I had one of those moments earlier this week, in which I suddenly felt as though the fog had lifted and everything I’d been muddling through for the last year or so became clear. I’m really hoping that this clarity isn’t temporary — I’m hoping I’m actually onto something — but I’m extremely excited about it right now. And I’m hoping that writing about it here will help make the thing that I’m thinking a bit more real.

Here’s the backstory: for the last couple of years, as those of you who’ve been hanging around here know, I’ve been writing a good bit about the future of scholarly publishing, producing a range of blog posts, manifestos, and even a couple of full-on articles. And they’ve been exciting to produce, and they’ve led to a certain kind of awareness of my work in the field that hadn’t existed before. But I wasn’t sure how much work they were doing for me, in a long-range sense. And here’s where a kind of craven careerism creeps into my thinking about my work: I need to be working on a project of the sort that one would call a “book,” not least because the second book is pretty much key to full professordom around these parts, or if not key, then certainly something somewhere well above helpful.

But I’ve been having a couple of problems with thinking about a large second project. The first is that such a project, in a lot of ways, is diametrically opposed to the manifestos and articles I’ve been producing, all of which have been arguing about various aspects of the problem that the book poses for the future of academic discourse; to be making those arguments while working on a book has felt more than a little hypocritical, and counterproductive to my real goals for the academy. And the second is that I’ve tested out a number of different ideas for that second project, and while the one I spent the summer working on seems like it will eventually come to fruition, it’s just not evolved enough yet. And every article or manifesto I’ve written has taken time away from that big project, and has made its full evolution seem that much more remote.

So when I decided this week to reinstitute the half-hour focused morning writing sessions, I had to figure out what exactly it was I was going to work on. I’ve got an article that I’m interested in writing toward that projected next big project, but I’m really not ready to launch into it. On the other hand, I’ve got another article on the future of scholarly publishing — the peer review article I mentioned a couple of posts back — that I also want to work on, and that I have the sense could be put together fairly quickly.

So I spent the first day of morning writing blocking out that article — writing the introduction, laying out the sections, figuring out how to proceed — and was very pleased with the results. And then later in the day, while thinking about something else entirely, it suddenly hit me (and with such a force that I honestly can’t believe this hadn’t occurred to me sooner):

What if all this writing about scholarly publishing is the next “book” project?

A flood of questions followed right behind that: What would the overall argument of such a project be? How would it be structured? What pieces of such a project are already in place, and what yet needs to be figured out?

And most importantly: Is the project a book, or a “book”?

I’m pretty rapidly figuring out the answers to those questions, and I’m hoping to share some of those answers here soon. In the meantime, though, I wanted to share this much: there have been few joys in my career thus far quite comparable to the moment — and I’ve now had it on four separate occasions — of realizing that all the random stuff I was doing, often not sure why I was doing it, was adding up to something coherent, and that that something coherent could actually, possibly, be really good.

I’m finally acknowledging this morning that the holidays are over, that there are two weeks left before classes start, and that if I’m going to get anything done, now’s the moment. I’m hoping to return to some regular writing here in this new year, and so am going to begin with a few relatively random bullets, just trying to capture some of what I’ve been pondering.

snow
Originally uploaded by KF

• The big-ass storm that pounded the west coast seems finally to have passed. The radar pictures I watched much of the weekend were quite dramatic — rain, at one point last night, stretching solidly from Palm Springs to the east to the coast, and from southern Orange County to well north of San Luis Obispo. Storms of that size are like a homecoming of a sort — one of a few things that I really miss from Louisiana — but they’re unusual enough to be a bit of a pain here: flooded streets, crap drivers, and a general creeping damp cold that my heating system can’t seem to overcome. On the upside, however, is that the storm has left us with enough snow that the desperation of this year’s drought might be a bit ameliorated.
• The first episode of season 5 of The Wire already has me hooked, but that was pretty much a foregone conclusion: combine my absolute adoration for the show’s narrative strategies, its complex web of characters, and its focus on the systemic obstacles to really fixing serious social problems with the fact that, this year, the media provides the primary system in question, and I’m one hundred and four percent sold.
• I’m back to work on some MediaCommons projects, which I hope I’ll have more to show for, soon.
• I’m also attempting to move forward with my own writing projects, but as usual, they’re getting short shrift. I keep saying that I want to find ways to integrate that writing with posting here, and I keep not following through. I’m determined to get some blog mileage out of the research I’m doing right now, though, and some project mileage out of the blog, too. I’d call it a new year’s resolution if I really believed in those.

