Call for papers: The politics of journal publishing

...with gratitude to Amy Pason at the University of Minnesota for sharing this with me. Thanks, Amy!

---

The Political Economy of Academic Journal Publishing

Call for Papers & Proposal for a Special Issue of Ephemera: Theory & Politics in Organization, to be edited by Craig Prichard & Steffen Böhm.

'Publish or perish', that famous diktat, is without doubt the central, pervasive and unassailable logic governing most academic work in the current period. The central figure, the one around which this decree currently revolves, is, of course, the academic journal article. While the book and perhaps the lecture remain important in some locations, the journal article has become the core currency and the very measure by which academic jobs, careers, reputations and identities are made and traded.

Yet despite all the hours congealed into 'the article', and the years spent perfecting the craft of writing for journal publications, many of us know very little about the industry that surrounds our work and to which we contribute so much. Of course, we may recall certain events: Some will have noted the sale, for nearly US$1 billion, of Blackwell's 875-strong journal collection to US company Wiley in late 2006. Others will be aware that they can now, if they so wish, purchase their already published papers as individual downloads on Amazon.com. There will be some for whom internet-based open access journals (such as ephemera) or online repositories are now the natural home of their written academic work. There may be others whom have confronted the crisis that surrounds journal subscription pricing and are seeing the demise of library journal collections in their university libraries. And there may be a few among us who recognize those journals and publishers that feature in Ted Bergstrom's hall of shame for the most expensive journals currently published (http://www.journalprices.com ). But for all those that recognize such events and processes there are many more for whom such events have 'taken a while to get our attention', as Ron Kirby, the University of California mathematician who led the editorial revolt against Reed Elsevier's pricing strategy at the journal Topography, said recently.

This special issue is an invitation to begin to change that. It is a call for contributions that directly and critically explore the dynamics, problems, tensions, and issues that surround the political economy of academic journal publishing. Part of this is an invitation to explore alternative ways of organizing the production of academic work, particularly the theory, politics and organization of open access publishing, which is, perhaps, the most promising initiative to challenge corporate forms of journal publishing today. This exploration of alternatives is an acknowledgment that the writer and academic author could be regarded, at various moments, as agent, challenger and also victim of hegemonic regimes. We invite inter-disciplinary contributions from around the world and particularly welcome submissions from countries of the Global South, which have seen particular growth of open access publishing initiatives.

Possible topics include (this is not an exhaustive list):

• Political economy of open access publishing
• Academic publishing and the knowledge society
• How to organize an open access journal?
• Political economy of corporate and university press publishing
• The place of journal publishing in the overall apparatus of academic publishing
• Historical perspectives of academic journal publishing
• The hegemony of UK/US publishing & referencing and its global economy
• Issues of censorship in the process of publishing
• Issues of inclusion/exclusion in journal publishing
• Academic publishing in the Global South
• Desires and identities connected to journal publishing
• The public sphere and journal publishing: Who do we really reach?
• The role of journal publishing in the setup and maintenance of professions and disciplines
• Cases of open access publishing
• The organisation of open access repositories
• Case histories of open access repositories
• Copyright vs Copyleft
• Publishing and language: the hegemony of English
• Intellectual property and the impact on academic publishing
• What is a journal's 'impact' and how to measure it?
• The specific role of ephemera: theory & politics in organization in the world of journal publishing and potential 'alternative impact factor measurements'
• Academic evaluation and performance measurement systems (such as the RAE in the UK)
• Publishing outside academia

Full papers should be submitted to the special issue editors via email by 1 November 2008. Papers should be between 5000 and 9000 words; multimedia work is welcome. All submissions should follow Ephemera's submission guidelines:

http://www.ephemeraweb.org/journal/submit.htm.

All relevant submissions will undergo a double blind review process. The special issue is scheduled to be published in late 2009.

Special issue editors:

Craig Prichard
Tari Whakahaere Kaipakihi,
Te Kunenga Ki Purehuroa
Pouaka Motuhake 11-222
Papaioea, Aotearoa
Department of Management 214
Massey University, Private Bag 11-222
Palmerston North, New Zealand
Phone: +64 (0) 6 356-9099 ext. 2244
Email: c.prichard@massey.ac.nz

Steffen Böhm
School of Accounting, Finance and Management
University of Essex
Wivenhoe Park
Colchester CO4 3SQ UK
Phone: +44 (0) 1206 87 3843
Email: steffen@essex.ac.uk

Update on Harvard's open-access decision

From today's Inside Higher Ed:

Harvard University’s arts and sciences faculty approved a plan on Tuesday that will post finished academic papers online free, unless scholars specifically decide to opt out of the open-access program. While other institutions have similar repositories for their faculty’s work, Harvard’s is unique for making online publication the default option.

You can read the full story here. Way to go, Harvard faculty!

I'm waiting on pins and needles

It seems as though talk about open-access journal publishing is all the rage these days, and with good reason. Preserving the integrity of scholarly communication and its ability to circulate are both pressing issues--the latter, especially, given the emergence of digitally rights managed academic journal content and other types of strictures.  These are changing times indeed.

Apropos, I was heartened to discover this article in today's New York Times.  Apparently, the faculty of Harvard University is voting today to decide whether or not to move toward a system that more fully embraces open-access.  Here's an excerpt:

Publish or perish has long been the burden of every aspiring university professor. But the question the Harvard faculty will decide on Tuesday is whether to publish — on the Web, at least — free.

Faculty members are scheduled to vote on a measure that would permit Harvard to distribute their scholarship online, instead of signing exclusive agreements with scholarly journals that often have tiny readerships and high subscription costs.

[...]

“In place of a closed, privileged and costly system, it will help open up the world of learning to everyone who wants to learn,” said Robert Darnton, director of the university library. “It will be a first step toward freeing scholarship from the stranglehold of commercial publishers by making it freely available on our own university repository.”

Under the proposal Harvard would deposit finished papers in an open-access repository run by the library that would instantly make them available on the Internet. Authors would still retain their copyright and could publish anywhere they pleased — including at a high-priced journal, if the journal would have them.

What's exciting (or maybe nerve-wracking) to me is the degree to which Harvard is such a trend-setter.  How the faculty there goes, others are likely to follow.  So, for those of you at Harvard who may be voting today, please support the cause of open-access.  And for those of you who may know folks at Harvard, please tell them to lend their support.

If you need convincing about the merits of open-access, or if you want to learn all there is to learn about the issue, be sure to check out Peter Suber's excellent website.  He also has some extended commentary there about today's vote at Harvard and its implications.  And if you want to read the complete story from the Times, you can access it here.

Lessig for Obama on Super Tuesday (and me, too)

Today, one of my students asked me where he could vote in Indiana's Super Tuesday primary. He was despondent when I told him that Indiana doesn't vote until May--about a week before Guam, and long after the Presidential nominations probably will be sewn up. So for those of you whose votes actually count (and, heck, for those of you who are just interested in the U.S. Presidential elections), check out the Lawrence Lessig video I've embedded here. He makes a clear, reasoned case for why Democrats should support Barack Obama. What I like most is the language of "moral courage" Lessig introduces, as well as how Lessig connects his endorsement to his recent work on ending corruption in politics.

Consider yourself fortunate if you're able to vote today; please make sure to do so. I wish I were in your shoes.

---

P.S. On the day after Super Tuesday, nobody seems to know exactly how many convention delegates belong to either Clinton or Obama. The consensus seems to be that each has around 800. Maybe the Indiana contest will end up mattering after all!

And...we're back!

