the minnesota review n.s. 48-49 (1998)Eyal AmiranThe Publishing Imaginary and Electronic Media
The soul is the prison of the body.
In a few volume years the minnesota review will most likely be out of print. While print publications, with all their attractions, will continue with us for a long time, academic journals like this one will move into electronic media. The benefits of this conversion, a process already underway with many scholarly publications (and others, like government documents), are diverse and for the most part obvious. For one thing, these documents will no longer be out of print in the electronic media: they will be available any time and at most places where they now have a readership. For another, the physical and economic limitations that characterize library "holdings" today will not affect electronic holdings, so that any library should, in principle, be able to provide access to all texts available electronically, and to electronic facsimiles of important paper documents. The result would be a revolution of the function and management of the library, among other things. Further, the computers and monitors we now use to read electronic text will become handier. It's misleading to argue that electronic text delivery is slow and reading it fatiguing: these are accidental features of an emergent technology that is already reaching a new level of functionality (with satellite email via palmtops, and the like). It is also probably misleading to argue that computers are too expensive and will separate the haves from the have-nots: like televisions, computers will offer basic cheap connection to almost anyone in the technologically advanced world. The price alone of paper, printing, and the distribution of hard objects will drive academic periodicals generally into the ether. The move from print to electronic publishing is not, I think, the issue; what's at stake is the use that will be made of academic publishing in the intermediate future. Electronic technologies enable particular investigations into the rhetoric, form, and political life of print publishing. Thought and Thinking, InevitablyThis revolution in techne is often said to bring with it a corresponding revolution in thought. The negative statement of this position (associated with Neil Postman, for instance) is more sensational and less technical than the positive one (that computers promote social good). We'll go non-linear, visual, maybe even intuitive. We'll forget how to read, shirk responsibility, and get our news from MTV. When teenagers will grow up, they will still be in their teens, because of the web. We'll lose our ability to think critically. Or else, conversely, the computer will enable a new productivity: free of tedious searches and collations, of literal cut and pasting, the mind will be set free of its material fetters. In zero-wait states, we'll write books in the morning, freeing the body to golf in the afternoon. But how fair is it to connect the technological revolution with a revolution in thought? True, the computer allows us to manipulate and combine texts—to jump around hyperlinked documents, for example—more readily than does print. Virtual texts offer possibilities, like hypermedia publishing, that will make the fixed text of yesteryears impoverished by comparison. On the other hand, it is possible that the thinking that animates the serious use of technology will not change any more than our ability to think today has been altered by recent technologies like nuclear energy, air travel, and plastics. That's not to say that these technologies have not affected our thinking. Their effect, in other words, has included a move to incorporate that change itself into our sense of what thinking is, so that it remains on the whole invisible. It is customary to argue intricately, as Horkheimer and Adorno did in the early days of television, about the deleterious effects of the media, about the short attention spans and intellectual passivity they would generate. Those arguments tend to belie their own claims (though it's important to remember that television, for example, is not now what it was for Horkheimer and Adorno). Are we already sitting around a fire and trying to get hold of an idea, which never quite manages to cohere, that somehow something went wrong? Or have we revolutionized ourselves already, and left the ruling ways of binary, cladistic, and hierarchical thinking for new pastures? It's hard to say, particularly since it's we who say, but usually not "we" who are the said. Perhaps one does think differently than one did before the advent of the world of speed, as Paul Virilio identifies it. But then one does not think of our thinking, the process, as being somehow diminished, impoverished, reduced, when we think the contemporary lifeworld is impoverished or reduced, nor of thought as strong and supple if its object is the powerful production of meaning, specularity, or the hyperreal. The usual paradigm, particularly from the viewpoint critical of new technologies, on the contrary, is that of a sad and angry intellect surrounded by dreck, which it is uniquely capable of judging. This distinction between thought and its intellectual context is worth making and preserving against the quick condemnation of contemporaneity; it is more generally a distinction between thinking and its objects that computer-mediated technology helps make visible. Is thinking itself being confused with the objects of thought? Wintermute, the Artificial Intelligence computer-being of Gibson's novel Neuromancer, explains the relevant distinction between our concepts of thinking and its objects when, during a holographic simulation, it responds to the question, "can you read my mind?": "Minds aren't read. See, you've still got the paradigms print gave you, and you're barely print-literate. I can access your memory, but that's not the same as your mind." He reached into the exposed chassis of an ancient television and withdrew a silver-black vacuum tube. "See this? Part of my DNA, sort of . . . ." He tossed the thing into the shadows and Case heard it pop and tinkle. "You're always building models. Stone circles. Cathedrals. Pipe-organs. Adding machines. I got no idea why I'm