more wisdom from Gratton

HIS LATEST POST continues the amusement over my Johnston mis-binding experience of yesterday (Among the Jasmine Trees), but quickly shifts to a topic on which I couldn’t agree with him more:

“Last week, I put together an article on Catherine Malabou, which was but a day or two between reading her most recent work and finishing it. Then I pop it over to a leading journal, and then there’s a lagtime of about 6-9 months to get it set for publication, and who knows when that will come, and it will be a year and a half from now that I’ll have the prints for a piece that I will not even remember writing since from conception to completion it didn’t linger with me for that long.”

Such lag times are typical, but no longer necessary. On several occasions I have seen things in print only some 4-5 years after having first written them, and in another case (Peter knows the one I mean) I yanked a chapter from an anthology when, 7 years after submitting it, publication of the volume was still nowhere in sight.

Technology certainly enables greater speed of publication. But I want to point to another factor, which is that only certain conditions of knowledge require speed. In the natural sciences it would obviously be appalling to have results published 2-3 years after discovery, because the sciences march quickly.

In the humanities there may be a bit less time pressure. But given how quickly things have unfolded in continental philosophy just in the past 3 years, there’s a reason that the blogosphere has become more important than some of the flagship academic journals.

Speaking of Among the Jasmine Trees, I ended up staying home today, and will pick it up at the library tomorrow. There has to be a message in that book for me somewhere. That can’t have been an accident…