After trolling through a bunch of Blogger discussion groups, at long last, I've finally discovered how to fix the strange header error that had been plaguing me here at D&R. That's the same error that compelled me to change the design of this blog for the last week or so. Anyway, I'm glad to be back to the look I've come to know and love for D&R, and I hope you are, too.

While I'm pretty sure everything's fixed now, I'm not all that confident in my html abilities. So if perchance you find that certain aspects of D&R aren't displaying properly in your web browser, please drop me a line.

One last thing: I still find it disconcerting that I have no idea how, exactly, my template spontaneously(?) changed. What's the saying? Deus ex machina...

Now that's what I call...democracy?

From today's New York Times:

Republican candidates were traveling to California for a debate Wednesday evening at the Reagan Presidential Library. While most of the attention in Florida was on the Republicans, Democratic voters gave Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton a victory in a virtually uncontested race. The Democratic Party had stripped the state of its delegates as a punishment for moving its primary earlier in the year, and the leading candidates refrained from campaigning there.

To be clear, I'm not a fan of all the primary-upping shenanigans. This sort of calendar game produces its own set of undesirable political effects. Nonetheless, it seem to me that stripping states of their convention delegates is an awfully undemocratic response for a society that so champions, and persistently wages war in the name of, democracy. And I gather this response isn't confined to Florida. It happened in Michigan, too, which similarly moved its primary forward. Between uncounted ballots, malfunctioning voting machines, so-called superdelegates, and an increasingly shady primary system, I'm genuinely worried about what's happening to democracy in these United States.

Spaghetti/regret/updates

I recently left a comment on Sivacracy responding to a post about Malcolm Gladwell's bestselling book, The Tipping Point. My remark was pretty snarky, admittedly. I said this: "Isn't The Tipping Point a readerly, if watered-down, version of Everett Rogers' The Diffusion of Innovations--a book that's been out for decades?" I still stand behind the spirit of comment, at least, insofar as I believe Rogers said essentially what Gladwell is now often credited with saying (and Gabriel Tarde before Rogers....You can see where this is going.). By the same token, I regret having too quickly dismissed Gladwell's work and contributions.

Perhaps what impresses me most about Gladwell's writing is his ability to make the history of the idea of communication engaging to popular audiences. Take his piece on "The Spin Myth," for instance, in which he tells fascinating stories about the role the late public relations doyen, Edward L. Bernays, played in shaping perceptions about media influence. Then there's the video I've embedded above, in which Gladwell shares a series of parables about the food industry's discovery of diversity-in-taste (spaghetti sauce is the operative example). This is no small matter. What Glaldwell is addressing are the epistemological assumptions individuals and groups bring to bear when making judgments about right and wrong, good and bad, tasty and displeasing, and more. He is also offering some intriguing commentary on personal influence and group dynamics, two longstanding issues in communication theory.

All that to say, having taught about the intellectual history of communication, I can appreciate the work that must go in to making his stories and lectures as captivating as they are. And while I wish his work were more critically inclined, I can't really hold that against him. After all, who am I to criticize an apple for being an apple, and not an orange?

* * *

In other news, after weighing the decision, I've decided not to join Facebook after all. I still may sign up one day, but as I said earlier, it's hard enough for me to keep the lights on here at D&R. Another online commitment (to whatever extent Facebook is a commitment) would just be too much right now. I'm not sure if anyone had designs on friending me, but if you were, sorry to let you down.

Also, in case you're wondering, I'm going to leave the design of D&R as it is for the foreseeable future. Ron tells me it's a bit busy, and I agree. But until I can get the issue with my old design template resolved, I don't want to change the site again. I worry that folks might come looking for D&R and think they've stumbled on some other blog.

Attn. grad students: How to get published

The following essay, which has been posted to the Social Science Research Network (SSRN), is perfect for graduate students and anyone else trying to break into the world of academic presentation and publishing. It discusses all the ins and outs of getting book reviews, conference papers, and articles accepted, but in a way that's neither pedantic nor condescending. It's a must read, at least, as far as I'm concerned. You can download the pre-print by clicking on the link below. Enjoy!

Publishing Advice for Graduate Students
THOM BROOKS
University of Newcastle upon Tyne (UK)
Newcastle Law School

Graduate students often lack concrete advice on publishing. This essay is an attempt to fill this important gap. Advice is given on how to publish everything from book reviews to articles, replies to book chapters, and how to secure both edited book contracts and authored monograph contracts, along with plenty of helpful tips and advice on the publishing world (and how it works) along the way in what is meant to be a comprehensive, concrete guide to publishing that should be of tremendous value to graduate students working in any area of the humanities and social sciences.

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

A new look for D&R...for the moment

Just a quick note to let y'all know that I've changed the look of D&R--temporarily, for now. There seems to be some sort of issue with the template I've been using. You may have noticed that the header wasn't displaying properly, which made it difficult to read the title and description. Until I can figure out what's wrong, I'm going to stick with the new look. And because I'm not opposed to change, I'd be curious to hear which you like better--the old template (pictured above-left), or the new one.

A new business model for videogames?

From today's New York Times:

Ever since John Riccitiello took over last year as chief executive of Electronic Arts, the video game industry bellwether, he has promised to revitalize the company with new games and new ways of reaching consumers. Now, that may be happening.

In a major departure from its traditional business model, E.A. plans to announce Monday that it is developing a new installment in its hit Battlefield series that will be distributed on the Internet as a free download. Rather than being sold at retail, the game is meant to generate revenue through advertising and small in-game transactions that allow players to spend a few dollars on new outfits, weapons and other virtual gear.

I know this sounds a lot like the business model for Second Life and other such games, yet in some ways, it seems to me something of a departure as well. For those of you who may know more about gaming than I, is this "buy to get ahead" ethic something common? To me it's always a sad day when more skills-oriented competition is complicated by economics. Invariably these situations produce what economists call a "race to the bottom," in which those who think they want to succeed must spend and spend and spend simply to keep up.

You can read the full article here.

Midwest Winter Workshop

Wow, what a weekend it's been! This Saturday, a great group of graduate students in my department hosted the third-annual Midwest Winter Workshop (a.k.a., MW3--you know something's significant when it warrants an acronym). The event brought together faculty and grads from some of the most stellar communication programs across the region. This year the participants hailed from the University of Illinois, Indiana University, the University of Iowa, the University of Minnesota, Northwestern University, and the University of Wisconsin. In years past, the event attracted folks from as far away as Pittsburgh and North Carolina.

The MW3 began with three back-to-back plenary addresses on Saturday morning, which focused on the theme of publics. The featured speakers were U of I's Cara Finnegan, who made the case for better historicization of "visual culture"; UMN's Ron Greene, who stressed the analytic importance of the category "communicative labor" in discussions of public activism; and IU's Phaedra Pezzullo, who explored the rhetorical processes through which deadly environmental hazards in and beyond the workplace have been rendered normal or everyday, and hence not worth publicizing. Needless to say, all three talks sparked lively discussion that lasted throughout the day.

Lunch was followed by the first round of break-out sessions, in which groups of 20 or so gathered to talk about specific themes. I had the good fortune of landing in the "Media and Counterculture" group, where I was joined by U of I's James Hay and Spencer Schaffner, U of W's Rob Howard, and by a talented group of grad students from across the six participant institutions. I talked about The Century of the Self, one of my favorite documentaries (and something I've posted about previously), as well as some books I've been reading that have provoked me to begin digging deeper into the intellectual-historical roots of oppositionalist discourses in cultural studies. (If you're interested, the books are Rachel Bowlby's Carried Away, Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter's A Nation of Rebels, Preston Shires' Hippies of the Religious Right, Joseph Turow's Niche Envy, and Fred Turner's absolutely brilliant tome, From Counterculture to Cyberculture.) As a whole, the group tried to get at what it means to be "counter" and whether or not the term is politically serviceable in contemporary times.