More from the homefront, soon.

I am completely up to my eyeballs in theories of subjection right now, and am thoroughly enjoying the connections that the reading that I’m doing is helping me to make, but I just want to note, for the record, that I long to be able to read (and, I guess more to the point, comprehend) at a rate such that my to-be-read list grows more slowly than my have-read list. I’m not holding out much hope for such an eventuality, alas, but it would certainly make things better, where “better” is defined as me feeling like less of an ignoramus.

The Institute for the Future of the Book has today announced the release of its open source WordPress theme, CommentPress, which allows for easy online publication and discussion of a wide range of documents. My article on scholarly publishing, released earlier this spring by MediaCommons, was published in an early draft of CommentPress, and I’ve now put the finished release into use on a paper-in-development that’s, appropriately, about CommentPress.

Stop by if:book, download CommentPress, and read (and discuss) all about it…

Somewhere, not terribly long ago, I heard or read someone make the argument that blogging was the first genuinely internet-native mode of publishing. I’ve been searching around for such a statement, and am coming up a bit dry. My fear is that this was just said to me in casual conversation, just someone opining. But, in the event that it wasn’t, have you come across anyone arguing something such as that, in, say, a citeable forum? I’d like to be able to use that point in the argument I’m trying to make right now, but right now it’s sitting there in that “arguably, blogs are the first…” mode that raises more questions than it answers.

[UPDATE, 11.00 am, CET: Interestingly, I've now found several sources that make the point exactly as I do, saying that blogs are "arguably the first" blah blah blah. Is there some magical point at which enough people suggesting-without-proving a point like that becomes convincing enough a part of the conventional wisdom that we can stop qualifying it with "arguably"? Or are such bits of hearsay precisely those that most demand questioning?]

1. The box of them (a.k.a. le colis de mystère) is still nowhere to be found. The USPS remains clueless. La Poste no longer acknowledges that there was once a package with the number they’d assigned to it.

2. The ones I ordered, estimated to arrive sometime between Monday and today, haven’t. At least yet.

3. I cannot be positive, but I believe that in the missing box was a book about the history of the book, which it turns out I desperately need right now, not for the project I thought I needed it for, but for another one that I didn’t know I was going to be working on. So I’m about to start searching for decent online sources on the history of the book, because I don’t want to tempt fate by attempting to have any more books shipped to me. If you know of good sources that I should look at, please send them my way. Electronically.

File this under “things I really ought to have read a long time ago, but am just now getting to”:  I’ve spent the last few days slowly working my way through The Pleasure of the Text.  And I found myself quite astonished by how much there is in this deceptively tiny text, and how elusive it all is.

What I need now is to do a bit more reading on the question of pleasure, and particularly in relationship to cultural consumption.  In part I’m looking for critical responses to Barthes, but also for competing or complementary theories of pleasure.  And it’s specifically pleasure that I’m interested in, as distinct from desire.  As Barthes points out,

Pleasure is continually disappointed, reduced, deflated, in favor of strong, noble values:  Truth, Death, Progress, Struggle, Joy, etc.  Its victorious rival is Desire:  we are always being told about Desire, never about Pleasure; Desire has an epistemic dignity, Pleasure does not. (Barthes 57)

Desire is permissible within criticism, and can even be acknowledged as having a revolutionary force, precisely because it operates around a lack—for desire to be desire, it cannot be satisfied.  Pleasure, by contrast, implies satisfaction, and thus, both politically and psychoanalytically, pleasure comes to be seen as regressive and infantile.  And, in fact, much of The Pleasure of the Text is at pains to distinguish between the confirming power of pleasure with respect to the status quo and the rupture produced by bliss.  On the other hand, Barthes also indicates that there is “an entire minor mythology [that] would have us believe that pleasure (and singularly the pleasure of the text) is a rightist notion” (Barthes 22), suggesting that pleasure—at least in the broader category that includes both plaisir and jouissance—is not so aligned with the conservative as we have been led to believe.

What I’m after is a critical theory of pleasure, and particularly the pleasure taken in the consumption of cultural texts.  I’m going to go reread some Freud, and I’m thinking I need to revisit Foucault and The History of Sexuality as well.  But what else should I be looking at?

