humanities, and it comes at a very interesting time for me. Now that my book, The Late Age of Print, is more or less finished, I’m about to return to the “Cultural Studies and Journal Publishing” essay I’ve been pecking at for some time now and presenting bits of at conferences.

It’s remarkable just how far things have come in a year, especially in the humanities, which has lagged way, way behind the sciences, medicine, and technical fields in terms of making its journal publishing apparatus more open and less corporate. Still, I wonder: does OA journal publishing need to remain so resolutely hierarchical? That’s a question I’ll be pondering, probably in the conclusion to my essay. I’ll be posting the piece to the Differences & Repetitions Wiki for feedback once it’s a bit farther along.

Anyway, here’s the OA announcement. Congratulations to all those involved on launching the Open Humanities Press initiative, and thank you for your vision.

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LAUNCH OF OPEN HUMANITIES PRESS – Open Access expands to humanities disciplines with a bold new publishing initiative in critical and cultural theory.

Brussels, Belgium – On May 12, 2008, the Open Humanities Press (OHP) will launch with 7 of the leading Open Access journals in critical and cultural theory. A non-profit, international grass-roots initiative, OHP marks a watershed in the growing embrace of Open Access in the humanities.

“OHP is a bold and timely venture” said J. Hillis Miller, Distinguished Professor of English at the University of California, Irvine, a long-time supporter of the Open Access movement and OHP board member. “It is designed to make peer-reviewed scholarly and critical works in a number of humanistic disciplines and cross-disciplines available free online. Initially primarily concerned with journals, OHP may ultimately also include book-length writings. This project is an admirable response to the current crisis in scholarly publishing and to the rapid shift from print media to electronic media. This shift, and OHP’s response to it, are facets of what has been called ‘critical climate change.’”

“The future of scholarly publishing lies in Open Access” agreed Jonathan Culler, Class of 1916 Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Cornell University and fellow member of OHP’s editorial advisory board. “Scholars in the future should give careful consideration to the where they publish, since their goal should be to make the products of their research as widely available as possible, to people throughout the world. Open Humanities Press is a most welcome initiative that will help us move in this direction.”

OHP will give new confidence to humanities academics who wish to make their work freely accessible but have concerns about the academic standards of online publishing. In addition to being peer-reviewed, all OHP journals undergo rigorous vetting by an editorial board of leading humanities scholars.

OHP’s board includes Alain Badiou, Chair of Philosophy at the École Normale Supérieure, Donna Haraway, Professor of the History of Consciousness and Feminist Studies, UC Santa Cruz, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Director of the International Center for Writing and Translation, UC Irvine, Gayatri Spivak, Avalon Foundation Professor in the Humanities, Columbia University, Peter Suber, Open Access Project Director for Public Knowledge and Professor of Philosophy at Earlham College, and Stephen Greenblatt, Cogan University Professor of the Humanities, Harvard University, who has been leading the public debate on the crisis of academic publishing in the humanities.

“Open-access publishing in serious, peer-reviewed online scholarly journals is one of the keys to solving a financial crisis that has afflicted university libraries everywhere and has had a chilling effect on virtually every academic discipline” said Greenblatt.“Making scholarly work available without charge on the internet has offered hope for the natural sciences and now offers hope in the humanities.”

With initial offerings in continental philosophy, cultural studies, new media, film and literary criticism, OHP serves researchers and students as the Open Access gateway for editorially-vetted scholarly literature in the humanities. The first journals to become part of OHP are Cosmos and History, Culture Machine, Fibreculture, Film-Philosophy, International Journal of Zizek Studies, Parrhesia, and Vectors.

“But it’s not simply a matter of what Open Access can do for the humanities” added Gary Hall, Professor of Media and Performing Arts at Coventry University, co-editor of Culture Machine and one of the co-founders of OHP. “It is also a case of what can the humanities do for Open Access. Researchers, editors and publishers in the humanities have developed very different professional cultures and intellectual practices to the STMs [Science, Technology, and Medicine] who have dominated the discussion around Open Access to date. OHP is ideally positioned to explore some of the exciting new challenges and perspectives in scholarly communication that are being opened up for Open Access as it is increasingly adopted within the humanities.”

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Open Humanities Press is an international Open Access publishing collective specializing in critical and cultural theory. OHP was formed by academics to overcome the current crisis in scholarly publishing that threatens intellectual freedom and academic rigor worldwide. OHP journals are academically certified by OHP’s independent board of international scholars. All OHP publications are peer-reviewed, published under open access licenses, and freely and immediately available online at www.openhumanitiespress.org.

Josh Gunn over at The Rosewater Chronicles has an excellent post about the various critical personae one might encounter in the process of double-blind academic peer-review. He classifies them (us?) as “gushers,” “assassins,” “turf pissers,” and “empaths.” My favorite characterization (although probably my least favorite type of reviewer) has to be the “naysayer,” whom Josh describes like this:

The Naysayer: Nothing of quality or interest has ever been published in the field, and your essay is no exception. Communication Studies is a sub-par and parasite field, and your essay continues this horrible, alien existence. The Naysayer wanted to be a philosopher or studied comparative literature, but reluctantly took a position in Communication Studies out of necessity. S/he is bitter about being in Comm, and will take it out on you—especially if you take up concepts from high theory or philosophy.