here now, you know that?" (170-71) Like stone circles and televisions, the computer can't tell you what it means to be here. The computer is a site for the storage and presentation of data. It is often suggested that if we can search for items in a database, we'll forget to think about them, or that the database itself would become our Great Memory and would render thinking superfluous. Similarly, some people believe that thinking is going bad, or good, when it is aided by computer media, conflating the medium with its message, the mediation with the objects of thought. Computer technologies may alter our thinking, but our thinking is not, by that token, degraded or improved in the same measure as we think the world we identify with computers is. Computer-aided work, writing, design, exposes a fear we have about the intellectual world. The question, simply, is where we are, where we think our thought is. As Donna Haraway writes, Late twentieth-century machines have made thoroughly ambiguous the difference between natural and artificial, mind and body, self-developing and externally designed, and many other distinctions that used to apply to organisms and machines. Our machines are disturbingly lively, and we ourselves frighteningly inert. (152) Are we less the thinking subject, more the passive receptacle that Horkheimer and Adorno discuss, if we use—and are produced by, as Haraway rightly notes (177)—electronic media? Has the computer screen absorbed us, as photographs did the Native American population? Do we really think less well, or is it the rhetoric of the media to make it somehow appears that the thought, or part of the thought, is taking place elsewhere? The Government of AcademeThe question that appears more interesting, then, is not whether we'll lose our minds to the machine, but why we think we will. The advent of electronicity may make visible and understandable print conceptions of publishing that have heretofore lurked beyond view. Chief among these is our publishing imaginary itself, the print status quo. This subject requires some consideration in itself. Publishing is the imaginary of the academic system, the system's elevated conception of itself which readily substitutes for the intellectual world itself. It does not replace intellectual activity, but stands in for it symbolically, particularly because it is supposed to be the synthesis and the distilled result of that activity. Publishing does not represent the totality of academic work, of course—teaching and service have a life of their own (Guillory 59)—nor even the process that goes into making published product. Instead it represents the representation of that process; it is the idea of the academy, its governmental bureaucracy. Publishing tells the academy who it is. Academics think, teach, read, converse, and—on this view—publish the results, which are in effect all that work that came before in a more distilled and finished form. Some academics do distinguish between thought and publishing when they complain (these items then get published in PMLA's "Forum," for example) that there is too much pressure to publish, or that we're asking graduate students to publish before they have thought more about their subjects and the profession. These complaints are not without some merit, but in a way they miss their own point. They reveal not the pressures of professionalization (can it be that these pressures need pointing out?) but the way professional thought thinks about itself in a print tradition. The complaint is that those students who publish prematurely have not read enough or thought enough to do a good job. They do not have enough intellectual life to monumentalize. However, it is not monumentalization that is under review, but its subjects, which are considered insufficiently heroic, accomplished, storied. Critics of premature publication do not question publishing itself. Publishing in these instances, and in the profession generally, is not a part of a larger process, an ongoing event, but its end. The profession imagines itself living in palaces of publication, exchanging offprints (and journal issues) that have symbolic power only, because few of the works so circulated are actually read with care, if at all. I do not propose the cynical argument that no one reads academic work—you're reading this, probably—but that there is another life, and a more important life, to published work, the spectacular life of symbolic capital. The product secures us like gold bullion. It is symbolic and arbitrary; if too much of it is released to the market—by premature student investors, say—then the system itself is threatened. There can be too much publication (an argument I've often heard librarians make). It, and not us, is the guarantee of our lives and identities as professionals. Publishing, perhaps more than the granting of academic degrees and titles, is the de facto process of accreditation in professional fields; in the sciences, for example, it represents the repository of knowledge, the establishment of truth that determines to a large extent the relevance of new work (see Kiang 351, 354). The CV and the citation represent the real circulation of intellectual capital, so that citation itself is the mark of achievement, rather than the achievement. Of course the rhetoric of excellence continues unimpeded (only good work is valued), but raises and promotions by and large do not and cannot depend on value judgments. Recently I saw Homi Bhabha speak, and whatever I thought of his lecture I did at least, I told myself, see him. "What am I to tell Mr. Godot, Sir?" asks the boy in Waiting for Godot. "Tell him . . . (he hesitates) . . . tell him you saw me and that . . . (he hesitates) . . . that you saw me," says Vladimir (59). Seeing is the most that can be said. And it can be said in spades about print, about the material presence of the page (as I argue further below). The star is stardom, the power itself of the spectacle, and not the burning light, the energy of exploding gasses. What happens when the academy itself becomes spectacular in this way, and not only in relation to stars, is that anything participating in the network of published material becomes part of the living, like