anti-wednesdayish

Apparently the talks at the Speculative Medievalisms event will be published in an anthology with punctum books, which seems to aspire to be the Brooklyn version of Zero Books. Their credo:

“punctum books seeks to pierce and disturb the wednesdayish, business-as-usual protocols of both the generic university studium and its individual cells or holding tanks. We solicit and pimp quixotic, sagely mad engagements with textual thought-bodies. This is a space for the imp-orphans of your thought and pen, an ale-serving church for little vagabonds.”

The more the merrier. (Do you prefer punctum’s phrase “an ale-serving church for little vagabonds” or Zero’s “expensively educated hacks in the pay of multinational corporations”? Both are good.)

I’m not at all an enemy of traditional academic presses (having published at some and now being a series editor at one of them) but a diverse publishing ecosystem will help everyone. What I would say about traditional academic publishers is as follows:

1. Their books are often too expensive.

2. Many are too slow in getting their books into print (Edinburgh was quite fast with my Meillassoux book, but I’ve had horror stories with anthology chapters elsewhere).

3. University presses fulfill a gatekeeper function in both the good and the bad sense. They tend to take a look at your credentials no less than at your manuscript, and while this sometimes helps prevent the really half-baked stuff from getting out there, it also does probably exclude some good material. The way the job market is going, the Ph.D. won’t necessarily be the right option for young people in the future anyway, so alternative publishing venues will have to appear that don’t care too much about your background.

4. Anything connected with the Academy is bound to happen slowly, for the simple reason that it takes a long time to work one’s way into positions of authority in academia. If speculative realism had had to wait for a thumbs-up for SPEP-type publishers, we’d probably still be waiting. You can say what you like about the blogosphere (and it does have its truly dismal aspects), but it has certainly accelerated the pace of change in our corner of the philosophy world. In another part of the philosophy world, and in rather different fashion, a similar point has been proven by the activities of Brian Leiter.