Moments of crisis

Sometimes it feels like we come from another world. In that world, we believe that it is possible for universities to be self-governing spaces where peers can democratically debate what knowledge is important and how to produce and evaluate it, protected from the “undue” influence of the state or, in some cases, religious institutions. Journals like this one are extensions of that imaginary. They are built on the assumption that what we do when we put together an editorial board or select reviewers is to meritocratically assemble a group of peers who will work to produce knowledge for the sake of reproducing the right to do so.

Of course we know that this is not an accurate account of what actually happens; we know that the dice are loaded. We know it so well that I don’t need to list here the multiple ways in which that is the case. And we see resistance in some major movements, like the open access movement, the movements to decolonize knowledge production, to displace English as the dominant language, to recognize indigenous knowledge, to cite Black women scholars, just to name a few that I happen to be aware of. But we keep trying to protect the ideals of meritocratic knowledge production: to include, to diversify, to decolonize. We are ready to give up on the Enlightenment ideal of universal knowledge and universal values in favour of a recognition of the value of radical difference, for example by multiplying spaces of autonomous knowledge production. But even there we hold to the notion that each space can be democratic and meritocratic, that somehow we can work it all out.

In “Everybody Knows” (1988), the singer-songwriters Leonard Cohen and Sharon Robinson write “everybody knows the dice are loaded, everybody rolls with their fingers crossed”. But I want to start here from the assumption that actually we do not usually roll with our fingers crossed; we try to pretend the dice aren’t loaded, we try to load them differently, we try to find unloaded dice – we try to make the game work the way it is supposed to. At this point though, we are facing the fact that none of those strategies are actually going to work.

This is a crisis of authority insofar as authority is predicated on the values of liberal democracy, and liberal democracy is no longer delivering the possibility to aspire to a decent life or to convince the excluded that that is where they deserve to be. So why read what we write? And what makes us think we have anything to say? These are the existential questions we now live with.

So I am not here to denounce, or even to try to suggest ways to do better. Instead, I want to ponder how the moment of crisis of knowledge production we are traversing lines up with the general crisis of capitalism and liberal democracy we now grapple with. The key lies in what we had to erase or struggle against in order to maintain our faith in our work, because the nature of crisis is the impossibility of continuing to deliver on promises, to neutralize contradictions, to erase what doesn’t fit. Perhaps the key contradictions we can no longer shove under the carpet have to do with the nature of the conditions of knowledge production in which journals play a key role.

Who produces journals? Largely, this is university presses and profit-driven private companies. Sometimes, they are produced by professional academic associations, but usually there is some kind of financial backing beyond the fees paid by members (and which tend to come from universities as a benefit to faculty, like dental care, and which are less and less available as the number of tenure-track positions declines); often there is a partnership with a university or private press. In some cases, states fund platforms which allow open access.

For example, the suite of journals produced by the American Anthropological Association used to be produced in collaboration with the University of California Press; as money became tight, the AAA turned – not without controversy – to the for-profit sector, and now partners with Wiley. The United States does not provide funds for publishing platforms, though its research-funding agencies in the natural sciences do provide funds for authors to pay for article submission. The Canadian Anthropological Society/Société Canadienne d’anthropologie has tried to go a different way; having partnered with the University of Toronto Press, it now published via Érudit, which is a Canadian university-based consortium funded by a number of sources, including state agencies. In all these cases, though, there is no collective purity; one way or another, journals need to make enough money to at least cover their costs. Doing so requires authors, reviewers and editors to not monetize their work (or not much; no one can live on the royalties), even as the product must be monetized.

This contradiction can be sustained as long as the techniques of erasure and neutralization function: notably a supply of enough university tenure-track positions to make it worthwhile to invest labour in producing articles that are counted as ways to measure eligibility for hiring, tenure, promotion and merit pay, for grant money, or for symbolic forms of power like access to seats on review panels or … journal editorial boards and editorships; or more broadly, invitations to enter and influence spaces of knowledge production such as conferences or other universities (coveted visiting professorships or institute for advanced study residencies, paid-for travel – all now called into question for the remaining few who can profit from them also by COVID, itself widely understood as a perverse consequence of globalized capitalism, along with such destructive processes as planetary overheating).