the glimpsed movie star in Percy's The Moviegoer. The people are the dead, awaiting life in their monuments. The imaginary of the system, an idea of intellectual activity that stands in relation to the real as bureaucracy does for Marx to the body politic (Davis 202; see also Bourdieu 315-17, and Guillory 249-53), has its own regulatory power. It is the representation of academic process, its government, the soul whose manifestation the body is supposed to be. Publications, as the academic imaginary, become actors in the play of their own production. They produce the academic emptiness that requires plenitude in published monuments. The point, as I'll argue in a moment, is not that publishing should cease so that life may begin, or some such thing. That in fact is the equation that now prevails, only in reverse. Life should be seen as part of publishing, rather than its alternative. We see life and publishing as translations of each other, so that one must take the place of the other. Hence the urge for more and more publishing, particularly for tenure. You should be on the way to being someone, so how much have you already become? Let us count the ways. Hence, too, the recent call for "public intellectuals," as though there are not already journalists, writers, artists, intellectuals, and untitled intellectual people active in the public domain. The assumption is that if something isn't published in academic contexts, or if it's not published by a certified academic in popular contexts, then it's not intellectual work. The call for public intellectuals in the academy, like the rhetoric of publishing more generally, reflects a need for credentials rather than for public conversation. It assumes that life is not lived properly unless it is properly monumentalized. What's required is a different relation between thought and publishing, so that this equation itself need not prevail. That new relation is made visible and, perhaps, more possible by electronic media. It establishes the link between the publishing problematic and electronicity. The fear that the computer has taken over, or that we have lost our minds and now the media think for us—a fear that will of course intensify greatly as electronic media become smarter—is overdetermined by its overlap with the unacknowledged sense that we are dead, dead authors whose life is elsewhere, in that published article or book. As dead authors we are supplemental to our work; as readers of computer-mediated publications we are limp receivers, outside the work we access. This is particularly true with the more lively hypermedia publications, which will be, surely, an immense, unprecedented, and exclusive contribution of computer publishing. Hypermedia—the interactive and dynamic unfolding of text, images, and sound on the screen (or in holographic or virtual reality)—is the always already present future of computer publishing. (It is logical therefore that in "Tympan" Derrida sees us objectifying thought with the publishing press: we want to fend off the notions of a mind elsewhere through the immediacy and palpability of print technology.) As publishing is the academic imaginary, so the computer is the imaginary of thinking itself. Both analogies are based on faulty assumptions, but it may take electronic intervention in the order of things to make their assumptions visible. Golems, Graves, MonumentsWhat then does it mean to say that publishing is the imaginary of academe, and what are the implications for publishing in the electronic media? Publishing is now mostly a substitution, a translation of the self. As walking paper monuments, academics are the golems of the new world. This is ultimately a political condition that characterizes the academy; even flesh, as Pynchon notes, is symbolic (386). Publication-as-translation performs an incomplete erasure of becoming, which is denied its own symbolic being and is instead deposited in the vault of the MLA index. The work of work then is in a way denied, made invisible. (This is particularly true in journals like PMLA where the normative assassination of writing is so marked as to unmark their contributions.) It is important therefore to rethink the value of process in academic work. For instance, journals like this one publish articles, and their contribution is thought to be the work that they publish. This is the view that many publications hold of themselves (some journals, like ELH, tell their prospective contributors not to expect comments on their submitted work). In fact, journals often require that authors not submit their work elsewhere when it is under consideration with them (be it noted that this is not the case with the minnesota review). Book presses too follow this logic—Priceton UP, for instance, demands that you sign a contract stating that your work is not being considered elsewhere. The press or the journal must know that it is not wasting effort as it tries to provide a place of publication for the work. If you're digging the grave over here you don't want the body getting up in the middle. Decide—do you want it over here? Fine, I'll start digging. Just don't change your mind. The same applies to the value placed in the profession on journal publishing and editing as a scholarly activity. Editorial work is usually considered professional service, and not scholarship. Someone else wrote the work; the editor only said yes to one, no to another. Clearly journal publishing is not simply the bound issue, like this one, but a complex of activities which, in many ways, are more important than the printing and distribution of the page. There is an academic context affected by journal publishing; there is a more particular context of that journal's publishing over time, which has its own rhetorical powers; there is the writing process of a particular article, a writing that usually involves many hands to various degrees; there is the process of submission, evaluation, revision, and acceptance; there is publication and distribution, and then, the life of afterlife, the continuing life of the letter. Printing, then, is not the first or the last step in publishing, nor is work erased or wasted if an essay is not accepted for publication. It is only when