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Planned Obsolescence

Fitzpatrick, Kathleen

Published by NYU Press

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| 1

Introduction: Obsolescence

Te old stu gets broken aster than the new stu is put in its

place.

Clay Shirky, Newspapers and Tinking the Unthinkable

In many cases, traditions last not because they are excellent, but

because inuential people are averse to change and because o

the sheer burdens o transition to a better state.

Cass Sunstein, Inotopia

Te text you are now reading, whether on a screen in dra orm or

in its nal, printed version, began its gestation some years ago in a series o

explorations into the notion o obsolescence, which culminated in my beingasked to address the term as part o the workshop Keywords or a Digital

Proession, organized by the Committee on the Status o Graduate Students

at the December 2007 Modern Language Association (MLA) convention in

Chicago. However jaded and dispiriting the grad students choice o obso-

lescence as a keyword describing their own utures might appear, the deci-

sion to assign me this keyword was entirely appropriate. My work has circled

the notion o obsolescence or quite a while, ocusing on the concept as a

catch-all or multiple cultural conditions, each o which demands dierent

kinds o analysis and response. As I said at the MLA workshop, we too oen

all into a conventional association o obsolescence with the death o this or

that cultural orm, a linkage that needs to be broken, or at least complicated,

i the academy is going to take ull stock o its role in contemporary culture

and its means o producing and disseminating knowledge. For instance, the

obsolescence that I ocused on in my rst book, Te Anxiety o Obsolescence:

Te American Novel in the Age o elevision, is not, or at least not primar-ily, material in nature; aer all, neither the novel in particular, nor the book

more broadly, nor print in general is dead. My argument in Te Anxiety o

Obsolescence is, rather, that claims about the obsolescence o cultural orms

oen say more about those doing the claiming than they do about the object


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2 | Introduction: Obsolescence

o the claim. In act, agonized claims o the death o technologies like print

and genres like the novel sometimes unction to re-create an elite cadre o

cultural producers and consumers, ostensibly operating on the margins o

contemporary culture and proting rom their claims o marginality by cre-

ating a sense that their values, once part o a utopian mainstream and nowapparently waning, must be protected. One might here think o the o-cited

reports published by the National Endowment or the Arts, Reading at Risk

(2004) and o Read or Not to Read(2007). Each o these reports, like numer-

ous other such expressions o anxiety about the ostensible decline o read-

ing (a decline that comes to seem inevitable, o course, given the narrowness

with which reading is dened: book-length printed and bound ction and

poetry consumed solely or pleasure), works rhetorically to create a kind o

cultural wildlie preserve within which the apparently obsolete can ourish.1

My argument in Te Anxiety o Obsolescence thus suggests that obsolescence

may be, in this case at least, less a material state than a political project aimed

at intervening in contemporary public lie, perhaps with the intent o shoring

up a waning cultural hierarchy.

Im beginning this new project by discussing my last project in no small

part because o what happened once the manuscript was nished. Naively,

Id assumed that publishing a book that makes the argument that the bookisnt dead wouldnt be hard, that publishers might have some stake in ensur-

ing that such an argument got into circulation. What I hadnt counted on,

though, as I revised the manuscript prior to submitting it or review, was

the eect that the state o the economy would have on my ability to get that

argument into print. In December 2003, almost exactly seventy-two hours

aer Id ound out that my colleges cabinet had taken its nal vote to grant

me tenure, I received an email message rom the editor o the scholarly press

that had had the manuscript under review or the previous ten months. Te

news was not good: the press was declining to publish the book. Te note, as

encouraging as a rejection can ever be, stressed that in so ar as ault could

be attributed, it lay not with the manuscript but with the climate; the press

had received two enthusiastically positive readers reports, and the editor was

supportive o the project. Te marketing department, however, overruled

him on the editorial board, declaring that the book posed too much nan-

cial risk . . . to pursue in the current economy.Tis particular cause or rejection prompted two immediate responses,

one o which was most clearly articulated by my mother, who said, Tey

were planning on making money o o your book? Te act is, they were

not much, perhaps, but that the press involved needed the book to make


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Introduction: Obsolescence | 3

money, at least enough to return its costs, and that it doubted it would,

highlights one o the most signicant problems acing academic publishing

today: an insupportable economic model.

