Cohen Sande Politings of Editing Cultural Crit 2010

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PUBLICATION, KNOWLEDGE, MERIT

ON SOME POLITICS OF EDITING
Sande Cohen
Civilization . . . has entrusted the conservation of its own traditions to a

class of persons [teachers] who, owing to their position, have not the power to
conserve them. By doing this it has put itself as much at a disadvantage, as
compared with peoples it calls barbarous, as it were a tribe which threw away
the paddles of its war-canoes, set sail, and employed crews of professional
medicine-men to whistle for the wind.
R. G. Collingwood, The New Leviathan
. . . what is seen in the book are words. The book has become the body of passion, just as the face was the body of the signifier. It is now the book, the most
deterritorialized of things, that fixes territories and genealogies . . .
platitudes . . . which cut the book off from its relations with the outside, are
even worse than the chant of the signifier.
Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus
INTRODUCTORY: GENEALOGY AND HISTORY

In his afterword/evaluation of The New Historicism, Stanley Fish excoriated metalanguage as such, arguing that reflection on the rules
of any particular discourse, game, or practice cannot lead to more
than tiny institutional modifications. The cost of reminding new
historicists that they cannot transform the conditions of historical
representation is Fishs absolutist, dogmatic irony: openness is nothing more (or less) than a resolution to be differently closed (Fish,
310). A beginning has ended before it has begun. One wonders what
Fish would say if he could be persuaded that some arts and humanities scholarly books in the United States are published as much for
political and marketing reasons as for their additions to knowledge.
Is it just another historical-ironic fact that a distinguished historian at
a renowned university sells three to four hundred copies of an important book?
Cultural Critique 75Spring 2010Copyright 2010 Regents of the University of Minnesota
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In this essay, I wish to open up the distinction between history

and genealogy, to work their difference, before turning to the overt
subject of this paper, the politics of editing, its present and messy
assemblages.
Historical representation (narration) and genealogy are different
ways of classifying and naming data in preparation for fuller elaborationfor interpretive and political conflict, for laying hold on what,
to borrow from Croce, is living and dead for a present, for assessing future probabilities. Whatever else it points to, historical representation is conditioned by its disciplinary preferences. While it is not
written down anywhere what these preferences are, it seems fair
to specify at least four: (1) a grudging tolerance for the discussion
of unwelcome data in the face of dominant models, for example, the
political history of America is often composed with a hands-off treatment of past and present professional silences and rationalizations,
with some exceptions noted (e.g. Scientists against Bombs); (2) complementary with (at times omitted) data selection, there is emphasis
on full narration to legitimize and socialize the way data are named;
(3) the assumption of the adequacy of basic naming means little consideration goes to the sense that names can be ruined and forced, for
example, what does the name democracy actually refer to? (see
Plato, Schmitt, Althusser, and a thousand other critics); (4) historical representation favors synthesis and thus narrative aesthesis, where
dreadful things and processes are made into a good read, where
art and morality and the politics of resolution touch. We can call
this good read the political necessity of humanizing the horrors of
experience. It is startling, however, that historians do not acknowledge that the price of having readers of such books is often the
banality of readability, the destruction of acute knowledge. Rare is
the university-based historian prepared to concede that the default
to narrative aesthesis is intrinsic to history-as-knowledge, the power
of art confused with epistemic or pragmatic claims. The very idea of
a good read is already a deeply vexed notion (Jenkins, 189, 26164).
Genealogical analysis deals with the blending of knowledge, discipline, the force of an interpretation, narrative incorporation, highstyle, and so forth. It speaks to what has been socially and historically
displaced, often in struggles over historical representation (Foucault
2003, 133). It is analytic and grants that elements not even named are
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in operation (Foucault 1997, 52). Genealogy has less to do with divining the emergent, but rather with the events that have led us to
constitute ourselves and to recognize ourselves as subjects of what
we are doing, thinking, saying (Foucault 2003, 125). A genealogic
analysis can be compared to history before it happens; it uses the
notion that experiences, on many levels, are not occurrences in storytime but dissymmetrical to narration. Genealogy problematizes time
and name; as a procedure, it is thus a resistance to the aesthesis of narrative. Genealogy suspends the illusion of a hard beginning, middle,
and end to things of public value; it emphasizes the ceaseless combination of timingsactualities taking shape, as in the warnings to students these days about the difficulties of reading Joyce and that their
time might be better spent with more accessible authors.
Thus, genealogy has it that time in itself is rifted, dis-identical to
itself. On the other hand, historical representation is like a vinculum
the aesthesis of writing passes to the reader of a historical text so as to
give the comforts of fullness, completion, continuityaesthesis is a
political finality, a forced peace-treaty (Nietzsche, 176). Aesthesis survives a texts organization of data, epistemology, psychology, theories
of human nature, and so on, so as to enter literary durability. Action,
movement, recurrence, singularity as well as related notions of pleasure and pain (folk psychology, as Arthur Danto [240] once put it),
denotation and connotation (logic), sense and non-sense (success and
failure of interpretation), the said and the unsaid (excess), imaginary
flow and hard fact are historicized if aestheticized. But genealogy insists that what is represented as historycompletion, finality, definitive endbelongs to culturalpolitical war, not aesthesis. Hence,
genealogy puts historical representation up as an intricate instrumental mechanism that today has transformed itself from the bad
imagery of the ranting historian (von Treitschke), forcing metahistorical continuities on a public, to the historian who now works for
institutions that select and evaluate: give a grade, declines to certify
a research project or a course offering . . . does not fire personnel, it
simply disapproves rehiring them (Terdiman, 228). By comparison
to historical representation, genealogy evokes a pre-literary notion of
events with no definitive aesthesis-narration. Fishs sense of irony
concerning New Historicism is precisely a (negative) application of
political-aesthesis.
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This essay is devoted to making editing a subject of critical discussion.