one takes the product for the work of publishing—"treating actions in terms of their results," says Foucault (210)—that rejection denies the work of writing, and only under such monumentalization must multiple-submission be banished from civilized publishing. The publishing imaginary confuses achievement with the product itself, and dictates a devaluation of work as a necessary and invisible prerequisite; the less of it the better. Authors too, probably, would rather get a straight acceptance than a detailed rejection, and might prefer that their work not be read, so long as it's respectably published. Though unpublished, it might still garner hundreds of hits on a web page, for instance. The demands of the system override but do not overlap the interests which the system is putatively set up to satisfy. Publication-as-translation also legislates a particular form of work that can be recognized as such. Only certain objects qualify as official monuments, so much so that it is hard to say what alternative forms of worthwhile intellectual achievement might be or look like. Authors fall over themselves to produce the expected; as Debord writes, "in entering the spectacle as a model to be identified with, [the individual] renounces all autonomy in order himself to identify with the general law of obedience to the course of things" (39). We know what books and articles look like. It is part of the work of books and articles (particularly those bound in book form) to look like work, to produce the idea that they are what published work looks like (see Cohen 3). "Experimentation" in publishing has pushed the envelope of acceptable writing styles and genres in academic work, and a rather diverse industry of 'zines and "alternative" press work has even made inroads into government territory. These have mostly enlarged the domain of the territory. Ronell's The Telephone Book, I have been told by its publisher, sold well on account of its design. Though it does not look like an ordinary book, it conforms so well to the enlarged idea of what a work can look like that it becomes, in its material form, newly desirable as a book. Design, finally, meets the reified and unread academic work. It is a triumph of the publishing imaginary. FinishedElectronic publishing, then, helps expose by analogy the assumptions that animate the monumental mentality of print publishing. The computer lives better than we do, our imagined substitute; likewise print works as the publishing imaginary that legislates us. The computer threatens that power of print, undermines our certainty in the suitability of the monument. Electronic publishing also shows that it is possible to question the vision of monumentality, the gold standard. Not a utopian solution to pollution and unemployment, it does suggest the possibility of new kinds of work, rather than providing only new means to execute familiar ends. This is not because it improves thought; rather, it exposes the logic of monumentality and makes more readily available alternate models of work and dissemination. At the very least, electronic media publishing opens the possibility of a new relation to intellectual work that could challenge the publishing imaginary. What's important about this new kind of work is not simply that it might be interactive, or that it allows one to publish more of the senses than print technology does; rather, it is that the electronic media make non-traditional work, work that isn't finished in the normative way, interesting and useful in ways that print cannot. We may not think better with computers, but we could see our thought differently. The larger issue here is interest. Academic work no longer has to make truth claims, to add to a collective vocabulary of truth, in order to count, to be found useful or worth pursuing. Nietzsche, for one, exposed that position for the naturalization of self-interest: today a study is worthy if it's interesting, if it develops a vocabulary that's stimulating, even if it's not in itself convincing. If interest once involved objectivity and a sense of importance, since the early nineteenth-century it has instead come to suggest claims to emotionality and individualism (Spacks 114-15). That's how the later Heidegger got so much press, for example. So truth claims have not survived. But another claim for usefulness remains, the claim to advancing the life of the profession, of advancing arguments that go beyond earlier arguments or that displace earlier interests. Thus published work needs to be conceptually whole, an achievement in an implicit argumentative continuum. There is a connection between what's found interesting in academic study, and the book and article form. What's interesting is that something can be a completed argument (or appears to conclude), an advance that can appear to be definitive. Universities and academic publications determine, in Cohen's word, "enclosurability" (25). Even "further meditations on," "towards a," and "a prolegomenon to"—forms of writing that have addressed this problem—have not for a moment abandoned the idea of making an advance, the idea of progress in the arts. And yet interest is not based on such an advance. It is easy to dismiss that claim as a description of the rhetorical position of academic work, because there need be nothing about new work that demands that we no longer care about earlier work. The claim to use value holds, instead, in the formal and rhetorical features of publishing. A work needs to be finished to be good, to be worth our attention. Why spend time on something that isn't complete? Books and, to a lesser extent, articles legislate this completion. To be a book, a work must be complete, an argument developed, mature, finished. Books must be finished. Did you finish your book? Looking at the bookshelf, I see hundreds of books, each of which claims rhetorically to bring up, explore, develop, and lay to rest another body of work. A Thousand Plateaus, Poetry as Epitaph, The Case of California, Language, Thought, and Reality are all generically claims to completed arguments. They may argue against completed arguments, but as books, they argue for them. The problem with finished work is that it's never finished. Rather it