o backtrack or a second: that there is a problem in the rst place is

something about which I hope, by this point, anyone reading this doesntreally need to be convinced; crisis in scholarly publishing has become one

o the most-heard phrases in certain kinds o academic discussions, and

organizations including the American Council o Learned Societies (ACLS)

and the Association o Research Libraries (ARL), publishers such as Lindsay

Waters and Bill Germano, scholars including Cathy Davidson and John Wil-

linsky, and, perhaps most amously, past MLA president Stephen Greenblatt

have been warning us or years that somethings got to give. So o course

the evidence or this crisis, and or the nancial issues that rest at its heart,

extends ar beyond my own individual, anecdotal case.

Tough the notion o a crisis in scholarly publishing came into com-

mon circulation well over a decade ago (see, e.g., Tatcher 1995), the situa-

tion suddenly got much, much worse aer the rst dot-com bubble burst in

2000. During this dramatic downturn in the stock market, when numerous

university endowments went into ree alla moment that, in retrospect,

seems like mere oreshadowinguniversity presses and university librarieswere among the academic units whose budgets took the hardest hits. And

the cuts in unding or libraries represented a urther budget cut or presses,

as numerous libraries, already straining under the exponentially rising cost

o journals, especially in the sciences, managed the cutbacks by reducing the

number o monographs they purchased. Te result or library users was per-

haps only a slightly longer wait to obtain any book they needed, as librar-

ies increasingly turned to consortial arrangements or collection-sharing,

but the result or presses was devastating. Imagine: or a university press o

the caliber o, say, Harvards, the expectation or decades had been that they

could count on every library in the University o Caliornia system buying a

copy o each title they published. Since 2000, however, the rule was increas-

ingly that one library in the system would buy that title.2 And the same has

happened with every such system around the country, such that, as Jennier

Crewe (2004, 27) noted, sales o monographs to libraries were less than one-

third o what they had been two decades beoreand theyve continued todrop since then. So library cutbacks have resulted in vastly reduced sales or

university presses, at precisely the moment when severe reductions in the

percentage o university press budgets subsidized by their institutions have

made those presses dependent on income rom sales or their survival. (Te


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average university press, as well see, receives well under 10 percent o its

annual budget rom its institution. We can only imagine what will happen to

that gure in the current economic climate.) Te results, o course, are that

many presses have reduced the number o titles that they publish, and that

marketing concerns have come at times, and o necessity, to outweigh schol-arly merit in making publication decisions.

Despite the act that Te Anxiety o Obsolescence was nally published

by a smaller press with more modest sales expectations3my experience o

the crisis in academic publishing led me to begin rethinking my argument

about the continued viability o the book as a orm. Perhaps there is a par-

ticular type o book, the scholarly monographor, even more specically

(given that marketing departments preer known quantities), the rstschol-

arly monographthat is indeed threatened with obsolescence. Even so, this

is not to say that the monograph is dead. Even rst books are still pub-

lished, aer all, i not quite in the numbers they might need to be in order

to satisy all our hiring and tenure requirements, and they still sell, i not

exactly in the numbers required to support the presses that put them out.

Te scholarly press book is, however, in a curious state, one that might use-

ully trouble our associations o obsolescence with the death o this or that

cultural orm, or while it is no longer a viable mode o communication, it is,in many elds, still requiredin order to get tenure. I anything, the scholarly

monograph isnt dead; it is undead.

Te suggestion that one particular type o book might be thought o as

undead indicates that we need to rethink, in a broad sense, the relationship

between old media and new, and ask what that relationship bodes or the

academy. I this traditional mode o academic publishing is not dead, but

undeadagain, not viable, but still requiredhow should we approach our

work and the publishing systems that bring it into being? Teres a real ques-

tion to be asked about how ar we want to carry this metaphor; the sugges-

tion that contemporary academic publishing is governed by a kind o zombie

logic, or instance, might be read as indicating that these old orms reuse

to stay put in their graves, but instead walk the earth, rotting and putres-

cent, wholly devoid o consciousness, eating the brains o the living and sus-

ceptible to nothing but decapitationand this might seem a bit o an over-

response. On the other hand, its worth considering the extensive scholarshipin media studies on the gure o the zombie, which is oen understood to