Thereafter, even smaller groups convened to workshop graduate student writing and research. These break-outs, which were student-led, gave each participant the opportunity to receive feedback on his or her work from a cohort of grad students, in dialog with two faculty members. Personally, I enjoyed not only learning about Erik Johnson (NU), Michael Lahey (IU), Kim Singletary (NU), and Jeff. St. Onge's (IU) work, but also learning, through it, more about the kinds of questions their respective graduate programs are focusing on right now. We covered everything from Google Street View and the racial politics of high fashion to audience labor and emergent constraints on political activism in the United States. Whew!

Practically every faculty member I spoke to during the weekend commented on how much she or he enjoyed every aspect of the MW3. Especially welcome was the opportunity to interact with incredibly bright students from outside of one's home institution. I also heard several colleagues mention how much they appreciated the opportunity to get to know fellow faculty in a smaller, more personable setting than your usual large-scale academic conference. I couldn't agree more.

The MW3 was real gem, and that was due to all the students who made it happen. They're a remarkable bunch who deserve heaps of praise. And here I feel compelled to single out the IU Department of Communication and Culture's own Jeff Motter. He helped conceive of the first MW3 three years ago, when it was hosted at U of I, and both this year and last, he shouldered a major share of the responsibility in organizing the event here at IU. Kudos, Jeff, and thank you for such a memorable weekend.

Saturday night's Presidential debate

It was enlightening to watch the ABC News/Facebook/WMUR Presidential debates this past Saturday night, for many reasons. I was aware of Obama and Huckabee's having won the Iowa caucuses, but honestly, I hadn't kept up much in terms of who-stands-for-what. The Indiana primary (where I live) doesn't occur until May, which is about two months after the Democratic and Republican nominees will have all but been determined. (The states with primaries later than ours are Kentucky, Montana, Nebraska, New Mexico, Oregon, South Dakota, and West Virginia.) I lived in New Hampshire many years ago, home of the nation's first primary, and was I born in New York, a state teeming with electoral votes. It's strange now living somewhere that barely registers in Presidential elections, other than as a place that can be counted on to go red literally within minutes of the polls closing.

Two things struck me most about the debates themselves. First, I appreciated seeing former Libertarian Ron Paul mix it up with the Republicans. His presence there changed the whole tenor of things, try as the other candidates might to stay "on message" and stick to their don't-let-them-seem-rehearsed sound bites. Though I have no intention of voting Republican, it was still refreshing to hear someone, finally, talking about the implications of the massive devaluation of the dollar that's occurred under Bush 43's watch. My only regret was that ABC News excluded Dennis Kucinich from the Democratic half of the debate. No doubt his presence there would have broadened the scope of the conversation and made it much more interesting.

Second, I was flabbergasted, as was the studio audience at New Hampshire's St. Anselm College, by a comment made by the debate moderator, ABC News' Charlie Gibson. He premised a question to the Democratic candidates about tax cuts by saying, "If you take a family of two professors here at Saint Anselm, they’re going to be in the $200,000 category that you’re talking about lifting the taxes on." Huh? Did I miss something here? Since when did it become routine for professors to make $100,000 per year or more? Apropos, there's a story in today's Inside Higher Education that talks about the public's misperception of the nature of, and compensation for, academic labor by full-time faculty. No wonder folks still can't manage to shake the myth of the ivory tower. Heck--most of what's in my office is made of plastic.

Should I join Facebook?

I'm undecided on the issue, personally, which is why I'm asking all of you to weigh in. On the one hand, it's enough for me simply to maintain this blog, let alone to contribute to Sivacracy (oh--and earn a living). On the other hand, a recent peek at a friend's Facebook page showed me that, well, essentially everyone I know in the universe belongs. No one's directly pressured me to join, yet I feel compelled to be a part of something so many people seem to be engaging in. (Yes, I succumb fairly easily to peer pressure.)

In other news, I've made a few minor changes to add further interactivity to D&R. Each post now contains a footer with email, Digg, and subscription links. I've also changed my site syndication, which is now handled through FeedBurner.

Happy 2008, everyone, and let me know what you think about Facebook.

---

P.S. For more on this thread, see my post from May 2008, "Why Did I Join Facebook?"

Happy holidays from D&R

I just wanted to wish all of my readers a happy and healthy holiday season. This probably will be my last post until the new year, so here's a link and another one to some holiday inspired classic D&R to tide you over. Peace.

Star Wars "on Ice"

My only question is this: wouldn't it have made more sense for his Vanilla-ness to have worked his mojo on Hoth, the ice planet?

A few of my favorite things

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.

An important addition to tbe blog roll

One of my primary research interests (and indeed one of the ongoing discussions here at D&R) concerns the politics of scholarly publishing. Apropos, I've decided to make a long overdue addition to the blog roll. Peter Suber is one of the leading--and surely one of the most intelligent--advocates for open access publishing. His blog, Open Access News, is a must-read for anyone interested in these issues. Please make sure to check it out!

If that's not enough for you, you might want to subscribe to the SPARC Open Access email newsletter. You can do so by clicking here. The newsletter's a great way to stay up-to-date on the latest in the world of open access. This information is especially important, given recent initiatives by opponents of open access to roll back some of the gains O.A. advocates have made.

Uh, did I miss something?

From today's Inside Higher Education comes a story about a recent symposium, convened at George Washington University, to explore copyright issues on university campuses. The sponsoring agency? A new group benignly calling itself "Copyright Alliance." Its mission, according to the piece, is to "promote strong copyright protection for artists."

Did somebody say, "thinly veiled PR front?"

What struck me most about the story was this particular passage, which refers to "a lack of critical engagement with copyright issues at the university level and the result that students often don’t understand the logic behind prohibitions on illegal file sharing."

Huh?

For my part, I can only imagine teaching about intellectual property critically, and trying to cultivate a critical sensibility in my students with respect to I.P. issues past, present, and future. Indeed most of the folks I know who teach about I.P. do exactly the same thing, trying their best to balance a healthy respect for the law with a recognition that, at least in some cases, I.P. law may well have been extended too far beyond the parameters set forth in the United States Constitution.

The question I'm left with is this: since when does "critical engagement" really mean "acquiescence?"


P.S. You can check out Siva Vaidhyanathan's (somewhat off-the-cuff) thoughts on the so-called Copyright Alliance by clicking here.

Some advice about writing

The end is near.

No, not that end. I’m talking about the end of the semester, the time when everyone I know starts scurrying frantically to finish up projects and to take/administer exams before we finally get to recess for the holidays. For my part, the students in my graduate seminar on cultural studies are turning in papers this Monday, and my teaching assistants and I are administering a final exam in my undergraduate class on—get this—the very last time-slot on the very last day of final exams here at Indiana University. No one’s thrilled, but what can you do?

A recent blog post from one of my former students (and current TAs) reminded me of just how much writing angst emerges around this time of year. I thought it might be worthwhile, therefore, to share a bit of writing-related advice that I’ve accumulated over the years. Maybe it will help some of you, who find yourselves stuck, to break through whatever impasses are getting the better of you.

(1) “Just write…”
This piece of wisdom was given to me by one of my former mentors, John Nguyet Erni, while I was writing my undergraduate thesis. I had hit a roadblock and told him I couldn’t go on; my head was just empty, my creativity, tapped. He responded by telling me to “just write.” I subsequently learned an important lesson about myself as a writer: I often write best when I start with a writing “riff.” Instead of trying to begin by forming complete sentences, I often compose short, half-formed phrases that I subsequently develop. Just getting something down on paper sometimes can be the key.