makes you feel finished. Even in traditional terms it isn't finished by half. It's the rare book that's memorable and worth keeping, as a book. That's normal, but the rhetoric of books ("$60 from Cambridge") says that it's not: it says that they're books. Book blurbs promise definitive and paradigm-shifting achievements (so much so that in order to earn tenure junior faculty in many research institutions must publish work that can be said to redefine its field; in effect literary studies are being redefined dozens of times every year). These books can only promise such achievements because, instead, they affirm, as Bourdieu has argued, the bound legitimacy of their fields, and fulfill the promise of autonomy and completeness made to the publishing imaginary. In the case of published journal articles, the status of the work is guaranteed by the passage of that minimal threshold provided by the set of rules that constitute journals, and not by the work itself (which may exceed that minimum, or not—cf. Foucault 183). As a side-benefit, this discourages qualitative judgment: the production of the imaginary depends on the system itself, on place, and not on the values of events within it. The Mind Has a Mind of its OwnElectronic media can bypass this expectation, and, because they are searchable and flexible in ways that print books are not, can remain useful (even in traditional ways) without being organized as monuments to the act of finishing. The new media can promote thinking rather than symbolically completed thought. This is only so, however, to the extent that electronic media will resist the pressures to become merely instrumental in the headstone factory. Most of the intellectual resistance in the academy to electronic publishing comes either from publishers who fear that their power systems will not withstand the new threat, or from critics of those systems who fear that they will. On the threat of centralization, Mark Crispin Miller writes that the Internet is still a medium of democratic promise, although that promise is also at risk. Indeed, the same gigantic players that control the elder media are planning shortly to absorb the Internet, which could be transformed from a thriving common wilderness into an immeasurable de facto cyberpark for corporate interests, with all the dissident voices exiled to sites known only to the activists and other cranks. (14-15) All technological media are not the same, however. Internet communications are at once more private and more collective than radio and television broadcasting. Radio and TV are regulated and governed strictly because of the limited broadcasting bandwidth available, and because commercial interests are threatened by the multiplication of broadcast stations. Radio and TV broadcasting is exclusive. That's not quite the case with electronic communication (or with cable and satellite communications). While corporate interests want their services to dominate people's net living as commercial television has, they cannot (under current legislation) control personal computer use, and their services are not limited by other Internet communications. Further, the Internet's interactive potential, so far largely unrealized, can counter the one-way media. Increasing centralization in and corporate control of publishing and the media will not have the same effect on electronic publishing as it has on the commercial media. Richard Barbrook argues that Unlike the existing electronic media, the Net is not centred on the one-way flow of communications from a limited number of transmitters. . . . The multi-media corporations will undoubtedly play a leading role in building the infrastructure of the infobahn and selling information commodities over the Net, but they will find it impossible to monopolise the social potential of cyberspace. At least computer-mediated communication has the potential to survive overt challenges from state censorship. Nor is it obvious that the commercial ownership of media has stifled diversity in publication; no more than has the marriage license stifled sexuality. The purveyors of commercial spectacle do help define the imaginary of publishing. They sell stale corporate visions of mediocrity: the commercial media—CNN et al.—are the living dead par excellence, now devoted more and more to promoting their owners' entertainment concerns. But alongside these centripetal forces there has been a publishing explosion in the arts, music, and writing. Small press work, 'zines of all sizes, alternative newspapers, music events, self-produced CDs and tapes, independent film and video all offer viable publishing opportunities. The Internet makes these ventures more possible, and more public. It also makes their symbolic power more understandable. More importantly, it is possible that these publications could develop less teleological interests. People who see mediocrity in the media as a controlling danger credit the media with too much power to define experience; in effect they agree with a vision of the legitimation of information that the media produces. I don't mean that the media is impotent in the face of undaunted individualism, and I am not calling, as Mitchell for example has, for a scaling down of "the rhetoric of the 'power of images'" (Mitchell 74); rather, we should not totalize the power of commercial media. The media's will to power is itself under pressure from decentralized forms of publishing, increasingly including the electronic media. While the Internet, then, like the other media, is technological, it is a mistake to equate broadcast and interactive technologies. To dissociate publication from the official publishing of finished work, aka books and articles, and from commercial interests, is to rethink the relation between what's found interesting and the legitimating processes connected with publishing. It is, lastly, also a function of electronic publication to expose that false association. The internet is not the technological function of the publishing imaginary. It is, at this time, a potential for a more incomplete mind, not mindless activity but a mind without a mind of its own. This article, RIP. Works Cited
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