{"id":171,"date":"2011-11-29T12:33:48","date_gmt":"2011-11-29T16:33:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.montclair.edu\/crdirector\/?p=171"},"modified":"2019-06-04T09:28:39","modified_gmt":"2019-06-04T13:28:39","slug":"kathleen-fitzpatricks-essential-new-book-planned-obsolescence-publishing-technology-and-the-future-of-the-academy-the-crc-december-2011-spotlight-review-by-neil-baldwin","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/creative-research-center\/2011\/11\/29\/kathleen-fitzpatricks-essential-new-book-planned-obsolescence-publishing-technology-and-the-future-of-the-academy-the-crc-december-2011-spotlight-review-by-neil-baldwin\/","title":{"rendered":"Kathleen Fitzpatrick’s Essential New Book – Planned Obsolescence: Publishing, Technology, and the Future of the Academy. The CRC December 2011 Spotlight Review – by Neil Baldwin; and a Letter in Response from Gary Hall About a Revolutionary Open-Access e-Book Project"},"content":{"rendered":"

“Raw metrics will never be\u00a0enough to tell us about the success or failure of a piece of scholarship<\/strong>.” — Kathleen Fitzpatrick, Planned Obsolescence<\/em>, p.193.<\/p>\n

A\u00a0statement of fact, not self-aggrandizement:\u00a0 Since 1978, I have been\u00a0writing and publishing books in the ‘analog’ world – poetry, translations, nonfiction, biography, American history, art history, cultural anthropology.\u00a0 Then, just last year, within two months of launching this CRC\u00a0site, I published my first novel, a thriller <\/a>—\u00a0as an e-book.<\/p>\n

Like most of you reading these words, I am spending a lot\u00a0more time on the Web. But the\u00a0situation<\/em> of writing, in my mind,<\/em> has not changed with the shift in medium. This is an electronic machine, not a typewriter; and so, admittedly, the impact is not direct from small-motor action to impression of ink on paper.\u00a0 I realize, and accept, that each and every one of these letters has to go through an invisible\u00a0coding process before it rematerializes in decipherable visual form. However, I do not\u00a0experience any\u00a0self-conscious or interfering moment in acknowledgment of the medium. When I am writing, I am still<\/em> making meaning, as I have always done,\u00a0and it still<\/em> feels like that.<\/p>\n

Why, then, make the case for the legitimacy of these pixelated, atomized words?\u00a0\u00a0Which is a roundabout way of\u00a0announcing my deepest gratitude\u00a0to Kathleen Fitzpatrick for having written Planned Obsolescence<\/em> <\/a>(New York and London: New York University Press, 2011.)<\/p>\n

Fitzpatrick’s reputation precedes her, as the founding editor of the digital scholarly network MediaCommons<\/em><\/a>, and the author of The Anxiety of Obsolescence<\/em> <\/a>(2006); and now, on leave from her position as Professor of Media Studies at Pomona College, she has taken on the timely\u00a0position of Director of Scholarly Communication for the Modern Language Association<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The narrative arc of Planned Obsolescence<\/em> is tight, coherent,\u00a0and eloquent — propulsively staking its territory\u00a0from micro to macro, personal to global, as its impassioned author\u00a0argues for “a new way of working,” advocating for “publishing on the Web [being] as valuable as publishing in print.”\u00a0 Sensitivities in the\u00a0academic arena run high when this volatile matter is broached.\u00a0 Nevertheless, Fitzpatrick wants to see the ascendancy of a new kind of critique, “post-publication peer review<\/a>” rather than the age-old, “entrenched” methods currently in place. We live in a far more “public place” than past generations, she reminds us;\u00a0 our\u00a0point of view on publication must likewise evolve.\u00a0 Incremental blogs add up to book-length tracts before we\u00a0realize it. Let us open up the entire process of generating ideas, putting them on the digital table, welcoming diverse attitudes toward them, selecting, shaping and reconfiguring them “curatorially”\u00a0in imaginative response to freely-offered and serious opinions — and then, let us further expand and infuse energy and health into the notion of making words fixed and truly “public.”<\/p>\n

Fitzpatrick’s mandate\u00a0has the exciting potential to become a self-fulfilling prophecy because there is strength in numbers. The more voices of “reputation and authority” step into the public mode of Web discourse and resolve to\u00a0bridge the “theory-practice divide,”\u00a0the more substantial the Web will become de<\/em> facto<\/em>.\u00a0\u00a0Planned Obsolescence <\/em>is\u00a0a rallying-cry to intelligent writers who want to be communicators<\/em>\u00a0to come to the Web.\u00a0\u00a0So doing, Fitzpatrick \u00a0rightly invokes Mark Poster’s “new historical constellation of authorship, one that [so far] is emergent, but seemingly more and more predominant.”<\/p>\n

The denouement of\u00a0Planned Obsolescence<\/em> is vitally devoted to\u00a0issues of stewardship, storage and preservation\u00a0arising concomitant with\u00a0explosions in\u00a0new media.\u00a0\u00a0Here, Fitzpatrick brings in the imperative voice of\u00a0another pioneer in the field, Laura Brown of Ithaka: \u00a0“Recognize that publishing is an integral part of the core mission and activities of universities, and take ownership of it.” It is time, Fitzpatrick agrees, for university libraries and ambitious scholar-faculty to join forces and revitalize the declining model of academic publishing. There is no practical way that inundated university presses in their current “unsustainable” [analog] structure can\u00a0hope to continue as the exclusive, traditional-media\u00a0initial offering-ground for young scholars’ monographs\u00a0— nor should this inordinate burden be placed upon them.<\/p>\n

