Re: <nettime> some more nuanced thoughts on publishing, editing, reading, using

[Brian Holmes <bhcontinentaldrift@gmail.com>]

On 07/27/2011 06:38 AM, Gary Hall wrote:

> one piece I've found helpful is Ted
> Striphas's (2010) 'Acknowledged Goods: Cultural Studies and the Politics
> of Academic Journal Publishing',  Communication and Cultural/Critical
> Studies, 7 (1), 3-25
> There's an 'open' pre-print version here:
> http://tandfprod.literatumonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/14791420903527798

This is an excellent piece, many thanks. It cuts to the heart of our 
current debate. Reading it, one might also feel shocked at the rarity of 
critical reflection on the technological and organizational conditions 
of knowledge production in the universities. Here at last someone puts a 
finger on academic alienation from the means of production and 
distribution. And the point of the reflection is to act, to change the 
hyper-competitive for-profit system of publication that effectuates a 
privatization of knowledge.

Of course, no feeling of shock will affect recent generations of 
"precarious intellectuals" who cannot find - or in some cases, don't 
want to find - secure positions within the context of academic 
overproduction described by Ted Striphas. The crucial generational 
difference is that from the Sixties to the Eighties, universities 
expanded vastly, integrating scholars who had gone through a period of 
deep social contestation. When they set about defining their 
professional goals and reshaping their fields, these scholars believed 
they were changing one of the central mechanisms of social reproduction 
in the knowledge societies: the university itself. They were changing it 
by the _content_ they brought, the theoretical techniques, the teaching 
styles, the new disciplines or transdisciplines and the intense 
questioning of both the "objects" and "subjects" of academic study -- 
all of which helped open the universities to new practices and different 
people, in terms of class, race, culture, sexuality and so on. A lot was 
accomplished in this way and one should not forget it.

From today's precarious perspective, however, the Sixties-to-Eighties 
generation lost the battle on two fronts. First and most obviously, the 
culture wars in the US, and more recently, the attacks on multicultural 
policy in Europe, have led to a weakening of the most socially 
transformative programs. At the same time, the new entrepreneurial 
management, with its ethics and metrics of hypercompetition, have voided 
much of the substance from the philosophical positions of the 
radicalized generation, whose most distinguished and sexy members were 
sucked into a worldwide star system. Vast new sets of issues brought on 
by networked globalization have not been subject to active political 
dissent, but only turned into grist for the mill of normative and 
neutralized career-paths. In the last decade the two trends came 
together in the form of direct persecution of individuals, broader 
"chilling effects" on critical research, increased workloads and 
performance metrics, and above all, budget cuts and shrinking 
departments, with the consequence of a dramatically increasing 
casualization of the university labor force. Would-be academics suddenly 
discovered that they have no career perspectives, and that because of 
the kinds of specialization they've been forced into by 
hyper-competition, their writings as well as their protests have no 
audience. The content has not circulated in the right way, which is the 
overarching point that Ted Striphas makes.

Instead of sustaining an alternative culture that can resist the 
dominant one, critical research has been funneled into the new 
hierarchies created by entrepreneurial administrators and by 
corporations such as Elsevier and Informaworld. The mix of egalitarian 
and environmental concerns that define all the different versions of the 
"New Left" seem to have gotten lost along the way. In fact, the 
universities no longer produce anything as politically potent as the 
aspirations of the Sixties-to-Eighties generation of radicals -- not 
even in the writing and the actions of nost of those same "radicals." 
The wave of student protests and university occupations that has swept 
across the world in the last three years (often under the impulse of 
working grad students and adjunct professors) has finally translated the 
precarious perspective into words and acts, which is a damn good thing 
in my opinion. We are still waiting to hear the echoes in the academic 
presses.

The only way for people in the social sciences and the humanities to 
regain some progressive societal influence would be to reasses what one 
of the founding Cultural Studies books called "the uses of literacy" -- 
but this time I mean, the uses of their own literacy, by themselves, 
their employers, their students and the wider literate culture with 
which they often fail to connect. What are the uses of literacy in the 
contemporary knowledge societies? In what kinds of technological and 
organizational infrastructure are these uses grounded? What subjective, 
cultural, social and political forms result from the networked uses of 
academic literacy? What kinds of blind spots are produced? And how can 
those involved exert a reflexive effect on these dynamics?

Gary, your post and the Striphas article have led me to a fascinating 
work, namely your own "Digitize This Book! The Politics of New Media, Or 
Why We Need Open Access Now."  This pdf reads like an expanded, in-depth 
synthesis of all the excellent debates we've had on this topic on 
nettime over many years, since the Budapest Open Access Initiative was 
launched in 2002. As I understand it, the book is not a hacker call to 
piracy, but instead a program to achieve institutional transformation, 
using the technical possibility of free access as a wedge to open up the 
current university hierarchy and fight the entrepreneurial trend with a 
new constructive program. It seems the book was supposed to be available 
in the digitized form championed by its title. And it is -- but as far 
as I can tell (perhaps due to some technical glitch?), it's only 
available at the website-of-choice for today's precarious generation: 
everybody's library-of-the-future-right-now, aaaaarg.org. A recommended 
destination for the alienated academic multitudes.

best, Brian


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