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Publishing Futures Within (or Without) the Humanities

Geoffrey Sauer

Presented at the Society for Critical Exchange's 'Humanties Futures'
panel at the 1999 Chicago Modern Language Association conference

Copyright (c) 1999 by Geoffrey Sauer. All rights reserved.
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Introduction

Humanities disciplines have attributed enormous
importance to scholarly publishing in the second half of
the twentieth century. In ways that are already familiar
to us, our careers as academics are strongly influenced
by the strategies we pursue to circulate our work among
our peers. Excellent histories have been written about
how this has come to pass~the emergence of
'publish-or-perish' after the Second World War, attempts
to increase the quality of presses in the early 1970s,
and worries about canonical knowledges, the subsequent
emergence of subdisciplines and 'star systems' in
academic publishing post-1980 have all been discussed in
more depth elsewhere than I could do here. But I would
like to begin by suggesting that it is important to
learn from these past examples when we attempt to
theorize possible futures for academic writing in the
humanities.

In the past ten years or so, since the Literacy On-Line
conference in Alabama in 1988, proponents of new media
in the humanties have become more prevalent and more
vocal, encouraging new media publishing of academic
writings (primarily via Internet and CD-ROM). These
colleagues, in their eagerness to enlist allies, often
depict hypertext as radical or revolutionary media,
which they often argue somehow fundamentally rebels
against the vestigial or conservative institutions of
knowledge. This sort of argument in academic writings
often adopts an essentialism, asserting that new media
are somehow essentially democratic or egalitarian (from
proponents), or essentially unstructured or nonlinear
(from antagonists). However, I would like to begin by
suggesting that essentialist arguments don't help us
theorize enact chage very effectively: when any claims
about essential characteristics in new media are
accepted, they undermine its advocates (who alienate
themselves from dominant institutions and practices).
When it fails, even worse, this marks its proponents as
simply na~ve. In neither case does this sort of argument
seem to help new media in their integration into the
humanities' present or future.

But too many writings about new media issues tend to
assume that print is somehow the opposite of new media,
as if 'publishing' has remained a fixed or stable
institution, in contrast to new media's rapidity of
change. The frequent equation of print with Gutenberg,
as if contemporary publishing somehow resembles
fifteenth-century incunabula, occurs surprisingly
often~despite excellent research about publishing
history that could support more careful theories about
the past and present status of knowledge production.

This paper will take seriously the possibility that
material changes in publishing in recent decades have
already had important, visible effects upon the status
of humanities disciplines: both in print and new media.
And it will attempt to read the lessons found in print
and other media from the past twenty years before it
discusses the future that faces us all. It will then
introduce the dangers of a continuing failure to
'discipline' online practices very effectively. Then, in
its conclusion, it will begin to examine practice of
this theory in the case of the English Server at
Carnegie Mellon. The paper concludes by suggesting that
a theoretically-informed daily practice has a potential
to lead humanities departments in a direction that might
significantly strengthen our position within the
contemporary (and emerging) academy.

Thor Power Tool

Though there are several influences in recent publishing
history that could be discussed in order to demonstrate
visible change in the past two decades, the clearest may
be the Supreme Court's 1979 Thor Power Tool decision.
The Thor decision ruled in an I.R.S. case against a
hardware manufacturer. Thor had found it useful to
manufacture many years' worth of parts in a single
manufacturing run, parts which could later be assembled
into tools, for distribution to retail stores over a
five- or ten-year period. The I.R.S. argued that these
parts should be assessed as taxable property at the
retail value of the parts, and in a unanimous decision
written by William Rehnquist, the U.S. Supreme Court
agreed (Thor Power Tool Co. v. Commissioner, 439 U.S.
522, 1979).

An unforeseen consequence of this decision was that
books stored by publishers in warehouses after large
runs (for long-term future sales) would also be taxed in
this fashion, so that the 'backlist' suddenly became a
financial liability. This is important, because common
technologies of offset lithography make printing books
less expensive when done once, in large volume, rather
than in multiple print runs of small quantities.
Publishers who produced specialized and abstruse works
with small audiences, such as academic and lesser-known
literary texts, had (before this decision) simply
printed a large number of copies those books and
amortized their cost over five or ten years of sales.
The Thor decision made this untenable, as such
publishers had to pay far greater taxes on backlists
than before 1979. As a result, many publishers prefer
today to publish easily-marketable books they believe
can be sold within a single fiscal year.

