Massive Multi-Thinker Online Reviews

I’ve been on sabbatical from CT, working on the Valve and, by extension, pushing pet notions about academic publishing reform. These notions have now born fruit in the form of a book event, conducted more or less on the model of similar events pioneered at CT – massive, multi-thinker online reviews. The book is Theory’s Empire, an anthology of essays critical of Theory – the ofless stuff, mostly indigenous to English departments. Several posts up so far, and several bloggers – inside and outside the Valve – lined up to participate over the next several days. Please feel free to drop by and join the conversation if this sounds interesting. Next month we’ve got a different book lined up: The Literary Wittgenstein. I wrote a long review of it for NDPR about a month back. Under the fold, some general thoughts about academic e-publishing.

These book events are an attempt to follow through on a loud declaration made in my inaugural Valve post, which was typically holbonic in length, so I’ll extract an executive summary-style bullet point:

A simple normative principle. Every scholarly book published in the humanities should be widely read, discussed and reviewed – should have it’s own lively blog comment box, not to put too fine a point on it. Because any scholarly book incapable of rousing a modest measure of sustained, considerate, intelligent chat from a few dozen souls who specialize in that area shouldn’t have been published as a book – i.e. after several years labor and an average production cost of $25,000. Turning the point around: any book worth that time and expense, that fails to be widely read, discussed and reviewed – that is not given it’s own blog comment box – has been dramatically failed by the academic culture in which it was so unfortunate as to be born.

I argue that this is particularly true of literary studies, which is the especial focus of my reforming impulses. But it seems to me the point applies, with varying degrees of acuteness and urgency, to the humanities generally, and perhaps the social sciences. The basic idea – certainly it is not new – is that the scholarly reputation economy lags behind the technology curve. I don’t think anyone really denies this. But what do you think about my normative principle? I say ‘blog comment box’ but obviously that’s just pointing to a thing we all know by way of conjuring an indefinite possibility.

In an ideal world, would building an e-forum and stocking it with participants make sense as a presumptively standard feature of humanities book publishing? And perhaps of journal publishing, if you cared to extend the scope of the principle? I perfectly well see that this proposal is radical. If every publication goes with a big symposium, it follows that most academics have to devote most of their ‘research’ efforts not to publishing their own work but to participating in symposia on the works of others. It is realistic to object that this tectonic shift in favor of ‘reviewing’, broadly conceived, just isn’t going to happen. But it may still be clarifying to ask, in a ‘let’s sketch our ideal Republic of ideas’ spirit: would it be better? The proposal is obviously one that admits of degrees of implementation, so one can perfectly well admit the ideal is unattainable, while still taking it as your target.

For those of you who aren’t academics and couldn’t possibly muster interest in this question: what is the worst superhero movie ever made? I watched “Elektra” last night, so today I say: “Elektra” is worst. But this probably fails to take the long view.