I’m sure anyone who’s been through the gauntlet of double-blind peer review has encountered at least one cranky naysayer in her or his lifetime, and probably one or more of the other characters as well. I only wish there were more gushers and empaths out there. Too often, I find, academic peer-review seems as much about hazing as it does about ideas and execution–and I say that as someone who’s enjoyed reasonably good success at getting published.

Anyway, be sure to check out Josh’s post and the lively discussion that follows. Great stuff.

I’ve been hinting for weeks (maybe longer) that I had a B-I-G announcement forthcoming about my book, The Late Age of Print: Everyday Book Culture From Consumerism to Control. At long last, here it is: the book will be published in 2009 by Columbia University Press!

I’m thrilled, needless to say, because Columbia’s such an esteemed press and has published so many books I love: from Rachel Bowlby’s Carried Away: The Invention of Modern Shopping to Gary Cross’ An All Consuming Century, and from David Henkin’s City Reading: Written Words and Public Spaces in Antebellum New York to Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s What Is Philosophy? and beyond.

What’s also thrilling is that Columbia has agreed to make available, for free, a Creative Commons licensed PDF of The Late Age of Print. It will be released on the internet, concurrent with the publication of the print edition of the book. This is the first time Columbia is producing a book this way, and given my own proclivities toward intellectual property (not to mention the arguments I make in the book), I couldn’t be happier to be the test case. What’s more, I’m pleased to see another major university press taking a strongly affirmative stance toward open access to ideas.

Many of you who read this blog will find yourselves thanked in the book’s acknowledgments. For now, though, a big, blanket “thank you” to all who’ve supported me throughout the process of researching, writing, revising, and finalizing The Late Age of Print. It’s funny–for someone who writes about book publishing, I feel like I learned as much about the book business by trying to get The Late Age of Print published as I did by actually writing it!

You may not know this, but I’m obsessed with Wikipedia. Truly, I am. A confession: I love to read it. Another confession: I’ve even done some editing. I still don’t let my students refer to it in their papers, though I may be coming around on that. It’s a remarkable resource, at least, for what it is.

Apparently, I’m not the only one who’s rapt with Wikipedia. I just discovered Jim Brown’s excellent blog, Clinamen, which I’ve added to my blog roll. I don’t know Jim personally, but what I do know is that he’s a graduate student in Rhetoric and New Media Studies at the University of Texas – Austin. Clinamen is his attempt to work publicly through issues he’s addressing in his dissertation, which focuses on Wikipedia. I haven’t been following his blog long enough to know exactly what he’s up to, but as far as I can tell, it’s all about history, agency, collective writing practices, and the politics of knowledge production. Now that sounds like a dissertation to me.

Anyway, be sure to check out Clinamen. It’s really interesting stuff.

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P.S. For all you Deleuzians out there who are trying to put a finger on the word “clinamen,” GD mentions it in his writings on Lucretius in Difference and Repetition, The Logic of Sense, and elsewhere. In a nutshell, it refers to the swerving of atomic particles–an apt metaphor for Wikipedia indeed!

A quick shout-out to Siva Vaidhyanathan over at Sivacracy for alerting me to the paper.

Because it’s holiday time, I figured it might be fun to share some thoughts about a few of my favorite things. Now, don’t get your hopes up. If you’re looking for gift ideas, these recommendations won’t exactly help you. They belong more to the category, “useful things I’ve discovered online” than to the category, “things you can buy for friends and loved ones at the store.” Anyway, I hope you enjoy.

Grammar Girl
For those of you with grammar questions–or, for that matter, for those of you with grammar guilt–this is the place to go. Mignon Fogarty is an authority on the subject, and her posts and podcasts will tell you all you need to know about how to make your prose sing. What I especially appreciate is her sense of English as a living language, and thus her sensitivity to the history of its grammar. So, for example, my high school English teachers drilled the “never split infinitives” rule into my head ad nauseum, presumably because most had had the rule driven into their heads ad nauseum. Fogarty, however, explains that the rule is a hold-over from the world of Latin declensions, and that it’s little more than a vestige in the English language. There are lots of other gems like this, so I’m grateful to my friend, Suzanne Enck-Wanzer, for turning me on to the site.

SourceWatch
An anonymous commentator on my last post turned me on to this site. As a professor of media and cultural studies, I’m embarrassed to admit that I didn’t know about its existence beforehand. In a nutshell, SourceWatch is a wiki site dedicated “to produc[ing] a directory of the people, organizations and issues shaping the public agenda.” In other words, it’s dedicated to peeling back the layers of public information, in an effort to shine a light on all the public relations and advertising folks who are working behind the scenes. The site is a project undertaken by the Center for Media and Democracy and, of course, by its many contributors. (I just wonder how they keep all the PR mavens from spinning their own entries.)

The Century of the Self
This video was recommended to me by my friends Elaine Vautier and Timothy Roscoe. It’s a four-part documentary directed by Adam Curtis, and it focuses on the history/uptake of psychoanalysis in the United States and Britain in 20th century. What’s especially fascinating is to see how different approaches to psychoanalysis fell in and out of favor over time, and how the vicissitudes of the profession affected the way in which psychoanalytically-inclined press agents and advertisers imagined both their audiences and their work. The third installment is the most interesting to me, in that it charts the rise of the “empowered” self. There seem to me some fascinating connections to be made here to the rise of so-called “active audiences” in cultural studies.