(2) “There’s a problem…”
I inherited this little pearl from another one of my mentors, Lawrence Grossberg, when I asked him for his advice about what causes academic writers to block (I was blocked at the time—notice a pattern?). He told me that writing blocks often result from specific errors or problems that can be easily fixed. These have tended to take two forms in my experience. First, they can be organizational, as in when I include material in the body or conclusion of my paper-in-progress that really belongs in the introduction. Bad architecture makes bad buildings, as it were. Second, these problems can be research related. I’m embarrassed to say that on too many occasions I couldn’t write because I simply didn’t have sufficient data to write about. I know enough about myself as a writer now to recognize when this is happening, and so I get myself back to the library immediately.

(3) “Thank You…”
This one I picked up during my research on Oprah Winfrey’s Book Club. Long about the year 2000 or so, Ms. Winfrey invited author Andre Dubus III onto her TV show to talk about his novel House of Sand and Fog, which she’d selected for the Book Club. There, he mentioned having discovered the writing diary of his father, Andre Dubus II, who was also a novelist and who’d recently passed away. Whether Andre Dubus II had written six or six thousand words on any given day, he chronicled the number in his diary and unfailing appended two words thereafter: “thank you.” Being able to write anything was something to be grateful for, as far as Andre Dubus II was concerned. He never beat himself up about not having had a stellar writing day, every day. Instead, he focused on the positive aspects of what he actually managed to accomplish. I’ve learned from the Dubus’ that maintaining an affirmative disposition can help you to avoid writing paralysis.

(4) “It’s not f-----g Shakespeare!”
This one also comes from TV. A few years ago I watched the American Film Institute’s tribute to actor Sean Connery. During the show, Andy Garcia reflected on what he’d learned as a relatively young actor when he appeared with the veteran Connery in The Untouchables. In one scene, Garcia recalled, his character simply had to answer the telephone and utter a few utilitarian lines; thereafter, the scene was Connery’s. There was just one problem, though. Take after take, Garcia couldn’t get it right. He flubbed his lines several times and over-acted them even more. Frustrated, Connery finally turned to Garcia and shouted in that thick, Scottish brogue everyone’s so fond of imitating: “My god! It’s not f-----g Shakespeare!” Garcia apparently delivered the lines successfully on the very next take, having been relieved of the feeling that his small contribution was supposed to carry the whole scene.

There seems to me a useful parallel to be drawn here when it comes to writing. Sometimes, you just need to be a hack who gets through the unimportant stuff so that you can focus on the really significant material. Now, I know what you’re probably thinking: isn’t it all important? No, it’s not. Get over it, and get over yourself. The trick lies in figuring out when to linger on certain aspects of your prose and when to let other aspects go. But at the end of the day, you must remember: much, and perhaps most, of what you’re writing isn’t “Shakespeare.”

If only Deleuze had had access to YouTube...

D&R readers absolutely must watch this video! It's modeled after the political "attack ads" that appear frequently on U.S. television around election time. Here, though, politicians aren't dueling, philosophers are, and Immanuel Kant is on the receiving end of the smear campaign. It's truly hilarious, if, ultimately, rather apt.

Thanks to my colleague John Lucaites for passing along the link. Share and enjoy!

I'm joining Sivacracy!

My good friend Siva Vaidhyanathan recently asked me to become a contributor to his main blog, Sivacracy. D&R readers will know that I've admired the writing and insightful commentary there for many years, and so needless to say, I accepted his kind invitation. I'm delighted to be joining the Sivacracy team as of today. You can read my first post, which is basically introductory, by clicking here.

I'm still working out what to post where, or if I should just cross-post everything I write. In any case, rest assured that D&R won't be shutting down. And to that end, I thank all of you, dear readers, for your continuing support.

Ebooks: The future (???) of reading

It's funny how things come and go. I published an essay about a year ago in the journal Television and New Media about ebooks and electronic reading. It's had some response, and a version of the piece will be included in my forthcoming book, The Late Age of Print. Even so, there's been some sense for awhile now, particularly since the dot-com bust, that stand-alone electronic reading devices were pretty much over and done with--at least, for the time being. I know, I know: Sony's had one out for a few years now; I've seen and tried it at Borders. Nevertheless, it doesn't seem to have had a great deal of uptake, much less sparked widespread discussion about the future of books and reading.

That's starting to change with Amazon.com's recent announcement of Kindle, its electronic reading device. It's been featured on the cover of last week's Newsweek and in stories by NPR; it's also whipped the technology wing of the blogosphere into something of a frenzy. (D&R is no exception here.) Suddenly, ebooks and e-reading are sexy again, the stuff of public commentary and conversation.

I'll be honest: having researched and written at length on the history and technology of ebooks, I'm skeptical of Kindle's possibilities for success. Every few years an ebook "revolution" seems to flare up, only to flame out shortly thereafter. Witness all the hoopla surrounding the Rocket Ebook and other such devices, which were touted in the late 1990s as the Next Big Thing. Where are they now, other than selling for pocket change on eBay?

Though I may not be optimistic about Kindle's future, there are a few significant differences that set it a part from earlier stand-alone e-reading devices. The most significant factor for me is probably Amazon.com, which is unusually well-positioned to market and sell the reader. But even more interesting to me is the careful messaging that's going on around Kindle. In contrast to many earlier forays into the realm of ebooks and e-reading, Kindle isn't being marketed as a replacement for printed books. Instead, media reports about the device, and indeed the marketing surrounding it, all speak reverentially about the smells, sounds, and textures of printed books. The Newsweek article I mentioned earlier even touted the printed book as having one of the best "interfaces" (to impose an anachronism) of all media hitherto created. Kindle's being sold not as a replacement for printed books, but rather as a supplement to them, or even as a way of augmenting them. This definitely shows signs of having learned from past mistakes.

Here are a couple of the rubs for me. First, Kindle can only hold 200 books. Now, that may sound like a lot, but at a time when iPods and other such devices can hold thousands of megabyte-consuming songs, couldn't the designers of Kindle have done better with what is, after all, mostly text? What's more disturbing to me, though, are the terms of service Kindle and many other ebook devices attempt to impose. Once you buy a book and download it to your Kindle, you're done--as in, you can't pass it on to anyone else due to embedded digital rights management technology. This "friendly" new e-reading device, like many digital technologies abounding today, is working actively, if quietly, to undermine the First Sale Doctrine. This basically says (among other things) that once someone has sold you some good, she or he is no longer at liberty to dictate to whom you can give or sell it. Kindle thus represents yet another salvo in the book publishing industry's ongoing war against the used and pass along book trades. Worse, now a major bookseller is in cahoots with the publishers.

I can understand why the book industry, as well as the Author's Guild and the sellers of new books, might be discomforted by the passing on and resale of books. None of these groups profits directly from the circulation of these objects in the after market. But I wonder: is it as simple as that? Does cutting off the ability to circulate books after their first sale really help authors and publishers? Or is this an unimaginative way of creating demand by manufacturing artificial conditions of scarcity, a way that neglects the degree to which informal and unauthorized economies of exchange actually can increase people's desire for at least some consumer goods? (Here I'll refer you to Yochai Benkler's The Wealth of Networks, which addresses these concerns more cogently and in more detail than I can here.)

All that to say, if you really want to revere the printed book (and I'm talking to you, Amazon.com), you need to respect its ability to circulate more or less freely and to create ebook devices that do the same. Lock down culture all you want. I'm not buying until I start seeing some keys.


Coming soon: my reflections on this little ditty from Amazon.com, which now appears on the page for a book I co-edited called Communication as...: Perspectives on Theory: "Upgrade this book for $9.19 more, and you can read, search, and annotate every page online. See details...." Sigh.