And this has offered material advantages to those books
which can become events, complete with public relations
campaigns and marketing which seeks to demonstrate their
relevance and timeliness. Such books can be highlighted
as 'the' hot new book in (insert your subdiscipline
here). Even in academic writings (where this is less
visible) the 'event' theory of publishing has encouraged
market segmentation and differentiation in order to
create 'hot' new subdisciplines and disciplinary 'star
systems,' whose greates authors' latest works receive
'must read' status. Meanwhile, older and more measured
works with smaller (if constant) reading audiences have
quietly gone out of print.

Among the longer-term results of this has been that four
large book distribution corporations have come to
dominate publishing in the U.S. These firms, such as
Ingram and Publisher's Group West, warehouse books for
publishers and have a strong inventory computer network
in place, with connections to bookstore franchises
across the country, so stores can automatically order
from centralized distributors.

We have seen how these networks have made possible an
hegemony of heavily-computerized retail franchises with
strong connections to the distributors: Barnes & Noble,
Borders, and Amazon.com are all examples of this. These
bookstores have databases designed to keep track of
inventory, to reorder popular works automatically from
distributors, and to keep track of what books go out of
print and what new offerings should be added to
catalogues and shelves. These firms wish to decrease
what economists term 'marginal costs,' the
cost-per-impression, so that a title can be 'scalable'
or rapidly published in much greater numbers, when
desired or needed.

On the one hand, such a system may seem efficient. It is
certainly true that the total number of works
available~including books and magazines, to say nothing
of increasingly-interesting academic multimedia~has
increased. However, much interesting work is also being
lost, because it does not fit into the new economics of
publishing; especially 'esoteric' works and books
published by small presses. As local bookstores are
replaced by these franchises, many traditional
relationships between academics and bookstore management
have decreased, and in many ways the influence of those
of us in the humanities in book sales seems to be the
weakest it has been this century.

What I'd like to suggest is that it's important to
consider these factors when attempting to consider the
status of knowledge at the present time, to say nothing
of in the future.

Humanities Futures?

The new costs added to books from computerized
databases, publicity, marketing and rapid obsolescence
have have had visible costs for those of us who read and
teach. The increase in the cost of 'leisure' reading has
already had noticeable effects for the liberal arts in
everyday life. Paperbacks begin in the $15 range, and
hardcover books range upward from $20 (at the least). In
this world, the futures for leisure reading seem more
difficult to imagine, particularly as young readers seem
to find early focus of their reading interests
economically rewarding, thus decreasing the sort of
breadth more common earlier this century.

Historians such as Robert Darnton and theorists such as
Pierre Bourdieu have written at length about the dangers
of allowing the price of written works to escalate,
creating elite knowledges with narrow bases of support
in culture. I have elsewhere drawn parallels between the
eighteenth-century print history of the French Bourbon
monarchy's publishing system when compared with its
dynamic, capitalist Swiss rivals, whose work helped to
erode support for an ancien regime which refused to
acknowledge the possibility that material economic
infrastructure jeopardized traditional institutions and
practices.

I myself wasn't so terribly concerned about the present
state until a personal friend, who works as a manager in
my neighborhood Barnes and Noble, told me that his store
plans to reduce its stock of university press
books~because they are comparatively difficult to find,
to order, and they do not offer the same profit margins
to the bookstore as do presses which distribute via the
four large distribution companies.

It may be worthwhile for us to consider the strategies
that we employ to publish our work to reading audiences.
Walter Benjamin (in 'Unpacking My Library') and Michel
Foucault (in 'What is an Author?') have written about
several organizing principles that our culture uses to
articulate the importance of its written works. Because
the complexities of comparing the many details of works
in any field are indeed so impossible, social
institutions are developed to assist us.
'Author-function,' one instance of this, is the creation
of a myth around particular authors which can be used to
connect their works to one another, in order to think of
works within a narrative of ouvres. If the sorts of
'author-function' which we employ are not well suited to
the newly-dominant systems of publishing, it may be
worthwhile for us to consider the alternatives.