act as a stand-in or the narcotized subject o capitalism, particularly at those

moments when capitalisms contradictions become most apparent.4 And, o

course, theres been a serious recent uptick in broad cultural interest in zom-


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bies, perhaps exemplied by the spring 2009 release o Pride and Prejudice

and Zombies.5 I there is a relationship between the zombie and the subject o

late capitalism, the cultural anxiety that gure marks is currently, with rea-

son, o the chartsand not least within the academy, as we not only nd

our ways o communicating increasingly threatened with a sort o death-in-lie, but also nd our livelihoods themselves decreasingly lively, as the liberal

arts are overtaken by the teaching o supposedly more pragmatic elds, as

tenure-track aculty lines are rapidly being replaced with more contingent

orms o labor, and as too many newly-minted Ph.D.s nd themselves with-

out the job opportunities they need to survive. Te relationship between the

zombie status o the scholarly book and the perilous state o the proession

isnt causal, but nor is it unrelated, and until we develop the individual and

institutional will to transorm our ways o communicating, were unlikely to

be able to transorm our broader ways o working.6

Just to be clear: I am not suggesting that the uture survival o the acad-

emy requires us to put academic publishing saely in its grave. Im not being

wholly acetious either, though, as I do want to indicate that certain aspects

o the academic publishing process are neither quite as alive as wed like them

to be, nor quite as dead as might be most convenient. I the monograph were

genuinely dead, wed be orced to nd other orms in which to publish. Andi the book were simply outmoded by newer, shinier publishing technologies,

we could probably get along ne with the undead o academic publishing,

as studies o orms like radio and the vinyl LP indicate that obsolete media

have always had curious aerlives.7 Tere are important dierences between

those cases and that o academic publishing, however: we dont yet have a

good replacement or the scholarly monograph, nor do we seem particularly

inclined to allow the book to become a niche technology within humani-

ties discourse. Its thus important or us to consider the work that the book is

and isnt doing or us; the ways that it remains vibrant and vital; and the ways

that it has become undead, haunting the living rom beyond the grave.

A ew distinctions are necessary. Te obsolescence aced by the rst aca-

demic book is not primarily material, any more than is the putative obso-

lescence o the novel; a radical shi to all-digital delivery would by itsel do

nothing to revive the orm. However much I will insist in what ollows that

we in the humanities must move beyond our singular ocus on ink-on-paperto understand and take advantage o pixels-on-screens, the orm o print still

unctions perectly well, and numerous studies have indicated that a simple

move to electronic distribution within the current system o academic pub-

lishing will not be enough to bail out the system, as printing, storing, and


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distributing the material orm o the book represent only a raction o its

current production costs (see Crewe 2004). In act, as many have pointed

out, digital orms may be more prone to a material obsolescence than is

print. Consider, or instance, the obsolescence one encounters in attempting

to read classic hypertext ction such as Michael JoycesAfernoon (1987/90)on a Mac these days: Apple ully retired its support or Classic mode with

the advent, on the hardware side, o Intel-based processors that cant boot

into OS 9, and on the soware side, the release o OS 10.5, which eliminated

Classic support or PowerPC machines as well. Couple this orward march

o technology with the act that Eastgate, the publisher o many o the most

important rst-generation hypertexts, has aer more than eight years still

ailed to release those texts in OS X-native editions. echnologies move on,

and technological ormats degrade, posing a set o dangers to digital textual

utures that the Electronic Literature Organization has been working to bring

into public view, both through its acid-ree bits campaign and through its

more recent work with the Library o Congress to archive digital literary texts

(see, e.g., Liu et al. 2005; Montort and Wardrip-Fruin 2004). Without such

active work to preserve electronic texts, and without the ongoing interest o

and commitment by publishers, many digital texts ace an obsolescence that

is not at all theoretical, but very material.As I discuss in chapter 4, however, the apparent ephemerality o digital text