Amusingly enough, my very last post of 2005 was about the difficulities of beginning a new large-scale project. That project, which I planned on spending my sabbatical with during spring 2006, got somewhat overcome by events, primarily the take-off of planning for MediaCommons. That project, called Archive, is one I hope to return to at some point, but it’s wound up getting even further back-burnered over the course of the year, as I realized that the conference paper I’d written about blogging was in the process of morphing into an article, and that it was threatening the boundaries of article space as well, turning into a full-length project, whether I wanted it to or not.

As it turns out, I’m excited about the blogging project, which I’m thinking of as something book-like but not book-ish, something that will almost certainly live in MediaCommons. But figuring out how to get from the article to the full-scale thing is proving, once again, daunting. Where do I begin?

Last year, Francois asked whether a technical solution might not do the trick, helping me to, as he said, “keep in focus a configuration of an unfolding.” This year, thanks to my friend G., I’ve found such a tool, one that I’m still experimenting with, but that I think might do the trick: Scrivener. The software is still in beta right now, but it’s got some awfully great features designed to help take a writer—of any kind—from a fuzzy notion of some too-complex-to-imagine text to a draft. It produces outline views, corkboard-and-index-card views, draft document views; it can contain research notes and objects alongside but separate from the draft-in-process; it allows for some complex uses of metadata.

I’m in the very early stages of imagining the full project, and I’m quite sure that I’m dead wrong about some key aspect of it as yet, but I think the malleability of Scrivener’s uses of text will allow me the simultaneous flexibility and structure that I need in getting started. Which, I hope, will make the getting started less daunting.

Say you’re quoting a passage from a text, and within that passage, the author uses a parenthetical citation to refer to another text.  Do you:

(a) Quote the passage exactly as printed in the text, including the citation?

(b) Quote the passage without the citation, as though it weren’t there, thus protecting the flow of the author’s writing?

or (c) Quote the passage without the citation, but with an ellipsis in its place?

None of these three options seems quite right to me, and I honestly can’t remember how I’ve resolved this issue in the past.  Probably by avoiding it.  And none of the online MLA guides I’ve found have any help to offer, so I’m resorting to blegging.  Also, apparently, posting a lot today, in a mad effort to keep from feeling as though I’m being radically unproductive.

I’ve had a few conversations about this here website of late, conversations with folks who seem uncomfortable with the personal nature of some of what I’ve blogged here.  Nobody’s upset with me about having been indiscreet, or about having said something about them that I shouldn’t have.  Rather, they’re concerned (albeit in different ways, and for different reasons) about my level of self-disclosure, and particularly with the ways that such disclosure might interfere with my professional self-presentation.

I’ve spent the last few days of silence trying to figure out how I feel about their discomfort.

The part of me that’s held off on posting anything takes these concerns seriously, and has tried to think through the question of how much I want to reveal here, and why, where I cross the line, where the line lies, and what purposes, for that matter, the line serves.  Much of the rest of me is having a hard time not finding this anxiety—both theirs and my own, as spawned by theirs—quite hysterically funny.  Because, yeah, I often post here about things that one might find a bit “personal,” at least in the sense of not being about work.

I’m just not sure why anybody would be surprised by that.

Because, damnit, isn’t part of the point of the blog that the personal and the public (and thus the personal and the professional) are so mutually implicated as to be inseparable?  That intellectual life is a profoundly personal experience, and that our lives outside the seminar room are as much in need of examination as anything inside it?  That, as Dr. B has at moments been fond of saying, academics are more than brains on sticks?  That our desire to distill the purely professional for public consumption, casting aside the personal, participates in the myth of the neutral, objective, disinterested scholar that we’ve done our best to reject on a theoretical level?

Isn’t part of the point of the blog—or at least this blog—the liberation of the personal from the slag-heap of academia, and an exploration of its co-implication with the professional?

I’m in the midst of a project that’s primarily about personal blogs, the ways that such blogs are dismissed as a kind of neurotic oversharing, and the reasons that such dismissals are a huge mistake.  And the purposes such dismissals, whether meaning to or not, must serve.  So I’m realizing that the main thing that all this concern about my dangerously unprofessional self-disclosure is making me want to do is theorize that writing, by bringing parts of the article I’m working on here for some early-stage discussion.

We’ve long since forgotten that the personal is political.  I’m not sure why it surprises me to find resistance to the notion that the personal might be professional, as well.