3/21/2009 05:13:00 PM

Academic authors, editors, publishers, and distributors are simply not in the business of reaching the masses; they are in the business of reaching other specialists. Academia banks on Intellectual Apartheid; its knowledge economy only rewards specialists publishing to specialists. In such a world, the "influence" of scholarship is not often correlated to real-world effects; it is usually correlated to how well a given work contributes to the specialist knowledge economy. Citation indexes measure reputations among specialists; "impact factor" relates not to real-world impact, but to reputation within the closed system.

...There is an assumption that if something is "published" (meaning published in a conventional, peer-reviewed journal), then it is appropriately circulating and available. Ironically, it may actually mean the opposite. It may be "circulating" among subscribers (a few hundred), but it is simultaneously being kept from the online public (a few billion). It doesn't take a PhD to see how bizarre the math works for the academic knowledge economy. Somehow, the fewer people that know about and use your scholarship, the better it must be. Does that follow? It does within the solipsistic logic of the closed knowledge economy that fuels Intellectual Apartheid.

...there is a well-established IF (impact factor) rating system.

Essentially, scholars whose work is measured in terms of how often their articles are cited within peer-reviewed literature demonstrate not so much the actual worth or impact of their ideas as they demonstrate their fidelity to a closed knowledge economy. Impact factor statistics are really loyalty points for the gentlemen's club: if you impressed other members of the club, you get to stay in it. If you try for other audiences--like the one's loftily imagined in university mission statements--you show disloyalty to the club.

Scholars who let their work be kept from broad dissemination by allowing its access to be tightly restricted through commercial means are complicit with Intellectual Apartheid. It's a shame, really, for such scholars underestimate the value and influence of their work, voluntarily giving up what their work might mean and do if circulating among a public that is literally six or seven orders of magnitude larger in size that the subscriber base of the most used journals.

Academic Evolution

7/05/2008 09:46:00 AM

5/19/2008 06:59:00 PM

Market Stalinism
Remember how we've always been told that free markets and free people go hand in hand? That was a lie. It turns out that the most efficient delivery system for capitalism is actually a communist-style police state, fortressed with American "homeland security" technologies, pumped up with "war on terror" rhetoric. And the global corporations currently earning superprofits from this social experiment are unlikely to be content if the lucrative new market remains confined to cities such as Shenzhen. Like everything else assembled in China with American parts, Police State 2.0 is ready for export to a neighborhood near you.

5/01/2008 07:43:00 PM

"Art is love creating the new world
and justice is love rolling up its
sleeves to heal the old one."
-NT Wright @ Emory University 2008

4/13/2008 07:55:00 AM

Of Aporutopias

The impasse of a utopia in the mode of a to come, an aporutopia is the open to which the determinate is exposed in its living. The to come is that unforeseeable to which all idiosyncratic instantiations invoking an empty signifier expose themselves. Lower case justice in the name of capitalized Justice exposed to the Justice to come. Temporally, the unforeseeable is the future of the forgotten and with the immeasurable demarcates the impossible.

The idiosyncratic instantiate, control and fill the empty signifier. Local, embodied justice acts in the name of Justice. justice is idiosyncratic. This is why humanity will never accomplish Justice. justice is idiosyncratic in that it is only ever present through people and so long as Justice is being served it never arrives.

The particular holds total hegemonic sway over the content of the signifier exposed to the aporutopia. This aporutopian opening is the impossible, what cannot be spoken of, brought into language in the guise of the to come as the absent sense (to use Blanchot's terms) that cannot be designated (as in the series) or learned (as in the singularity), but, as Nancy writes, "makes sense in and by its very absenting." The Democracy to Come, The Coming Community, The Language to Come, even the god that is coming: all aporutopias of considerable interest in recent Continental Philosophy. All designating outcomes we do not understand, that we have part in, but cannot bring about: the black box of creation, the unforeseen and the great forgetting. A locution attempting to speak from one register of the ever receding primal future, that impossible undecidable, that is the meaning of linear temporal existence, of finitude.

The world of human finitude, temporal existence, (or to invoke Heidegger) of dwelling, is about construction. It is about a particular remembering (which is always a way of forgetting). It instantiates, premeditates, orchestrates to bring about a particular construction of home. Creation is different from construction. The very patterns of construction always already bring deconstruction within them. That which cannot be deconstructed is created. Creation is scaled differently. We are exposed to it, but cannot bring it about. It calls to us as the earth and the sky, humanity and their gods. So when Derrida explains that Justice cannot be deconstructed he writes of a Justice whose we are--a Justice to come that is not ours to claim, but to which we are exposed as we instantiate justice.

4/03/2008 03:26:00 PM

winning has no margin of error
serving is nothing but

3/24/2008 07:13:00 AM

i think, perhaps, it would be fitting for us to demand that the same no-bid contractors rebuilding New Orleans be given the contract to build the Bush Embarrassment Library.