in act masks unexpected persistences. Let me point, by way o example, to

my more than nine-year-old blog, which I named Planned Obsolescence as a

tongue-in-cheek jab at the act that Id just nished what seemed to be a long-

term, durable project, the book, and was le with the detritus o many smaller

ideas that demanded a kind o immediacy and yet seemed destined to ade

into nothingness. Te blog is the perect vehicle or such ephemera, as each

post scrolls down the ront page and o into the archivesand yet, the appar-

ent ephemerality o the blog post bears within it a surprising durability, thanks

both to the technologies o searching, ltering, and archiving that have devel-

oped across the web, as well as to the network o blog conversations that keep

the archives in play. Blogs do die, oen when their authors stop posting, some-

times when theyre deleted. But even when apparently dead, a blog persists, in

archives and caches, and accretes lie around it, whether in the orm o human

visitors, drawn in by Google searches or links rom other blogs, or spam bots,attracted like vermin to the apparently abandoned structure. A orm o obso-

lescence may be engineered into a blogs architecture, but this ephemerality is

misleading; the ways that we interact with blogs within networked environ-

ments keep them alive long aer theyve apparently died.


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I want to hold up alongside the blogs persistent ephemerality the state o

the scholarly monograph, which Id argue aces an obsolescence that is pri-

marily institutional, arising rom the environment in which it is produced.

I, aer all, theres something obsolete about the book, its not its content;

despite my general agreement with calls to decenter the book as the goldstandard or tenure and place greater value on the publication o articles,

theres a kind o large-scale synthetic work done in the orm o the book thats

still important to the development o scholarly thought.8 Nor is the problem

the books orm; the pages still turn just ne. What has ceased to unction in

the rst academic book is the system surrounding its production and dis-

semination, the process through which the book comes into being, is distrib-

uted, and interacts with its readers. I mentioned earlier that the message Id

received rom that press, declining my book on nancial grounds, produced

two immediate responses. Te rst was my mothers bewildered disbelie; the

second came rom my colleague Matt Kirschenbaum, who le a comment

on Planned Obsolescence saying that he did not understand why I couldnt

simply take the manuscript and the two positive readers reports and put the

whole thing onlinevoil: peer-reviewed publicationwhere it would likely

garner a readership both wider and larger than the same manuscript in print

would. In act I completely understand why thats not realistic, he went onto say, and Im not seriously advocating it. Nor am I suggesting that we all

become our own online publishers, at least not unless thats part o a con-

tinuum o dierent options. But the point is, the systems broken and its time

we got busy xing it. What ought to count is peer review and scholarly merit,

not the physical orm in which the text is ultimately delivered (Kirschen-

baum 2003).

Tis exchange with Matt, and a number o other conversations that I

had in the ensuing months, convinced me to stop thinking about scholarly

publishing as a system that would simply bring my work into being, and

instead approach it as the object o that work, thinking seriously about both

the institutional models and the material orms through which scholarship

might best circulate. I began, in early 2004, to discuss in a airly vague way

what it would take to ound an all-electronic community-run scholarly press,

but it took a while or anything more concrete to emerge. What got things

started was a December 2005 report by the online journal Inside Higher Edon the work that had been done to that point by an MLA task orce on the

evaluation o scholarship or tenure and promotion, and on the multiple rec-

ommendations thus ar made by the panel. At the request o the editors o

Te Valve, a widely read literary studiesocused blog, I wrote a lengthy con-


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sideration o the recommendations made by this panel, and extended one o

those recommendations to reect one possible uture, in the hopes o open-

ing up a larger conversation about where academic publishing ought to go,

and how we might best take it there.

Many o the recommendations put orward by the MLA task orce(expanded in the task orces nal report; see Modern Language Associa-

tion o America, December 2006) were long in coming, and many stand to

change tenure processes or the better; these include calls or departments

to clariy the communication o tenure standards to new hires via memoran-

dums o understanding;

to give serious consideration to articles published by tenure candidates

thus, as I noted, decentering the book as the gold standard o scholarly pro-

ductionand to communicate that expanded range o acceptable venues or

publication to their administrations;

to set an absolute maximum o six letters rom outside evaluators that can

be required to substantiate a tenure candidates scholarly credentials, to draw

those evaluators rom comparable institutions rather than more prestigious

ones, and to rerain rom asking evaluators to make inappropriate judgments

about the tenure-worthiness o candidates based on the limited portrait thata dossier presents;

and, perhaps most importantly, at least or my purposes,

to acknowledge that scholarship o many dierent varieties is taking place

online, and to evaluate that scholarship without media-related bias.