Options Available To Us

I: The Software Model

The New York Times reported in November 1998 that the
personal computer game industry generates an annual
revenue of $9.3 billion, which exceeds even the box
office receipts of Hollywood films, $6.2 billion per
year. Software is very much a written product, and it
has adapted itself well to the rapid-obsolescence model.
With version numbers, systems that allow Internet
'patches' for minor updates and new CD-ROM releases for
major updates, software has become a success story for
the new, low 'marginal cost' publishing.

It would be possible for academic writers to re-fashion
print publishing to this model. Books may have primary
authors, but their production requires teams of peer
reviewers, content and copy editors, fact-checkers, and
design specialists. Viewed more abstractly, books are
more profoundly collaborative works still, as they are
written within and for discourse communities, and thus
build upon and with what has gone before. Software is
similar: especially today, software is written by teams
of programmers, often with the aid of designers,
'scriptwriters' (for video games and elaborate cds),
error-checkers, and so on. Furthermore, software, too,
has its discourse communities, and in more than one
sense. On the one hand, software too is produced for and
in response to certain discourse communities (running
the gamut from graphic designers to educators to game
players).

However, as in wrtten works, the collaborative nature of
software authorship tends to be hidden within an
author-function of the publishing firm. For instance,
Adobe PageMaker is the work of dozens of programmers and
designers, but only a handful are credited on the splash
screen, and even those names are rarely noted. The
oligarchical monopoly of contemporary software
publishing ensures that there are only (at most) a few
rival software titles vying for any particular software
market (such as desktop publishing software in this
case). In print publishing, the current breadth of
markets might require significant re-fashioning.

However, I have colleagues and friends who do quite well
under this new order. Their books are relatively
well-known in their areas of expertise and their own
minor 'stardom' within disciplinary constraints seems
advantageous to them. They talk about the contemporary
constellation of publishing interests as 'progress,' and
I can certainly understand the reasons why some may wish
to tell that narrative to explain present circumstances.
They see their own books within a short-term vision of
scholarly writing, and so it may not be impossible for
academic writing to adapt to this sort of market-driven
logic.

But I'm uneasy about the epistemologies which might
allow me to endorse this option: how could I feel
certain that I'm arguing for this sort of work from its
own merits, and not as a rationalization for following
the direction so encouraged by the Rehnquist court and
capital's interests?

II: A Barthian Poststructural Alternative

In Roland Barthes' 1971 essay 'From Work to Text.'
Barthes distinguishes two approaches to a literary
product: one seeing it as a finished commodity complete
in itself (a 'work'), and the other which sees meaning
as continuously changing and developing (a 'text'), so
that production is not a closed system, but an open one:

The work is a fragment of substance, occupying a
part of the space of books (in a library for
example), the text is a methodological field....
likewise, the work can be seen (in bookshops, in
catalogues, in exam syllabuses), the text is a
process of demonstration, speaks according to
certain rules (or against certain rules); the work
can be held in the hand, the text is held in
language, only exists in the movement of a
discourse (or rather, it is text for the very
reason that it knows itself as text); the text is
not the decomposition of the work, it is the work
that is the imaginary tail of the text; or again,
the text is experienced only in an activity of
production. It follows that the text cannot stop
(for example on a library shelf); its constitutive
movement is that of cutting across (in particular,
it can cut across the work, several works).
(156~157)

The convenience, he implies, of thinking of a literary
product as a 'work' is offset by the limitation of
divorcing textual products from the social or cultural
contexts which lend meaning to certain forms of literary
production. Some forms of writing must, he argues, be
understood as a 'text'~an object not divorced from the
social systems which give it meaning. ' The Text is
experienced only in an activity of production. It
follows that the Text cannot stop (for example on a
library shelf); its constitutive movement is that of
cutting across.' (157) 'The Text is not to be thought of
as an object that can be computed.' (156) Barthes claims
that a text 'requires that one try to abolish (or at the
very least to diminish) the distance between writing and
reading, not by intensifying the projection of the
reader into the work but by joining them in a single
signifying practice.' (162) In other words, the
commodity fetishization possible from Internet
distribution of writings is only one possible
relationship between readers and online documents. An
alternative might be something which more resembles what
Barthes considers the more flexible and more powerful
relationship between readers and texts: one in which the
reader brings to bear his or her knowledge of the social
context and the history of the community for which the
text is produced in order to interact with the text.