It specifies contemporary practices of editing infused by politics. It
raises issues of discipline and control, which are less notions of overt
repression as they are managerial techniques that Foucault identified in knowledge as selection, normalization, hierarchicalization,
and centralization. These techniques (e.g. selection) are less practices
of censorship on statements than part of an orthologyto speak
is already to be an opposing party to someone, hence a situational
practice. Discipline and control are used to establish the regularity of
enunciations. They rely on questions of [w]ho is speaking, are they
qualified to speak, at what level is the statement situated, what set
can it be fitted into, which Foucault associated with a liberalism
of university-based cultures, which has no clear boundary line with
commercial interests and service to society. Enunciative regularity
needs new statements to constantly replace the stock of statements
that no longer work, or have dated, as it were, before they are retrieved, if at all (Foucault 2003, 18384). The perspective offered here
steps beyond Foucault a bit, arguing that scholarly publication, located
within a larger process of to-edit, cannot synthesize knowledge by
the assignment of scholarly merit (reward) and that it is as often arbitrary as not, as often despotic as not. In other words, competition and
conflict (war) trumps both discipline and control as it makes both
possible, even if at times discipline and control get the upper hand on
overt war. Here, publication, merit, and peer review are only contested notions. Despite all the measures used to sustain credibility,
it is difficult to find any unequivocal statement of merit, or process
of producing it. Merit and peer review are nice professional words
with sometimes aggressive functions, as Foucault offered.
In sum, genealogic critique starts with entangled terms that signify at once processes, facts, and accidents that are open to other
processes along with practices that are rational as well as fragile and
even wicked. My titles synthetic phrase, politics of editing, pertains to what Foucault characterized as the elliptical and dark god
of battles [that] must explain the long days of order, work, and peace.
In other words, the politics of editing refers to practices that stabilize scholarly writing, give it places of access and solidity, yet open
onto its illusions, chimeras, and mystification. The politics of editing does not refer to a legislative event or a figure of peace and
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reconciliation, but to a metaconcept of dissymmetry . . . force, a