Tese were extremely important recommendations, but there was a signi-

cant degree o easier said than done in the responses they received (par-

ticularly the last one), and or no small reason: they require a substantive

rethinking not simply o the processes through which the academy tenures

its aculty, but o the ways those aculty do their work, how they communi-

cate that work, and how that work is read both inside and outside the acad-

emy. Tose changes cannot simply be technological; they must be both social

and institutional. Tis recognition led me to begin two projects, both aimedat creating the kinds o change I think necessary or the survival o scholarly

publishing in the humanities into the twenty-rst century.

Te rst o these is MediaCommons, a eld-specic attempt to develop

a new kind o scholarly publishing network, which my collaborators and I


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have been working on with the support o the Institute or the Future o the

Book, a National Endowment or the Humanities (NEH) Digital Start-Up

Grant, and the NYU Digital Library echnology Services group. MediaCom-

mons is working to become a setting in which the multiplicity o conversa-

tions in and about media studies taking place online can be brought together,through projects like In Syndication, which aggregates a number o the lead-

ing blogs in the eld. Were also publishing a range o original projects, the

longest-running o which is In Media Res, which asks ve scholars a week to

comment briey on some up-to-the-minute media text as a means o open-

ing discussion about the issues it presents or media scholars, students, prac-

titioners, and activists. We hope to oster that discussion as part o a much

broader scholarly ecosystem, understanding that the ideas we circulate range

in he rom the blog post through the article to the monograph. Tose he-

ier orms are published through MediaCommons Press, a project in which

we produce longer texts or open discussion, some o which move through

the digital phase on their way to a primary lie in print. (For example, we

launched an experiment in open peer review in March 2010 on behal o

Shakespeare Quarterly, or a special issue on Shakespeare and New Media.)

Other projects are meant to have a primary digital existence, including Nick

Mirzoes Te New Everyday, an experimental middle-state publication.But the chie importance o MediaCommons, as ar as Im concerned, is the

network it aims to build among scholars in the eld, getting those scholars in

communication with one another, discussing and possibly collaborating on

their projects. o that end, weve built a peer network backbone or the sys-

temFacebook or scholars, i you like. Trough this prole system, mem-

bers can gather the writing theyre doing across the web, as well as citations

or ofine work, creating a digital portolio that provides a snapshot o their

scholarly identities.

Working on MediaCommons has taught me several things that I mostly

knew already, but hadnt ully internalized: rst, any soware development

project will take ar longer than you could possibly predict at the outset; and

second, and most important, no matter how slowly such soware develop-

ment projects move, the rate o change within the academy is positively gla-

cial in comparison.

My need to advocate or such change is what led to this project, oralthough numerous publications in the last ew years have argued or the

need or new systems and practices in scholarly publishingto name just

two, John Willinskys Te Access Principle (2006) and Christine Borgmans

Scholarship in the Digital Age (2007)these arguments too oen ail to


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account or the undamentally conservative nature o academic institutions

and (the rhetoric o a David Horowitz notwithstanding) the similar conserva-

tism o the academics that comprise them. In the main, were extraordinarily

resistant to change in our ways o working; it is not without reason that a

senior colleague once joked to me that the motto o our institution (one thatI think might useully be extended to the academy as a whole) could well

be We Have Never Done It Tat Way Beore. As Donald Hall has noted,

scholars oen resist applying the critical skills that we bring to our subject

matter to an examination o the textuality o our own proession, its scripts,

values, biases, and behavioral norms (Hall 2002, xiv); such sel-criticism is

a risky endeavor, and those o us who have been privileged enough to suc-

ceed within the extant system are oen reluctant to bite the hand that eeds

us. Changing our technologies, our ways o doing research, and our modes

o production and distribution o the results o that research are all crucial

to the continued vitality o the academyand yet none o those changes can

come about unless there is rst a proound change in the ways that scholars

think about their work. Until scholars really believe that publishing on the

web is as valuable as publishing in printand more importantly, until they

believe that their institutions believe it, tooew will be willing to risk their

careers on a new way o working, with the result that that new way o work-ing will remain marginal and undervalued.