This plays itself out in numerous ways in day-to-day
online practices. The Internet is composed not only of
'dominant economies' which allow, for instance, the
purchase of up-to-date software packages as commodities
('works') directly from developers, but also a wide
range of 'alternative economies.' Hackers also often
work against planned/accelerated obsolescence, by
archiving and continuing work in areas defined by
commercial publishers as marginal or antiquated.
Examples of this can be found in the mame project, in
emulators, in software archives, in stella. Hackers who
undertake these forms of collaboration vest value in the
work and in the continuation and improvement of work.

It may be possible to articulate a poststructural
argument about textuality which would encourage a
rethinking of humanities knowledges as intertextual. By
arguing that academic writing is meaningful only within
a play of discourse that could be linked to any new
work, it might be possible to realize a poststructural
alternative to the simple commodity logic of the
software publishing regime.

I am personally uneasy about this option, as well,
however. I have a colleague whose e-mails all end with
the signature line 'Solving tomorrow's problems with
yesterday's theory, today.' Adapting the poststructural
theory might be practicable, but I'm uncertain of
contemporary academic writers' will or interest in
producing an alternative to current market systems.

III: The EServer Model

A third option might be to play within the space
afforded us by the present disorder. The EServer was
founded in 1990 in order to serve as a liaison between
scholars and computer enthusiasts, in order to explore
innovative community publishing capabilities implicit in
the emerging new media. With it, I hope to point to
better models of collaboration than perhaps we currently
employ, and also point to ways in which academics in
writing programs can both benefit by and influence
emergent means of collaboration online. The EServer is
hardly revolutionary: its spanning of a gap between
conventional publishing (by publishing works with
commercial value) while also publishing some works which
do not fit into contemporary commercial publishers'
interests makes it (of necessity) an imperfect
compromise.

But I would argue that this sort of position offers a
certain liberation from either the na~ve individualism
of technophile utopias, while at the same time

This space has enabled for me the possibility of a
critical interrogation of present publishing practice.
And I recommend that sort of 'relative autonomy,' which
may offer the space necessary for us to formulate viable
alternatives to present-dominant practice.

IV: The Diminution of the Humanities

A fourth option would, of course, be a decrease in the
cultural importance of humanities knowledges. I don't
know how rapidly that might occur: if business models
have successfully rearticulated professional status
within narratives of the successful management of
information, then reading becomes simpler to identify as
a definitive element of bourgeois culture. So, needless
to say, I don't foresee the possibility that the
humanities might unilaterally decide to place less
emphasis upon publication as a significant measure of
professional work. The United States in the past two
decades has seen a significant increase in
information-production industries as a percentage of
GNP.

But there is a danger. Disciplines such as business,
economics, computer science and design have successfully
restructured the publishing of their books to fit the
rapid-obsolescence model favored by publishers. Business
textbooks are produced for timely issues (look in your
local bookstore if you haven't browsed these titles
lately). In some cases, they have been very successful:
B. Dalton booksellers now has a category for books
titled 'Business and Computers,' which contains all
their business and computer books, so closely have the
rapid-obsolescence of these disciplines' works been
identified in the minds of franchise booksellers.

But this fourth option hardly needs much discussion.
Continuing upon our present course may well result in a
continued dimunition in the importance of humanities
disciplines, to the advantage of business, engineering
and the sciences which fit more easily into for-profit
publishing models than English, History, Modern
Languages and similar fields.

Conclusion

I'm not offering in this paper some simple formula to
solve this problem; none of the options above could
constitute a complete articulation of how to correct
twenty years of momentum in the knowledge industries.
However, I've worked extensively in new media studies
for ten years and I am profoundly skeptical about
intrumental rationalities which promise some new
'gadget' which can correct widespread societal and
cultural issues. Instead, I would like to conclude by
arguing for the construction of spaces within new media
which will allow more of us to examine these issues in
ways which take seriously the threats posed to
humanities futures by the status quo.

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Geoffrey F.K. Sauer English Department
412 268-2893/268-7989 259 Baker Hall, CMU
http://eserver.org/geoff Pittsburgh, PA 15213
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