truth-weapon . . . in which subjects and institutions fight over merit,
rewards, recognition, and power-truth prizes (Foucault 2003, 55, 269).
For example, a recent book on peer review in the United States, published by Harvard University Press, diminished the study of peer
review for tenure, focusing instead on peer review in the reception
of grants: tenure was judged too difficult to discuss because it was too
local.1 In another vein, the editors at Twelve/Warner Books must be
quite pleased with the sales and visibility of Christopher Hitchenss
recent God Is Not Great. But this text is also part of a cultural war in
which its dissemination makes it difficult for other texts to be noticed;
to perpetuate Enlightenment skepticism toward religion disqualifies
other discourses that say it is time to drop Enlightenment as a criterion of selection for what might concern public contestation. Why
repeat the forms of opposition that have failed or in fact perpetuate
what they claim to oppose? (Foucault 2003, 180).
DISTURBANCES AND THE POLITICS OF EDITING

The main conceptual formations discussed hereediting, highend scholarship, politics, publicationare experiences and concepts that constantly shift between the general and the specific, the
vague and the precise, the singular and poor generalization, or more
precisely the legacy and aberration of scholarly publication. Toedit opens to a foray into too many half known territories, a multidirectional flow.2 Editors who risked their fortunes and lives to
publish what was unacceptable to one force of police or another have
given way to university and commercial editors, a group that includes
curators in museums and others, whose legitimacy turns on service
to the public, a not uncontested notion. Given way just means living out what writers such as Baudrillard call a new consumption of
sign-values with no clear relation to knowledge. It is important to add
that scholarly production is not a disciplinary technique directly related to censorship by a state, but now an internalized professional
discipline in which editors and institutions (university presses) are
subject to market risk, favor, patronage, reputation, prestige, accumulations of advantage, and other certification/reward processes that
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both generate and consume a book in the arts and humanities (Biagioli 2002, 32; Turner, 372, 374).
Thus, editing et alia refers to both processes and products of
modern critical thinking, the latter of which, as Vilm Flusser noted,
is difficult to now even define (Flusser, 44). Notions of peer review,
the processing and dissemination of knowledge, the (alleged) publics access to such knowledge, and the role of merit in figuring forth
public debate on matters of the day are part and parcel of the politics
of editing. These pure singularities (Foucault 1997, 63) are, minimally, operations that give and remove credibility to knowledge-truth.
Academic publishing is at once a membrane of scholarships relation to various publics and an engine that constructs shared knowledge. It is a stake in institutional reputation. It is an amalgam, at the
very least, of what evolutionary theory would call competition, and
what that supreme adisciplinary or out-of-the-box thinker, Nietzsche,
conceived as culture ceaselessly dressing and undressing itself in
the covers of selectiondefinitive appearances of knowledge, that is,
canonic texts. As a junction of politics and culture, scholarly publication is supposed to serve as a regulator of public knowledge, or it
selects for the public, what the latter is said to actually need, different
from raw politics or edutainment selections. Yet this regulation (dissemination) is entwined with factors such as reputation, prestige,
status, and impact, as well as the publics reading habits, the time
pressures the vast majority of possible readers experience in their
daily lives. The chief competitive process, highly differentiated, is to
make noteworthy knowledge necessary for the future. Yet dogmatic
interpretations sanctified by virtue of the position of an author or
institution abound in the arts and humanities, and this also seems
to take place with a quickening of the decay-time in which ideas and
groups have an impact, or last. None of these relations are stable
interested influences are intrinsic to competition for the best impact, and evaluators are constantly under various pressures to select
a representative text for the public. These engagements regularly
misfire, or professional life can be less than itself, so to speak (Turner,
378). For example, the different editorial operations that produced
widely discussed books by the historians Stephen Ambrose, Michael
Bellesiles, and Doris Kearns Goodwin did not prevent grievances on
behalf of the public concerning their alleged, later proved, plagiarism
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(or misrepresentation in the case of Bellesiles). It was the readers of