In what ollows, then, I ocus not just on the technological changes that

many believe are necessary to allow academic publishing to ourish into the

uture, but on the social, intellectual, and institutional changes that are nec-

essary to pave the way or such ourishing. In order or new modes o com-

munication to become broadly accepted within the academy, scholars and

their institutions must take a new look at the mission o the university, the

goals o scholarly publishing, and the processes through which scholars con-

duct their work. We must collectively consider what new technologies have

to oer us, not just in terms o the cost o publishing or access to publica-

tions, but in the ways we research, write, and review.

In chapter 1 I argue that we need to begin with the structures o peer

review, not least because o the persistent problem they present or digital

scholarship, and the degree to which our values (not to mention our value)

as scholars are determined by them. Peer review is at the heart o everythingwe dowriting, applying or grants, seeking jobs, obtaining promotions. It

is, arguably, what makes the academy the academy. However, the current

system o peer review is in act part o whats broken, o what threatens a

vibrant mode o scholarly communication with obsolescence. As I explore in


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the next chapter, a rather extraordinary literature is available, mostly in the

sciences and social sciences, on the problems with conventional peer review,

including its biases and aws. It also requires an astonishing amount o labor,

or which academics cant currently receive any credit. And thus when

Kirschenbaum says that what ought to count is peer review and scholarlymerit, not the physical orm in which the text is ultimately delivered, I agree,

but at the same time eel quite strongly that the system o peer review as we

know it today is awed, a backchannel conversation taking place between

editor and reviewer that too oen excludes the author rom its benets, and

that too oen impedes rather than assists in the circulation o ideas. For that

reason, I want to orce us to take a closer look at what we mean when we say

peer review, and what it is we expect the process to accomplish, in order to

make sure that were not installing a broken part in a new machine.

A dramatically changed peer-review system such as the one that I propose,

however, would require us to think about new structures o authorship. In

chapter 2, I argue that a turn rom pre-publication review to post-publication

review will almost certainly necessitate a parallel turn rom thinking about

academic publishing as a system ocused on the production and dissemina-

tion o individualproducts to imagining it as a system ocused more broadly

on acilitating theprocesses o scholarly work, as the time and eort requiredto maintain a community-oriented, gi-economy-driven system o peer-to-

peer review will oblige scholars, much like the developers o large-scale open-

source soware projects, to place some portion o their emphasis not on their

own individual achievements, but rather on nding their sel-interest served

by the advancement o the community as a whole. Tis is a utopian ideal, o

course, and it largely goes against our training as scholars, particularly within

the humanities; what we accomplish, we accomplish alone. (Or, as a com-

menter on witter put it aer hearing a talk o mine, Being helpul is not

really part o academic culture.) As I reconsider authorship within digital net-

worked publishing structures, I argue, using the example o blogs, that what

we will need to let go o is not what we have come to understand as the indi-

vidual voice, but rather the illusion that such a voice is ever ully alone. Roland

Barthes, o course, claimed back in 1967 that no text is a single line o words,

but that each is instead a multi-dimensional space in which are married and

contested several writings, none o which is original: the text is a abric o quo-tations (Barthes 1967/86, 5253). We have long acknowledged the death o

the authorin theory, at leastbut have been loath to think about what such

a proclamation might mean or our own status as authors, and have certainly

been unwilling to part with the lines on the CV that result rom publishing.


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Digital networks, as structures that acilitate interaction, communica-

tion, and interconnection, will require us to think dierently about what it

is were doing as we write. As the example o the blog might suggest, com-

munities best engage with one another around writing that is open rather

than closed, in process rather than concluded. I we were to shi our ocusin the work were doing as authors rom the moment o completion, rom

the sel-contained product, to privilege instead the process o writing, dis-

cussion, and revision, wed likely begin to publish workin the sense o

making it public in readable ormearlier in its development (at the coner-

ence paper stage, or instance) and to remain engaged with those texts much

longer aer theyve been released to readers. Although this idea makes many

scholars nervousabout getting scooped, about getting too much eedback

too soon, about letting the messiness o our processes be seen, about the

prospect o never being ully done with a projectits worth considering

why were doing the work in the rst place: to the degree that scholarship is

about participating in an exchange o ideas with ones peers, new networked

publishing structures can acilitate that interaction, but will best do so i the

discussion is ongoing, always in process.