Rather, the contemporary university press\u00a0must embrace its nonprofit imperative and focus upon the local as the universal;\u00a0\u00a0slow down the race to emulate trade publishing, and return to a way of life that exists in service to “showcase”\u00a0homegrown faculty and promote the riches of its 21st-century institution.<\/p>\n

“Knowledge which is not public is not knowledge.”\u00a0 Indeed,\u00a0 I still remember my attitude, a mere five years ago, before I\u00a0accepted my first university appointment, coming out of a world where I\u00a0believed that knowledge was everyone’s\u00a0purview. I had no experiential\u00a0relationship to\u00a0disciplines, departments, schools, or colleges.\u00a0 And nowadays, even though I am “housed” in a department of a college in a\u00a0major state university, I\u00a0find my concept of interdisciplinarity expanded rather than inhibited.\u00a0 I accept the necessity of separate modes of inquiry as being coexistent with<\/em> the omnivorous desire to learn more and\u00a0venture outside the subject of one’s choice and\/or passion.<\/p>\n

Kathleen Fitzpatrick likewise reminds and encourages us that — whether we choose to live and work and think inside or<\/em> outside the academy — special expertise is not a barrier, but, rather, serves as the gateway<\/em> to freely-ranging thought —\u00a0and\u00a0that the Web\u00a0can be\u00a0a liberating, welcoming and altogether legitimate arena.<\/p>\n

– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –<\/p>\n

A letter in response from Gary Hall with news about an exciting new interdisciplinary open-access e-book project\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

7 December 2011<\/p>\n

Dear Neil,<\/p>\n

I just wanted to write to express my gratitude to you personally for this review of Kathleen Fitzpatrick’s Planned Obsolescence<\/em><\/strong>.<\/p>\n

As you rightly say, the more voices of ‘reputation and authority’ – such as Fitzpatrick and yourself – that step into the mode of networked computing discourse and help to legitimate it, the closer we’ll hopefully get to opening up a space for re-engineering the university, so that’s it’s neither simply going along with the free-market economics that are endeavoring to transform it into an extension of the corporate world, nor looking nostalgically to return to the kind of paternalistic and class-bound ideas that previously dominated the institution.<\/p>\n

Your efforts in this direction, with your blog, and with the Creative Research Centre<\/em><\/strong> generally, are much appreciated – I know it’s not always an easy step to take, as it requires not just creativity and imagination,\u00a0 but a certain amount of courage too, for numerous institutional and professional reasons.<\/p>\n

Certainly, far from this time of financial crisis being an unpromising moment to be taking such steps, or ‘for university libraries and ambitious scholar-faculty’ to be joining together in an effort to ‘revitalize the declining model of academic publishing’, I would argue that this is precisely the moment when we should be doing so. To quote two very different writers on the subject of courage:<\/p>\n

\u2018Moments of crisis are also moments of opportunity \u2013 if we have the courage to act creatively and imaginatively\u2019 (Mark C. Taylor, Crisis on Campus<\/em>, p13); \u2018the courage to defend and practice our ideas and principles, to say what we think, what we want\u2019 (Alain Badiou, The Communist Hypothesis<\/em>, p.66).<\/p>\n

Speaking of the process of generating ideas, putting them on the digital table, welcoming diverse attitudes toward them, selecting, shaping and reconfiguring them “curatorially”‘, we’ve just launched a new expanded interdisciplinary project that’s endeavoring to do just this.<\/p>\n

It’s a series of 21 online open access books called Liquid Books About Life<\/strong><\/em>. You can find it at:<\/p>\n

http:\/\/www.livingbooksaboutlife.org<\/a><\/p>\n

I’d very much welcome your thoughts and input on it. All the books in the series are open to being collaboratively written, edited and updated. So you are free to rewrite, remix, reinvent and reuse any or all of them – and in fact, you’re expressly invited and encouraged to do so.<\/p>\n

Gary<\/p>\n

Gary Hall<\/strong> – www.GaryHall.info<\/a> – an early contributor <\/a>to the Creative Research Center – is a London-based cultural and media theorist working on new media technologies, continental philosophy and cultural studies. He is Professor of Media and Performing Arts in the School of Art and Design<\/a> at Coventry University, UK, author of Culture in Bits<\/em><\/a> (Continuum, 2002) and Digitize This Book!: The Politics of New Media, or Why We Need Open Access Now<\/em> (Minnesota UP, 2008), and co-editor of New Cultural Studies: Adventures in Theory<\/em><\/a> (Edinburgh UP, 2006) and Experimenting: Essays with Samuel Weber<\/em> (Fordham UP, 2007). He is also founding co-editor of the open access journal Culture Machine<\/em><\/a>.<\/p>\n

———————————-<\/p>\n

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“Raw metrics will never be\u00a0enough to tell us about the success or failure of a piece of scholarship.” — Kathleen Fitzpatrick, Planned Obsolescence, p.193. A\u00a0statement of fact, not self-aggrandizement:\u00a0 Since 1978, I have been\u00a0writing and publishing books in the ‘analog’ world – poetry, translations, nonfiction, biography, American history, art history, cultural anthropology.\u00a0 Then, just last […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":23,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-171","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-director-s-essay"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/creative-research-center\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/171","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/creative-research-center\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/creative-research-center\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/creative-research-center\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/23"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/creative-research-center\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=171"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/creative-research-center\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/171\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1120,"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/creative-research-center\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/171\/revisions\/1120"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/creative-research-center\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=171"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/creative-research-center\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=171"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/creative-research-center\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=171"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}