First posted at Progressive Geographies:
My experience with academic publishing is dispiriting. Mostly
editors and so-called peer reviewers don't like (my) thinking,
but demand standard scientific or scholarly discourse instead.
The lesson: Don't rock the academic boat. Don't challenge
orthodoxy in its infinite variety and complacency. Academic
publishing is a rigged game. Academics (thankfully, I'm not one)
have to publish in well-reputed journals or by a well-reputed
publisher to get ahead in their careers by boosting their
who-status as somewho purportedly worth listening to, who gets a
pat on the back from colleagues.
The academic scholar has to submit to the publisher's rules and,
these days, often even has to pay for the review and editing
process, or the printing, him/herself. Academic reputation has a
monetary price. The publisher then locks up the textual product
behind a pay-wall. For a single short article today's standard
prices are around USD30 up to USD50 or EUR40. At that price, your
article doesn't get into wide circulation to polish your
reputation. Those citing it are largely those with a pre-paid
institutional access, i.e. those with some more or less modest
position of power in an academic institution. They're the ones
who have a say in whether your career flourishes or withers on
the vine. Keep the club closed for the initiated. Apart from
gouging academic authors in reputational need, the whole
who-game stinks, serving as it does to keep thinking within
bounds already established by some institutional power play or
other. Maybe you're lucky or clever enough to be swimming along
in one of the current streams, whether main or subsidiary. Just
be prepared for disappointment and exclusion if you try to think
anything hitherto unheard of.
So academic publishing is one more instance of how the gainful game can be played. The latter is infinitely versatile. The quest to see more clearly pursued by the precious few, too, is a power play with winners and losers.
Further on the gainful game as a socio-ontological constellation.
Unfortunately para-academic publishing is also an arena for the gainful game (what I have called the "game of thrones": http://terenceblake.wordpress.com/2012/06/07/bourdieu-academias-game-of-thrones/). Disappointment and exclusion are the rule for interactions on the blogosphere as well.
ReplyDeleteThanks for the link, which is interesting. What you address as the Game of Thrones I regard as a version of the Emperor's New Clothes. Everyone knows very well of the ubiquitous power plays, but, if you have skin in this game, it is very impolite to say anything publicly about it, even and especially if you are a philosophy professor. I say that this philosophical nakedness has to be remedied by a thinking that puts the phenomenon of whoness itself centre stage to show that these who-power-plays are not merely unfortunate or deplorable facts of life, but themselves call for a simple thinking to see more clear and gain distance. The individuation you speak of I see as the possibility of casting your ownmost self, i.e. the self-mask that fits you best of all for as long as you are around to play the who-game. Philosophical re-flection back onto your self is a therapy for hubris as well as alleviating blindness. In German I speak of the Wertschätzspiel (literally: value-estimation-game) among people and things, i.e. whos and whats. This is a socio-ontological concept, not merely a descriptive word. It is supposed to capture in thought the presencing and absencing of whos and whats in a play of mutual assessment and valuation that can take on myriad shades from accolades and fame through to denigration and annihilation of reputation.
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