Tis oregrounding o conversation, however, will likely also require

authors, who are in dialogue with their readerswho are, o course, them-selves authorsto relinquish a certain degree o control over their texts, let-

ting go o the illusion that their work springs wholly rom their individual

intelligence and acknowledging the ways that scholarship, even in elds in

which sole authorship is the norm, has always been collaborative. (We resist

this, o course; as Lisa Ede and Andrea Lunsord [2001] have pointed out,

no matter how much we claim to value the collective or collaborative, the

proo o our prooundly individualistic sense o accomplishment rests in the

literally unthinkable nature o the multi-author dissertation.) Sometimes the

result o these new conversational publishing practices might be productive

coauthoring relationships, but it need not always be so; we may instead need

to develop new methods o citation that acknowledge the participation o

our peers in the development o our work. Along the way, though, well also

need to let go o some o our xation on the notion o originality in schol-

arly production, recognizing that, in an environment in which more and

more discourse is available, some o the most important work that we cando as scholars may more closely resemble contemporary editorial or curato-

rial practices, bringing together, highlighting, and remixing signicant ideas

in existing texts rather than remaining solely ocused on the production

o more ostensibly original texts. We must nd ways or the new modes o


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authorship that digital networks will no doubt acilitateprocess-ocused,

collaborative, remix-orientedto count within our systems o valuation

and priority.

In the later chapters, I explore a number o other such changes that will be

required throughout the entire academic community i such new publishingpractices are to take root. Publishers, or instance, will need to think dier-

ently about their business models (which may need to ocus more on ser-

vices and less on objects), about their editorial practices (which may require

a greater role in developing and shepherding projects), about the structures

o texts, about their ownership o copyright, and about their role in acilitat-

ing conversation; theyll also need to think in concert with libraries about

archival and preservation practices, ensuring that the texts produced today

remain available and accessible tomorrow. Universities, in the broadest

sense, will need to rethink the relationship between the library, the university

press, the inormation technology center, and the academic units within the

institution, reimagining the unding model under which publishing oper-

ates and the institutional purposes that such publishing servesbut also, and

crucially, reimagining the relationship between the academic institution and

the surrounding culture. As new systems o networked knowledge produc-

tion become increasingly prevalent and inuential online, the university andthe scholars who comprise it need to nd ways to adapt those systems to our

needs, or we will run the risk o becoming increasingly irrelevant to the ways

that contemporary culture produces and communicates authority.

In the end, what I am arguing is that we in the humanities, and in the

academy more broadly, ace what is less a material obsolescence than an

institutional one; we are entrenched in systems that no longer serve our

needs. But because we are, by and large, our institutionsor rather, because

they are usthe greatest challenge we ace is not that obsolescence, but our

response to it. Like the novelists I studied in my rst book, who may eel

their cultural centrality threatened by the rise o newer media orms, we can

shore up the boundaries between ourselves and the open spaces o intellec-

tual exchange on the Internet; we can extol the virtues o the ways things

have always been done; we can bemoan our marginalization in a culture that

continues marching orward into the digital utureand in so doing, we can

urther undermine our inuence on the main threads o intellectual discus-sion in contemporary public lie. Te crisis we ace, aer all, does not stop

with the book, but rather extends to the valuation o the humanities within

the university, and o institutions o higher education within the culture at

large. We tend to dismiss the public disdain or our work and our institutions


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as a maniestation o the ingrained anti-intellectualism in U.S. culture, and

perhaps understandably so, but until we take responsibility or our cultures

sense o our irrelevance, we cannot hope to convince it otherwise. Unless we

can nd ways to speak with that culture, to demonstrate the vibrancy and the

value o the liberal arts, we run the risk o being silenced altogether.And we will be silenced, unless we can create new ways o speaking both

with that culture and among ourselves. We can build institutional supports

or the current, undead system o scholarly publishing, and we can watch

as the proession itsel continues to decline. Or we can work to change the

ways we communicate and the systems through which we attribute value to

such communication, opening ourselves to the possibility that new modes

o publishing might enable, not just more texts, but better texts, not just an

evasion o obsolescence, but a new lie or scholarship. Te point, nally, is

not whether any particular technology can provide a viable uture or schol-

arly publishing, but whether we have the institutional will to commit to the

development o the systems that will make such technologies viable and keep

them that way into the uture.

fitzpatrick 1

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