Write, form a rhizome...

Differences and Repetitions began in many respects as a blog about the individual and collaborative writings of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. It's always been about more than that, of course, but many of my earliest readers/interlocutors were fellow admirers of their work. I'm writing now to propose an experiment involving those of you with an interest in Deleuze and Guattari, and those of you who might be intrigued to participate for other reasons.

I've just completed a draft of a short paper on Deleuze and Guattari, which I'm scheduled to present at the US National Communication Association convention next week in Chicago, Illinois. It's part of a panel organized by my friend and colleague, Mehdi Semati, on the theme, "Against Communication: On the Deleuzoguattarian Ethics of Refusal (to Communicate)." Here's the deal: each of the panelists has chosen a short passage from the duo's work that says something about communication. My selection, which comes from What Is Philosophy? is this: “We do not lack communication. On the contrary, we have too much of it. We lack creation. We lack resistance to the present” (108; emphasis in original). Our task is to explicate and complicate our respective passages, in the strong sense in which Deleuze uses those terms. "To seek the truth is to interpret, decipher, explicate," he writes in Proust and Signs. "But this 'explication' is identified with the development of the sign itself" (2000: 17).

This is where you come in. I've set up a page on wikidot.com, which, like Wikipedia, allows users to view, comment on, and edit the document I've drafted. You can access the paper by clicking here. You don't need to do anything special to edit it; no registration or login is required. All you need to do is click the "edit" box near the bottom of the page, and the rest is more or less self-explanatory. If you'd rather not actively edit, you're always welcome to read the paper and email comments/ responses to me: striphas@indiana.edu. Alternatively, you can leave your comments here on D&R.

I'm interested in soliciting your input and collaboration for several reasons. For starters, I'd love some advance feedback on the piece before presenting it. But beyond that, having read Yochai Benkler's The Wealth of Networks, Henry Jenkins' Convergence Culture, and related materials, I find myself becoming increasingly interested in the creative possibilities of distributed peer production. Wikis and other such technologies seem to me commensurate, at least in principle, with Deleuze and Guattari's injunction from A Thousand Plateaus: "Write, form a rhizome..." (1987: 10). I thought it might be intriguing to try something like dissolving the speaking (or writing) subject in a piece ostensibly about "communication."

Anyone who contributes will, of course, get appropriately credited on the piece. I thank you in advance for your input and look forward to seeing how the essay shapes up.

Dispatches from the edge of the Eastern time zone

It was dark this morning--until 8:00 a.m. It wasn't murky, it wasn't rainy, it wasn't foggy. In fact, today has turned out to be one of the sunniest days we've had in awhile here in Bloomington, Indiana. But this morning, it was just dark. Really dark.

About a year ago, I posted a short piece on the State of Indiana's decision in early 2006 to adopt daylight savings time. For those of you who don't know, most of Indiana used to observe Eastern Standard Time all year round. Basically, this meant we spent half the year on Eastern Standard Time and the other half of the year on Central Daylight Time. If you're confused, join the club. Nobody ever seemed to know what time it was in Indiana, except maybe those of us actually living here.

For most of last year, I considered Indiana's move to observe daylight savings time a welcome one, since it put us on the same time year round as my friends and family living back east. There were other benefits that followed, too, since Indiana was now effectively the western edge of the Eastern time zone. The best part was how the daylight lasted deep into the evening. In summer, sunset occurred close to 10:00 p.m., and even in winter, daylight would linger until about 5:30 or 6:00 p.m. That was a far cry from when I lived in New Hampshire. There, sunset in December happened around 4:15 or 4:30 p.m.

Anyway, the U.S. Congress has gone and mucked it all up by extending daylight savings time by two weeks this year. Those who observe the time change set our clocks ahead one week earlier than normal this past April, and this coming weekend--one week later than normal--we'll set our clocks back. The result has been the incredible darkness we've lately been experiencing each morning here in Indiana. By the time we do set the clocks back, sunup won't happen until close to 8:15 a.m.

Let me tell you, it's hard getting out of bed when it's that dark, even when you know, rationally, that you normally get up at 7:30 a.m. or thereabouts.

Needless to say, I'm looking forward to the restoration the move back to Eastern Standard Time will bring. Regrettably, it's only a temporary respite. The days keep getting shorter until the third week in December, which means, just about then, sunup won't happen until 8:00 or 8:15 a.m. again.

Who knows? Maybe the old, two time zone system wasn't so bizarre after all....

On being wrong

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.

U of MN strike update

I have disappointing news to share, courtesy of Gil Rodman's Revolution on a Stick. Gil writes: "Less pretty--and something closer to a total loss (at least to this point)--is the AFSCME strike at the U, which officially ended last Friday...but only because the striking workers couldn’t afford to stay away from steady (if still inadequate) paychecks as long as the administration could afford to hold out. There’s much more to say here, but I’m still feeling far too angry about it all to get it down cleanly."

Sigh. You can read Gil's full post here, as well as his follow-up. The AFSCME strike website has even more detailed information about the strike and the reasons why the U of MN clerical, technical, and health care workers decided they couldn't hold out any longer.

Collapse on Deleuze

A message just came my way via email announcing the latest issue of the journal, Collapse. The previous issue had a more-than-vaguely Deleuzian bent, and this one promises even more. In fact, it contains work by Gilles Deleuze previous unpublished in the English language. The piece I'm especially intrigued by is the one Deleuze penned when he was just beginning his philosophical career at the age of 21.

Anyway, I thought D&R readers might be interested in what the good folks at Collapse have been up to. They seem to be doing something quite engaging indeed, so please pass the word on to others who might be interested.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
We are delighted to announce that COLLAPSE Volume III will be published in mid-October and is now available for advance purchase online at http://www.urbanomic.com/order.

Collapse Volume III: 'Unknown Deleuze' contains explorations of the work of Gilles Deleuze by pioneering thinkers in the fields of philosophy, aesthetics, music and architecture. In addition, we publish in this volume two previously untranslated texts by Deleuze himself, along with a fascinating piece of vintage science fiction from one of his more obscure influences. Finally, as an annex to Collapse Volume II, we also include a full transcription of the conference on 'Speculative Realism' held in London earlier this year.

Whilst books continue to appear at an alarming rate which claim to put Deleuze's thought 'to work' in diverse areas outside of philosophy, we submit, in this volume, that his philosophical thought itself still remains enigmatic, both in its detail and in its major themes. The contributors to this volume aim to clarify, from a variety of perspectives, Deleuze's contribution to philosophy: in what does his philosophical originality lie; what does he appropriate from other philosophers and how does he transform it? And how can the apparently disparate threads of his work to be 'integrated' – what is the precise nature of the constellation of the aesthetic, the conceptual and the political proposed by Gilles Deleuze, and what are the overarching problems in which the numerous philosophical concepts 'signed Deleuze' converge?

The volume includes two newly-translated articles by Gilles Deleuze along with contributions from Arnaud Villani, Thomas Duzer, Quentin Meillassoux, John Sellars, Éric Alliez & Jean-Claude Bonne, Haswell & Hecker, Robin Mackay, Mehrdad Iravanian, J.-H. Rosny the Elder, Graham Harman, Iain Hamilton Grant and Ray Brassier.