Bellesiless comments about his work in the Boston Globe that undid
his texts credibility (Smith and Rutten; Rutten 2002). Yet charges
of plagiarism also invoked defenses of it, if the latter leads people
to become readers of history. Does affirmation of plagiarism show
another marker of an emerging disjunction between the means and
ends of culture? It seems necessary to stress, again for the sake of
context, that concepts of public knowledge and private production,
media impact and professional rigor and so forth are volatilized when
it comes to scholarly writing and the public(s). Context is incessantly
changed: we live out a metonym of scenes where an instant cultural
studies book from a university press on Clinton/Lewinsky mixes with
the consolidation of scientific writing hyperlinked or owned by
groups such as the information provider Elsevier, in which both need
customer usage for their professional information, to compete
for and secure the very public such information is composed for. It
would be difficult not to analyze academic publishing without divergent senses of its entanglements, for example, that such publishing
coexists with popular and alternative editing, all of which are selfpromotional to audiences, none of which coincide with the public.3
Thus to contextualize an editing function is to consider various
events and practices of it, shifting between scholarly publication and
some general issues that involve public knowledge (Casper, Chaison,
and Grove, 437). The notion of context is not something to point at,
or to assume, but has to be constructed, partly because scholarly
publication is more unstable than ever. For example, scholarly texts
about the vicissitudes of worldly violence, say books on the Middle
East, seem to be called for by various publicshow else to have an
informed public?but it is not clear what this public ever comes to
learn and translate into political and social thought, into practice.
Further, scholarly issues compete with a devouring popular press: a
few years ago, 500,000 copies were sold in Italy of a teenagers account
of her emergence into sexuality, and the editor was reduced to saying what merit came from this book: I felt something (Bruni, A7).
Hannover House, which sells DVDs to Wal-Mart, sold 75,000 copies of a book, made into a documentary on the History Channel, that
charged Lyndon Johnson with conspiracy to murder John Kennedy:
editors in two media thrilled, and who is to object? (Weber, A18).
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Thus, the discipline and control required by scholarship is regularly

ignored, subverted, upended. A genealogy of scholarship would have
to account for its differing relevance in various disciplines. Stephen
Bann has argued that in the nineteenth century, the discipline of art
history set itself against connoisseurship, going scientistic insofar as
art history developed techniques such as framing and focalization;
today art needs art history to keep up the value of a competitive
art market, and more than ever sanctifies the connoisseur, who has
returned in the shape of an editor and curator for an artists catalogue
raisonn (Bann, 104).
In addition to the movements of cultural war, discipline, and control, it is important to add that editing is inclusive of transtemporal political and cultural concepts said to have been left in the past.
When did academic despotism and censorship stop happening, even
if now censorship is less overtly political and more pervasively social,
as when young scholars are warned off from writing excessively difficult or critical texts in order to succeed? Mostly, scholarly publishers are concerned with market shares, and investments for shares
have implicitly become an agreement not to alarm or frighten a public. Are there dangerous academic books? Given the contentiousness
of the cultural wars in the United States, are there texts akin to what
one author has called the political pornographic pamphlet that circulated in France in large numbers between 1789 and 1792, ribald and
anonymous, acutely critical of the powers-that-be (de Baecque, 167)?
Is blog-land really its equivalent or replacement? Or graphic novels?
To conclude this section: today authors, editors, and so on are
caught in disjunctions about knowledge. Perhaps the most acute
disjunction is within critical knowledge itself: between the affirmation of morality, with its basis in modern idealism, which emphasizes
rights and wrongs, and a critical analysis that is formal and amoral.
This disjunction is clear in the difference between Habermas and de
Man, the formers strenuous projection and protection of civil identity for political action and the latters relentless critique of identity
and thus asking what politics could mean. Further, editors rely on
readers reportswhich are peer reviewand they are ambiguously
used in the arts and humanities. These reports are as close as we have
to a partial fusion of democratic (merit) and expert measures of evaluation, yet progressive interests in making the world a better place can
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collide with work editors think too contentious, partly over different
claims about knowledge, but also partly about the social aspects of
publishing unfriendly criticism of the shared community interests
of other scholars. Because this is such truculent material, everything
said below is obviously subject to a variety of readings or interpretations. In such matters, conflicts are multiple.
THE EDITING FUNCTION: MULTIPLICITY IN ACTION

