Too Far, Sir, Way Too Far, Painfully Far, If I May

Little in life is less gratifying than having an moment of insight and writing on its strength for a couple of hours before realizing that your insight isn't all that insightful—that in fact it further confuses already confused matters, adding wrinkles to creases of folds on what might well be the surface of a prune.  Case in point: late yesterday afternoon I thought I'd discovered a better way to describe the current situation in scholarly publishing/reviewing.  Picking up from the end of the previously posted paragraph, I wrote:

This is not to say that all academic careers are destined to be as unfruitful as Casaubon's, nor that all monographs wear the obsessiveness which produced them as proudly.  To the contrary, vital works are being published every year—only instead of spirited debate, their publication occasions an item of note on the next tenure review, indicative of the contribution made to the professional discourse.  That the intellectual impact of this contribution is illusory.  Publication should not accord to what I call the Tunguska model. 

As many of you know, on the morning of June 30, 1908, the largest object to strike the Earth in recorded history exploded in the air above deep in the Siberian wilderness.  The forest below was flattened.  Reasonable people would assume the Tunguska event, as it came to be known, would have aroused scientific curiosity.  However, it took the Soviet scientific community more than a decade to launch an expedition.  Rumors of the impact did not even reach American shores until early 1928.  They were met with by an incredulous public, secure in the belief that if something so significant had happened, news of it would have taken less than twenty years to reach them.  It was not until George Merrill, then head curator of geology in the U.S. National Museum, published in Science a loose translation of the account written by Leonid Kulik, the minerologist who led the belated Russian expedition, that the American public was convinced that something had occurred on that bright morning two decades earlier.  Sadly, the space of academic publishing is something of a Siberia.  Impressive monographs crash into an indifferent earth and wait, unstudied, until someone important lends them his credibility years after the fact. 

Only unlike the Siberia of 1908, contemporary academia is densely populated.  The indifference with which these books are met is all the more surprising—or, perhaps, dismaying—because it is as if whatever object came screaming across the Siberian sky exploded above the joint annual conventions of the American Astronomical Society, the Mineralogical Society of America and the Geological Society of America.  It is as if the event occurred above the heads of the professionals best equipped to study it, but instead of stopping, heading for an exit and starting the investigation, they did not (or refused to) notice it.  The flattening of the very forest in which they stand is met with a knowing but indifferent nod, or a wry remark about not being able to note whether every tree falling unobserved in the woods makes a sound—this after every tree in the woods crashed loudly to the floor. 

I almost certainly push the analogy too far, but knowingly so, because I want to emphasize how little an impact a newly published monograph has on the discipline at large.  In the Tunguska model, there is no Tunguska effect: defying physics, important works tumble through the atmosphere without disturbing it; explode above the steppes without a sound; engulf the forest in flames without scorching a single leaf.  Where should be a spectacle, an event, there is only a peaceful Russian morning.  The reality of academic reviewing dictates that when you encounter an important but "effectless" book, you have little choice but to make an event of it yourself. 

Even under the thrall of my own "wit," I acknowledged that I might be pushing the analogy too far—but folks, that is what we in the writing business call "false humility."  When I wrote that yesterday afternoon, I was plum impressed with my own sharp wit. 

Now, I'm of the mind that excursions like yesterday's are necessary if you want to write anything anyone would willingly read.  But it is difficult not to be embarrassed when you unwittingly drown in an unsound analogy. 

Comments

[Sisyphus]

Heh. Scott, does your advisor run when you come at him with a big sheaf of pages? Has he developed any facial tics?

Me, I'm blaming all that London you've been reading. Unless you've been into the Christopher Marlowe lately.

[Rich Puchalsky]

Yes, this analogy is fatally flawed. It assumes that monographs are like Tunguska objects that crash into Earth but are oddly unnoticed. But, sad to say, that dignifies them with undue weight. They are more like snowflakes, burying the Siberian wastes in a dead white silence, individually unique if you look at them through a microscope but as a group wholly unremarkable.

Do you have specific examples of monographs that should have been noticed but were not?

[Martin GL]

The title of this post is a quote, isn't it? Where is it from?

[Adam Kotsko]

Do you have specific examples of monographs that should have been noticed but were not?