For anyone wanting to go right to the core of Deleuzian philosophy and to experience the challenge of Deleuze's thought, the articles collected in Collapse III will provide a virtually inexhaustible treasury of insights. As the featured authors shed light on this challenge from different points of view, they produce unexpected points of convergence, providing important resources for a more complete conceptual 'portrait' of Deleuze, and suggesting further lines of thought to be investigated. For anyone looking for an alternative to the emerging orthodoxy seemingly bent on broadcasting an 'image of Deleuzian thought', Collapse III provides a wide-ranging but uniformly rigorous and innovative survey of Gilles Deleuze's thought, and an illustration of the fact that, even if it is already fashionable to evoke a 'post-Deleuzian' era, we have not yet begun to draw the properly philosophical consequences of this thought.

– Mathesis, Science and Philosophy, written by a 21-year-old Gilles Deleuze, has never before appeared in print in English and is published in Collapse in a new translation. Written as an introduction to a 1946 republication of a 19th-century esoteric philosophical work by Dr Johann Malfatti de Montereggio, this text offers a fascinating glimpse, set in an unexpected context, into the themes of Deleuze's early work, as they emerge, in an already characteristically-dazzling style. Meanwhile, in the brief but illuminating 1981 interview with Arnaud Villani, Answers to a Series of Questions (also appearing here for the first time in English), Deleuze provides some tantalising intimations regarding the enduring concerns of his work over the years.

– In his own contribution to the volume, philosopher-poet Arnaud Villani (whose 1999 The Wasp and the Orchid was one of the first books to be published in France treating Deleuze's work as a whole) reflects on Deleuze's affirmation that he considered himself a 'pure metaphysician': what, precisely, does metaphysics mean for Deleuze? Through a sophisticated reading utilising the resources of aesthetics, poetics and philosophy, Villani not only defines the object of this metaphysics, but also shows clearly why it cannot be severed from its links with these other realms of thought, or from the question of the political or moral 'decision'.

– This allusion reminds us that an examination of Deleuze today would be unthinkable without reference to Alain Badiou's provocative Deleuze: The Clamor of Being, and in his article In Memoriam of Deleuze, Thomas Duzer undertakes, through a survey of the major axes of Deleuze's philosophy, to locate the precise nature of their now famous 'nonrelationship'; his defence emphasises that the positive features of Deleuze's thought cannot be reduced either to a 'phenomenology' or to Badiou's polemical opposite.

– In an exclusive translated extract from their new book Matisse-Thought: Portrait of the Artist as Hyperfauve, philosopher Éric Alliez (former student of Deleuze's and author of The Signature of the World) and art-historian Jean-Claude Bonne analyse the revolution inaugurated in painting by Matisse during his ‘Fauvist’ period of 1905-6, discovering that the rigorous 'quantitative' conception of the intensive which Matisse proposes allows not only a new understanding of the significance of Fauvism for his later work, but also clarifies and reaffirms the philosophical pertinence of a Nietzschean-Deleuzian thinking of intensity and extensity, the qualitative and the quantitative.

– On the basis of an examination of a 'fragment' from Deleuze and Guattari's What is Philosophy?, Quentin Meillassoux, in a philosophical tour de force, meticulously reconstructs the nature and the measure of Deleuzian 'immanence', proposing finally a 'subtractive' reading drawing on Bergson's Matter and Memory, allowing us to understand, step-by-step 'from the inside' the construction of that singular network of concepts found in Deleuze's work.

– Sound artists Russell Haswell and Florian Hecker contribute some strange and beautiful images taken from the electronic 'score' of their new sound work Blackest Ever Black, an 'introduction to synaesthesia' created using composer Iannis Xenakis's computerised UPIC system to transform contemporary images into sound. An accompanying text by Robin Mackay analyses the affinities between Xenakis's conception of a musical 'polyagogy' and Deleuze's 'transcendental empiricism'.

– Examining Deleuze's famous use of the supposedly Stoic theory of Chronos and Aîon in Logic of Sense, John Sellars (author of The Stoics and The Art of Living) examines just how much it owes to actual stoic theories of time, thus providing both a case-study in the Deleuzian 'ventriloquism' in the history of philosophy and an informative example of the 'stratigraphic' time in which, according to Deleuze, philosophy takes place.

– Iranian architect Mehrdad Iravanian constructs a 'graphitext' which, taking as its starting point a page from Deleuze's The Fold, undertakes a non-interpretative 'ex-pli-cation' of its content. Employing a hybrid methodology at once literal, textual and architectural, he brings to light structures secreted within the folds of the text itself.

– One of the many obscure 'personae' in the background of Deleuze's Difference and Repetition, the mysterious figure J.-H. Rosny the Elder not only supplied that work's repeated formula for the nature of intensity-as-difference, but, as both philosopher and pioneering science fiction author, was also a living embodiment of the notion that 'philosophy is a kind of science-fiction': in his astonishing 1895 tale Another World, appearing here in English for the very first time, Rosny evokes an alien world of abstract lifeforms intersecting with our own, and examines with philosophical acuity the process of bringing such unknown beings within the purview of scientific knowledge.

– As if all this were not enough ... Following the 'dossier' on Speculative Realism in the previous volume of Collapse, Volume III also includes a full transcription of the colloquium of the same name held at Goldsmith's University of London in April 2007 featuring presentations by Ray Brassier, Iain Hamilton Grant, Graham Harman and Quentin Meillassoux on the problems, and the promise, of this renewal of speculative philosophical thought. Running to well over 100 pages, this is an important and exciting document of contemporary philosophy in the making, proposing new conceptual approaches, exploring the borders between science and philosophy, and mining the history of thought for fresh insights into Nature, objectivity, and the legacy of 'correlationism'.

Advance online orders for Volume III are priced (including postage) £10 (UK) / £13 (Europe) / £16 (Elsewhere).

(Unfortunately a vastly increased page count, together with regular unpredictable postal rate rises, have necessitated an increase in price for this volume.)

***4-Volume subscriptions are also available online at a reduced price.***

Readers will shortly be able to download a preview of the introduction to Volume III from the website http://www.urbanomic.com/dl.php, where introductions to Vols I and II are already available.

Help us: if you are able to post a notice in your place of work or study, please download and print the flyer for Collapse Volume III from http://www.urbanomic.com/dl.php. We would also welcome and reciprocate all links into the Urbanomic website from blogs, etc. Finally, please forward this bulletin on to anyone you know who is not on our mailing list but who may be interested.

COLLAPSE Volume III
October 2007.
Paperback 115x175mm 515pp (TBC)
Limited Edition of 1000 numbered copies.
ISBN 0-9553087-2-0

Kembrew's latest hits

Kembrew McLeod, my sometimes-partner in crime, is a busy person--so busy, in fact, that he's got several new productions I thought D&R readers might be interested in hearing about. The first is his newly-renovated Freedom of Expression® website, which contains information about his book and soon-to-be-released documentary, both of the same name. Also new to the site is an excellent interview with writer and intellectual property activist, Jonathan Lethem. Kembrew promises more updates soon, including Jon Langford's (of Mekons fame) cover of "This Land Is Your Land," which he recorded for the credits to the Freedom of Expression® documentary.

As it happens, Kembrew also published a great op-ed piece in today's LA Times called, "Uri Geller's YouTube Takedown." As with all of Kembrew's work, it's at once insightful and painfully funny. The piece looks at how Uri Geller, everyone's favorite spoon-bending TV psychic from the 1970s, has been been using threats of copyright infringement to censor video that discredits his act. Definitely check it out--though Uri Geller fans, beware: you might want to keep a tissue or two handy to dab the tears.

Big (Warner) brother is watching...

Courtesy of the Los Angeles Times via Sivacracy, to which I can only feebly respond, "yikes!"

The all-you-can-eat packages of voice, video and Internet services offered by phone and cable companies may be convenient, but they represent a potentially significant threat to people's privacy.

