The universities have truly become the spirit’s burial mounds, filled with the stink of corruption and immovable gloom. – Ernst Bloch
I have learnt two things at university: in the entire history of university exams no candidate has ever written anything of real intellectual significance; and, the only people who read academic journals from cover to cover are their editors. There wasn’t ever any deception about exams. No-one ever suspected the metrics they produce would serve thought; everyone still knows they serve a system in which thinking is best kept shallow, procedures are executed expediently, lives are slowly and unconsciously absorbed into jobs which finally overcome them in an immense apparatus of death. But academic journals are somehow different. They maintain an air of prestige and an appearance of reasonableness. Yet the fact that no-one today reads an academic journal in its entirety marks them as a strange commodity that lives on beyond its time: while people do still read the articles from them, the journal as form – as something to be consumed whole – is long defunct.
If fifteen years ago the Internet looked like it would spell the end of the academic journal, it has not. Paywalls of virtual ivory proved as sturdy as the towers of the old libraries. But the move online had two major effects: firstly for the first time journals could be used to produce a set of metrics for citations (currently the production of these metrics is monopolised by Google); and secondly, editors began to change their strategy, understanding that despite the continued production of journals they were no longer read as fully formed material artefacts, but instead were accessed partially. The second of these effects presages the transformation we see today: editors become curators, assuming the ubiquitous discourse of the cultural industries. No longer is the concern of an editor one of the tension of arguments surrounding the subject of study; instead, as curators, they are concerned only with wholesale valorisation.
Behind curatorial culture, originating in the arts, is an extremely simple thought: the chaos and irrationality of the market can be supplanted by the idiosyncrasies of an individual. In turn this individual’s idiosyncrasies can be influenced – bought and sold – by any racketeer with the means to do so. The intellectual vacuity of a Hans Ulrich Obrist or an Alex Beard provides the most stable foundation for a hub of “connections” (read transactions), upon which the most robust alternative to a free market can be built. The arbitrariness of the market is replaced by the decisions of these individuals, housed in enormous cultural institutions, informing the judicious separation of whose work is in and whose is out (based on the thin air of a business suit, a stale face, the bureaucratic charisma and the assurance that all those connections really were worth it.) Whatever is in will be valorised: the risk is transferred from the institution to the worker.
Curators are much like the old deluded bourgeoisie, so blinded by the light of their own confidence, elevated by economic success or institutional election, that they are convinced that profit is produced straight out of their own intellectual brilliance. Long lives the myth that concealed the horrors of Foxconn behind the shining face of Steve Jobs, even from beyond the grave, under the rapt eyes of a thousand investors. As though sales alone, and not production, a profit makes. And those of this curatorial class must see only themselves or at least their likeness, and never the labour of production, in the spectacular avatars of other institutions. This is not to protest for some dignity of the free market against the racket: neither was there ever a market free of corruption, nor was the selling of one’s labour ever dignified. But it is to say that the market’s condensation under curatorial avatars signifies a new form of integration and a form of ideology specific to our historical moment. How the contingencies of the markets are transformed into juridical questions of the fiefdoms of institutions – whether art galleries or journals – must inform our destruction of the market.
But the market for research cannot match the buoyancy of that for art. It is a persistent failure even from the terms of capitalism. Meanwhile the vacuity of todays’s editors is marked by the endurance of journals. Any editor who still believes the old journal form is adequate or appropriate to the labour of thought and its expression is so far from the mark that they ought not to be allowed to be editors. But more than this, they are responsible for ushering in the narrowing of thought, for removing its capacity to engage with and address the world. This is not to say that we should plea that these editors return to their senses: we don’t own the capital to issue them with this kind of demand. Nor is this just an argument merely for technological progress: it points strictly to an ideological moment in academic production (assuming momentarily that academic production was ever more than ideology). Even though the journal as form is today outmoded, it persists transformed: its valorisation relies not on buying and selling of research, on articles actually being read, but on the saleability by universities of the mere fact that their employees have been published in journals. There is an echo of the art market’s closed off warehouses, where artworks protected from critique behind iron walls are branded with valuable names and insignia.
From the standpoint of the university the valorisation of journals is a matter of outsourcing. It is well known to those within the academy, less so to those outside, that today the purpose of academic publishing is the production of metrics for Continuing Professional Development of some and the exclusion from the academy of others. The journal and the exam begin to coincide: research, thinking, and writing are transformed into the endless assessment of academics in their jobs. Meanwhile, those who want to be published (or need to be published to keep their jobs) will normally have to contribute unremunerated labour to the institution, either as peer reviewers or through joining the editorial boards. A few who do enough may well become the next editor. Better to be an examiner that the examined, better to hope to be transfigured into shining phantasmagoria than to embody the dying labour concealed beneath it, since we know no exam candidate has ever produced anything of real intellectual significance. Thinking, if it were ever there, cannot be heard beneath the crescendo of curatorial chatter. But that academic writing is read does not really matter to any institution any more.