The increasing unavailability of these conditions is linked to market saturation and intensification, which are among the central characteristics of crises of capitalism. Since capitalism is predicated on growth, we have seen in recent years a marked increase in the number of journals. Each journal is under pressure to publish more articles. Technological innovation facilitates this, and is used as a way to try to reload the dice. It is now easier to submit or download an article from many parts of the world, despite a lingering digital divide; it is easier to translate articles to and from English using machine translation, despite English remaining the default language; it is easier to publish a wider variety of formats and so to increase the numbers of units identifiable as a product.

There are many wonderful things about this: the numbers and kinds of people who can participate in a journal’s discursive space expands along with what is recognizable as a form of knowledge production. Indeed, it allows a multiplication of discursive spaces, healthily destabilizing monopolies. But it brings along a set of problems; here are just two.

1. There are fewer people who can enter the game. We already have seen an increasing reliance on flexibilization, which in our world means an increase in unstable and poorly paid positions. Even those in tenured positions are seeing cuts, and COVID has intensified work beyond the capacity of most people to cope; it has hit women with children the hardest. Those who have sought (and with luck obtained) positions in the public or private sector are unlikely to profit from the supports once understood as necessary to knowledge production. The basic conditions necessary for individuals to be able to participate in the game are in question.

2. Any kind of access requires producing more and more. Many journals are seeing an increase in submissions, which of course increases the labour required to process them. Publishers often suggest editors should simply accept more papers, which assumes both that the production process can handle an increase, and that the content of all the papers is not significantly different from what existing criteria of evaluation have been based on. It is as though we have all been producing a certain kind of car, and all we have to do is produce more of them. In fact, there are three problems: one is that the volume required exceeds the capacity to work; another is that we are not being provided with the same parts; third, we are also being asked to experiment with new kinds of car, indeed new forms of transport, so that we can compete both in volume and via distinctive added value. In the meantime, it is not clear that there is even a market for transportation, given COVID, wildfires, unemployment, and civil unrest.

Those of us contributing to this set of essays are in the game; some of us have been in the game for a long time. Standing on the production line, it is difficult to find the time and space to see what is happening, to develop an analysis, to imagine what kinds of conditions would let us work towards a set of shared values and modes of knowledge production that allow us to struggle better. And yet here we are.

A long time ago (2001 to be precise), Marilyn Martin-Jones and I suggested that the locus of social change lies precisely in the interstices of hegemonic processes, spaces which lie in the incomplete seams between forms of social control. A pertinent example was explored by Alessandra Renzi (2008), who discussed the ways in which the Naples squatter movement in the 1990s identified neighbourhood-level zones lying in the interstices between the broadcast spaces regulated by the corporate Italian state under Berlusconi – and then tapped into them, creating hyper-local pirate television. The question for us, I think, is whether we can identify our interstices, and what we want to use them for.

In many ways we are already doing that. Many editors are using the same technology that overworks us to create spaces of discussion in which to gather the basic data we need for any kind of analysis to be possible: what is the submission rate? Who is submitting? What are our publishers asking of us? These spaces also allow for collective discussion: What issues are we facing? What strategies have we been adopting? And, finally, they allow us to contemplate collective action: a suite of editors with an analysis and an alternative imaginary gets farther than (possibly) replaceable disgruntled individual editors.

Having time for those spaces does require stepping away from the production line. And it is of course easier to do for those few of us who still enjoy the conditions we need to do our work (or even better, are retired and don’t have much we can be threatened with). Nothing’s perfect. But journals are nothing if not discursive spaces. And this set of essays is one contribution towards rethinking what we want them to be.