If he did, that would mean that they were in fact noticed, undercutting his entire point.

[Anthony]

By the way, if the object struck the Earth in June, 1908, and it took the Soviet scientific community a decade to investigate, this suggests that they began investigations in 1918. This is actually not too bad, since there was no Soviet scientific community until late 1917. But I suppose your point is also that Imperial authorities and scientists also ignored this event.

[Rich Puchalsky]

The whole thing depends on a distinction between works that should have been noticed and works that have actually been noticed by the field. Whether something has actually been noticed by the field is determinable, quantifiable even (through Hirsch number etc.) But the only way you can make an argument that something should have been noticed is through either a) hindsight, in which a field notices something decades later and there is general agreement that it should have been noticed earlier, or b) the claim that as a discerning reader you've noticed something that others haven't, generally supported by some kind of explanation of why it's worth noticing. I think that's what is meant by "The reality of academic reviewing dictates that when you encounter an important but "effectless" book, you have little choice but to make an event of it yourself."

[Loki]

I would definitely read more reviews if a big ball of flames is referenced in each one. Better yet, an actual big ball of flames exploding over my head as I read.

As flawed as the analogy may be, it does make for engaging reading. Keep it up!

[Nate]

Rich, the event Scott describes was exactly your type "a)", an event which was investigated only after the fact and everyone goes "oh hell we should have gotten into this ages ago! what were we thinking?" I know there are works like this in academia but I can't think of any examples off the top of my head in part because I read mostly stuff by people who are already dead. In some parts of universities some people have started to do with work by Antonio Negri, though the sentiment isn't widespread enough to be called "general agreement." There definitely are cases like this in other areas of culture all the time - the whole cliche of the starving artist whose work sells for buckets of money posthumously, for one, or the obscure band who influences another obscure band who then becomes a great big band. Translations of academics works sort of works like this too, I think.

[Rich Puchalsky]

But in art I think it's different, Nate. You can take Van Gogh and say that everyone should have realized the brilliance of his work while he was alive -- but maybe the audience wasn't ready. If you're going to take a fairly standard (now) view of the meaning of art as being partially from the artist and partially from the viewer, then maybe you're limited to saying that Van Gogh made brilliant art that was (to use another cliche) before its time, and which could only be recognized by a later audience.

Academia isn't supposed to work that way; it's supposed to deal in ideas or in investigations of fact, which are supposed to be more immediately recognizeable as being important or not than art is. If instead you want to adhere to a more extreme social construction for academic work, such that works are not really intrinsically important but only are recieved as important or not, then you can't have the disjunction that Scott writes about -- the perception of the meteorite knocking down trees and the actual knocking down of trees are one and the same.

[Eileen A. Joy]

Scott, I'm not sure I exactly agree--regardless of your feeling that you somehow got the analogy wrong [I grant you to be the best judge of that]--that we are in a certain state of affairs in academic publishing where so-called "vital" books are just coming and going without notice, without proper vigorous debate, without full attention being paid. Now, I DO agree, on one level that, yes, sometimes really excellent and important books kind of appear and disappear without the general academic community taking the kind of notice they should [within medieval studies, I would nominate in this category David Gary Shaw's "Necessary Conjunctions: The Social Self in Medieval England"], but then on the other hand, also within medieval studies, we have books like David Wallace's "Premodern Places: Calais to Surinam, Chaucer to Aphra Behn" and the more recent Bruce Holsinger's "The Premodern Condition," which have received tons and tons and tons of attention, both within and outside of medieval studies. And I'm thinking, too, within queer studies, of Lee Eddelman's "No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive," which has practically produced a riot of dialogue and debate, with no signs, so far, of this letting up. I myself have chimed in on this one here:

http://www.siue.edu/babel/BABEL_Lonelyhearts_Ad.html

So, what do you think? Is it too little attention in some places and too much in others? Although I have to say, I actually think Edelman's book represents a crisis in queer studies, and an awfully important one, not just for that sub-field, but for the fate of the humanities more broadly. And people are seeming to recognize that and wanting to grapple with it.

[jholbo]

I like it. Overextended stuff like this has a Melvillean glamour to it. Good.