Re: <nettime> some more nuanced thoughts on publishing, editing, reading, using

[Brian Holmes <bhcontinentaldrift@gmail.com>]

On 07/28/2011 06:17 PM, McLaughlin, Lisa M. Dr. wrote:

> The problem is that academe and for-profit publishers
> can put editors, authors, and even reviewers in a position of having to
> participate in "delivering" scholarship in a way that is behind the times.
> And, related to this, there is the problem of universities' pushing
> publication in the corporation Thompson-Reuters' ISI approved journals,
> where there is an extreme bias against online open access journals (among
> other things, such as certain fields of study).

As in the rest of our society, change is so difficult... Reminds me of 
last year when I went to California for the University of California 
protests and came back with two words in my head: "total corruption." It 
turns out that UC, the premier public education system of the US, has 
become a pyramid of privatized interests, at whose apex you find 
six-figure humanities professors, scientists with fat lab grants for 
military programs, administrators treated like star CEOs (and treating 
everyone else like "human resources"), corporations like BP buying out 
entire research sectors, and finally, billionaire "regents" like Richard 
Blum, the construction magnate and husband of longtime California 
senator Dianne Fienstein (which shows that the corruption really is 
total, going to the top of the political system). On the bottom of the 
pyramid are students getting bled for loans, adjuncts doing the majority 
of the teaching, and as far as the eye can see, casual and undocumented 
labor doing the clean-up for both the debt-slaves and the luxury class. 
Actually it's hard to say it's even a pyramid: the middle is largely 
illusory.

The interesting thing is that in both the UK and the US - not mention 
the rest of Europe at this point - we are living in economically 
imploding societies. Maybe under such conditions some basic elements of 
the system could change? My aim for this year is to set up an autonomous 
seminar in Chicago (using aaaaarg as a repository of materials) in order 
to explore the effects of previous large-scale economic crises, 
particularly the effects on class structure and the forms of cultural 
hegemony. The goal to grasp at least the magnitude of possible change 
over the upcoming decade. Of course, history will be no guide, as all 
indications are that ecological and geopolitical factors will make this 
crisis very different from the last two. Nonetheless, history can show 
us some of the parameters to look for in the present:

http://brianholmes.wordpress.com/2011/06/26/three-crises-30s-70s-today

The fact that this is an autonomous, self-organized seminar betrays my 
conviction that the university lacks an outside, or to put it another 
way, that critical thinking needs to articulate itself beyond the nexus 
of professional obligations that Lisa describes. But this proposal is 
not simply antagonistic. The point of (re)establishing an external locus 
of critique is to help transform the inside, to build both pressure and 
desire for new forms of education and intellectual activity. 
Institutional change is fundamentally necessary. Only a critical 
university system could provide the capacities to steer the knowledge 
society, or what's more aptly called cognitive capitalism. Gary's 
subversive proposals and open-access activism are great, it's excellent 
to hear about. So are the other open-acesss initiatives that have been 
discussed here. Florian's idea of pursuing the conversation in an OA 
journal is perfect. All of this could come to something!

best, Brian Holmes, PhD and blah blah blah....


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