Take, for example, Time Warner Cable, which has about 2 million customers in Southern California. The company offers a voice-video-Net package called "All the Best" for $89.85 for the first 12 months.

But for anyone who has the wherewithal to read Time Warner's 3,000-word California privacy policy, you discover that not only does the company have the ability to know what you watch on TV and whom you call, but also that it can track your online activities, including sites you visit and stuff you buy....

You can read more here.

Open access update

A couple of weeks ago I posted a piece called "The Publishing Industry Strikes Back," in which I advocated for more open-access publishing in the humanities. There I also talked about a PR front called Prism, whose goal is to undermine open-access journal publishing in medicine and the sciences. Well, as it turns out, this week's Chronicle of Higher Education included a couple of really interesting reports, both from the front-lines of open-access journal publishing. I figured D&R readers might appreciate an update.

The first of these stories spotlights James D. Jordan, President and Director of Columbia University Press. Last month, he courageously resigned from the Executive Council of the Association of American Publisher's Professional and Scholarly Publishing division. He did so, notably, because he opposed Prism and its efforts to restrict open-access to publicly funded scientific and medical research. If you're a Chronicle subscriber (unfortunately, the publication's not open-access), you can read the whole story here.

The second story ups the ante even more. Other university press officials and the Association for Research Libraries are speaking out publicly about how Prism misrepresents its constituency and makes erroneous claims about the nature of open-access journals. The story also recounts how some open-access supporters are beginning to resign from the editorial boards of journals whose publishers support Prism. Here's an excerpt:

Reactions to Prism have been widespread and vigorous, with some commentators calling for a boycott of the association. The news provoked one university-press director, Mike Rossner of Rockefeller University Press, to make a public request that a disclaimer be placed on the Prism Web site "indicating that the views presented on the site do not necessarily represent those of all members of the AAP." Mr. Rossner continued, "We at the Rockefeller University Press strongly disagree with the spin that has been placed on the issue of open access by Prism."

The Association of Research Libraries sent its members a talking-points memo, dated September 4, that deals with some of the arguments made on the Prism site. The librarians' group wrote that Prism "repeatedly conflates policies regarding access to federally funded research with hypothesized dire consequences ultimately resulting in the loss of any effective system of scholarly publishing. Many commentators agree that inaccuracies abound in the initiative's rhetoric."

One of those commentators, Tom Wilson, took his own advice that "academics should resign from editorial boards of journals published by the supporters of Prism": He posted an open letter on the Information Research Weblog announcing his resignation from the editorial board of the International Journal of Information Management. Mr. Wilson, a professor emeritus of information technology at the University of Sheffield, in England, was founding editor of that journal. He is also publisher and editor in chief of Information Research, an online, open-access scholarly journal.

There's much more to the story, of course. In any case, I hope you can see just how much momentum the effort to resist Prism seems to be gaining. What's especially encouraging, as I think I mentioned last time, is the fact that individuals and groups from across a whole range of fields and professions are joining together to support the cause.

The decisive battle has yet to be won on Capitol Hill, of course, and so the fight's long from over. But it's precisely this mobilization of pointed counter-arguments, coupled with a refusal to support publishers who actively oppose open-access, that must persist in the short term.


P.S. I have to give a shout-out once again to my friend Julie Bobay, the Director for Scholarly Communication Initiatives at the IU Libraries, for passing links to these stories on to me.

Strike at U of Minnesota

My good friend Ron Greene, who teaches at the University of Minnesota, left this comment yesterday on my previous post. It links to a blog he and others at Minnesota have set up to talk about how the media are--or are not--covering the AFSCME strike there, which involves Health Care, Technical, and Clerical Workers. Strikes don't deserve to be buried in comments, as far as I'm concerned, so here's what Ron had to say:

Well, on your second anniversary, in an effort to help the AFSCME strike here at the U of Minnesota, me and some folks from the people's confernece set up a website of daily media analysis: check us out: http://peoplesconference.blogspot.com/.

For more about the strike, you can check out this post from Gil Rodman's Revolution on a Stick and the ongoing commentary over at Socialism for Gunslingers, a blog authored by a great group of graduate students at the University of Minnesota.

And please...offer whatever support you can for the strike. The AFSCME is asking mainly for a cost of living adjustment commensurate with the cost of living. Sounds reasonable enough to me.


** An update from Ron who writes: "a key support website for the AFSCME Strike at the University of Minnesota is www.uworkers.org."

Second birthday, and some changes

I'm not sure whether to call these things birthdays or anniversaries, but in any case, D&R is celebrating one on Friday, September 14th. With more than 100 posts and a host of lively comments from all of you, I'm pleased to report things are still going strong after two years.

To celebrate the big event, I've made some changes here at D&R. They're mostly cosmetic, though some are designed to make the site more participatory and interactive for all you readers. The changes were facilitated by my switching over at long last to the new Blogger template system, which I should have done a year ago. (I was frightened off by the prospect of losing all of my existing template modifications.) The switch allowed me to introduce a more user-friendly archiving system, display an index of tags for simpler cross-referencing, and update my site syndication link to one that's more encompassing. On the downside, the formatting on some of my older posts has been rendered somewhat haphazardly, though everything, thankfully, is still entirely readable.

The biggest change, though, are the "DIGG IT" tags you'll see next to each of my posts. (And I owe a shout-out here to Lawrence Lessig, on whose blog I first discovered how cool it is to digg.) If you like what I've written, feel free not only to comment, but also to "DIGG IT." Clicking the tag will redirect you to digg.com. This in turn will give you an opportunity to share my post with the larger, Digg community, allow the good folks there to vote on its worth, and potentially introduce a broader readership to something you found on D&R. And don't worry--it may sound complicated, but it's all really simple.

Thanks, everyone, for celebrating two years of my musings and for contributing your thoughts and perspectives to D&R. Here's to you!

New issue of Culture Machine

Here's a blurb about the latest issue of the online journal Culture Machine, sent to me by my friend Gary Hall (who also co-edits the journal). Apropos of my previous post, Culture Machine is an important, and rather unique, open-access publishing initiative in the field of cultural studies. Please support not only the journal, but also CSeARCH, its open-access archive. More details about both follow below.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
CULTURE MACHINE 9 (2007)
http://www.culturemachine.net

RECORDINGS
Edited by Paul Hegarty and Gary Genosko

The latest issue of Culture Machine asks: What is the current state of aural art media in ‘an era of digital reproduction’?

Contributors to ‘Recordings’ consider the residues of technologies, the anachronisms, the failures, the less-than-excellent, the dated, the outmoded, and even the yet-to-work. Taking into account the material (or dematerialised) art object, they also ask about collecting cultures, recycling, destroyed and broken media (the TV thrown from the window… ), new broadcast media, turntablism, noise, radio and its avatars, podcasting, any casting, the range of material ‘supports’ (vinyl, the 8 track, betamax, different audio files).

Has the digital and informational swamped the world in a mass encoded simulation? What and where are the resistances? Are they within or outside of the digital? In the junk heap of analogue machines? In Ebay dreams? What are the material forms/formats that offer critical models, avant-gardism, metacommentary and so on? What is the status of the art commodity, non-commodity or hypercommodity?

The ‘Recordings’ issue features:

Eugene Thacker, ‘Pulse Demons’

Greg Hainge, ‘Vinyl is Dead, Long Live Vinyl: The Work of Recording and Mourning in the Age of Digital Reproduction’

Paul Hegarty, ‘The Hallucinatory Life of Tape’

Jerome Hansen, ‘Mapping the Studio (Fat Chance Matmos): Sonic Culture, Visual Arts and the Mediations of the Artist’s Workplace’

Gary Genosko, ‘8 Track Rhapsody’

Ross Harley and Andrew Murphie, ‘Rhythms and Refrains: A Brief History of Australian Electronica’

Dan Hays, Painting in the Light of Digital Reproduction’

Adam Bryx, review of Charles R. Acland (ed.) (2007) Residual Media. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press (available separately in the Culture Machine Reviews section)

Plus, new in Culture Machine's InterZone:

Christian Kerslake, ‘The Somnabulist and the Hermaphrodite: Deleuze and Johann Malfatti de Montereggio and Occultism’

-------------------------
CONTRIBUTING TO CULTURE MACHINE

Culture Machine 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, Tadeusz Slawek 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: ry.hall@connectfree.co.uk and d.boothroyd@kent.ac.uk

All contributions will be peer-reviewed; all correspondence will be responded to.


ABOUT CULTURE MACHINE

Culture Machine is an umbrella term for a series of experiments in culture and theory.

The Culture Machine journal: ttp://www.culturemachine.net

Culture Machine Reviews: http://culturemachine.tees.ac.uk/bk_rev.htm

Culture Machine InterZone: http://culturemachine.tees.ac.uk/InterZone/index.htm

The Culture Machine book series, published by Berg, and including:

Paul Virilio, City of Panic (2005)

Charlie Gere, Art, Time & Technology (2006)

Clare Birchall, Knowledge Goes Pop: From Conspiracy Theory to Gossip (2006)

Jeremy Gilbert, Anti-Capitalism and Culture: Radical Theory and the Global Justice Movement (forthcoming)

The Culture Machine open access archive, CSeARCH: http://www.culturemachine.net/csearch

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


----
Dr Gary Hall
Co-editor of Culture Machine http://www.culturemachine.net
Director of the Cultural Studies Open Access Archive, http://www.culturemachine.net/csearch
My website http://www.garyhall.info

The publishing industry strikes back

I mentioned briefly in a post last month that I've been working on a piece on cultural studies and the politics of academic journal publishing. It's evolving, and I have other projects in line ahead of it, so I haven't yet had time to give it the polish it deserves.

In the interregnum, I've been doing my best to stay on top of trends in this no-longer-so-small corner of the academic publishing universe. (It's a multi-billion dollar industry, in case you didn't know.) And I've been fortunate in this regard that Julie Bobay, a colleague of mine at IU and Director for Scholarly Communication Initiatives, has put me on her mailing list. A week or so ago she sent me a copy of this Washington Post article, which reports on an organization called Prism. Its job? To fight open-access journal publishing, beginning in medicine and the sciences.

For those who don't know, open access refers to a range of publishing initiatives, all of which are designed to make knowledge cheaper and more readily available to researchers and the public at large. In some cases publications may be made freely available on a website; in others, they may be placed into sophisticated digital repositories, where they're not only made accessible, but they're also massively cross-referenced with other published research. In most cases, open access tends to respect authors' and users' rights better than the scholarly publishing industry. And this is just the tip of the iceberg.

The case for open access is especially--though by no means uniquely--acute where the research in question has been funded by public money. Consider this: a state university (for example) may subsidize a given professor's research. She or he is then expected to sign away key rights (e.g., copyright, translations rights, electronic publishing rights, terms of access, etc.) to whatever press has agreed to publish journal articles related to this work. The university then will essentially have to buy back that research, typically in the form of a high-priced journal subscription. Now, this isn't to suggest that traditional academic journal publishers don't add significant value to the work they produce. They do. But it is an odd situation, don't you think, when universities and other institutions are expected to pay for their employees' research on both the front and the back ends?

Prism apparently is a none-too-thinly-veiled public relations front for the Association of American Publishers (AAP), whose aim is to convince scholars, administrators, and especially government officials that cheap and accessible knowledge is a very bad thing. You'll see from Prism's website (if you care to go there) that it's "on message" and fairly, if predictably, astute from a rhetorical perspective. I say "predictably," because one of its main tropes against open access is the tired old saw, "big government." One of the organization's main aims is to convince you, or whoever cares to listen, that open access portends government control, and worse yet censorship, of published research; it also claims that the established publishing industry, and only the established publishing industry, can safeguard the rigorous peer review standards that help give published research its legitimacy.

I won't refute Prism's arguments here. That work is already well underway elsewhere. For now, I merely want to point out one significant danger that Prism poses: it has the ear of the US government. The AAP is headed by Pat Schroeder, a former US Congresswoman, who no doubt was hired because of her contacts in Washington. The Prism website also has lots of nifty wizards that make it easy for you, dear reader, to generate emails and letters to send to your Congressional representatives, proclaiming the evils of open access publishing.

I take comfort in the fact that librarians, scientists, doctors, mathematicians, and others outside of the humanities are rather well-organized in opposing Prism and what the organization stands for. It's my sincere hope that more scholars in the humanities will become aware of the issues, realize they affect us as well, and sign on to this important cause.

Reality TV: The new opinion poll

It's over. Summer break, that is. Today started orientation for new graduate students in my department here at Indiana University, which means fall semester has begun for all intents and purposes. Honestly, summer really ended about 10 days ago for me, when on last Monday morning there arrived an avalanche of emails pertaining to things that needed to happen NOW before the semester started. And on top of that, my department moved buildings. More on that, later.

The summer was a reasonably productive one, as I'm sure readers of D&R already know. When I wasn't writing, reading, prepping for fall classes, or traveling, I spent a good deal of time watching reality TV. It seems as though that's becoming an annual occurrence for me, as one of my posts from last summer attests and as my colleague, Jon Simons, reminded me today during one of our orientation sessions. This year I got sucked into two cooking competitions, Fox's Hell's Kitchen and Bravo's Top Chef, in addition to On the Lot (a competition to become a feature film director) and So You Think You Can Dance. (Yes...I watched So You Think You Can Dance. Snicker all you want.)

Most of these shows wrapped within the last week, and so with a little critical distance under my belt, I'm moved to reflect on their significance as a genre. I'm especially intrigued with shows like On the Lot and So You Think You Can Dance, both of which, like American Idol (Pop Idol for my readers from across the Pond), base their weekly contestant eliminations on audience call-ins, text messaging, and internet voting.

This is marketing research, and a clever form of it at that. It's so clever that rather than costing money, it actually generates income for show producers who subsequently sell the already-proven skills of the contest winner in the form of CDs, music downloads, movies--you name it. Think about it for a moment. Rather than someone from some random opinion-polling firm calling you up during dinner, bothering you with questions about whether you'd prefer to see this or that type of film, TV program, or performing artist, viewers contact these shows of their (our) own volition to provide essentially this type of information. We do it en masse. Now, this isn't perfect research, to be sure. People typically can vote as often as they'd like within an allotted period of time. But even so, what's essentially happening is that the unsexy drudge-work that used to be hidden away in mass culture's "back office" (i.e., opinion polling) now is emerging front-and-center as a key aspect of the entertainment value of these shows. And of course, it's never called "opinion polling" or "market research." In good "democratic" spirit, these shows always stress audience interactivity and empowerment. (I wish I had a dollar for every time I heard Ryan Seacrest proclaim, "America voted, and here are the results....")

All this is part of a larger set of trends. From bar codes becoming things that people other than cashiers now pay close attention to, to the widespread, public testing of "beta" versions of products and more, the boundaries between what used to be called "production" and "consumption" are increasingly fuzzy. And oftentimes, it seems, this fuzziness provides not only for a richer, more potentially informed and interactive relationship with TV programs and other cultural consumables; it also opens up weekly, hour-long opportunities to test-market products in front of millions of viewers.

Focus groups are just sooooo 20th century, aren't they?

Paris, c'est moi!

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.