Editing is more than a repetitive practice that embeds various standards in the means of cultural production, whether the artifact/product is a scholarly text, an artists book, or a trade manual. Yet editing
is not reducible to any of its practices, such as conceptual organization in graphic design or a specific act like proofreading. A recent
book by J. R. and William H. McNeill, The Human Web, has it there is
an editorial board of life and earth (323), where editing is metaphysical in scope, or at least a good framing device for a story. Vagueness and precision surround to-edit, infinitive mode, as editing spans
general and specific uses (Hall, 254). Yet if the McNeills offer too
much, editing is certainly not only vague. Tom Conley has noted the
attempt by anthropologists in Brazil to help rain forest shamans
copyright their knowledge of plants, in exchange for preservation of
the forest; such a copyright would edit-in for them future authority
to be involved in all decisions affecting the forests (Conley, 366). Editin is here political, affecting the credibility and exercise of a new right.
To-edit and achieve some degree of political autonomy is one thing,
but there is also editing whose coherence is a little frighteningthe
design firm BRC Imagination Arts concocted an Abraham Lincoln
attraction in Illinois as if the sound bites of 2005 really resembled the
political debates of the early 1860s, editing so total so as to inspire
in the visitor a deep sense of personal connection and empathy with
[Lincoln] (Rothstein, B1). What about to edit-out, which has markers of repression (prevention) about it, as taught to us by Freud and
now Derrida? Did the law faculty at Egypts Al Zaqaziq University
editsanction, applaudProfessor Nabil Hilmi before or after he
claimed he was going to sue Jews for plundering jewelry during the
Exodus from Pharaonic Egypt . . . based on information in the Bible?4
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Editing certainly straddles discipline and control, and is not at all

subsumed by negative, eliminative practices. Who would object to
editing that makes something more thoroughly complex, if that is
the quality an assemblage requires, say, for a focused dictionary of
reconstructed speech patterns in Naples, 18001866? Further, the
concepts and functions of to-edit are not restricted to a single economy, cultural or political. To assemble is to edit and can be done with
combinations of love and hatethe restoration of a forgotten author
such as Zora Neale Hurston, or Ted Hughess burning of Sylvia
Plaths journals, where senses of fragmentation (feared) and completion (desired) joined to-edit = make a story. The editors of the Los
Angeles Times might not deviate very much in their centrist, Enlightenment version of progressivism, but their editorial line does coexist
with corporate requirements and information circulation. The editors
are self-censored to edit-out what they deem excessive difficulty
for readers of that paper, a shift (regression?) to a psychologeme,
such as guidance (Cohen 2006, chaps. 2 and 3). The editors of BK
announce their new imprint as an inexpensive pamphlet that is
readable in the time it takes to drink a cup of coffee (BK). Editing
can shade into desperation or manipulation: the southern California
writer and academic John Rechy was called out for having pseudonymously written . . . five-star reviews of his own writings, yet he
declared his right to survive (=sell more) so as to offset poor promotions and reviews by what he called incompetent editors and readers
(Harmon, A1). By comparison to such overt political practices, there
is also editing that pertains to sheer composition, as in Michael
Frieds description of the artists Noland and Caro, whose objects
were not made by a process of adjusting, or modifying or adding or
subtracting constituent elements . . . to achieve . . . an ultimate effect
(Singerman 2003, 140).
There are, as well, publishers who were able to carry out large
scale changes in cultural editing, as the case of the Italian publisher
Feltrinelli suggests. His publishing of Dr. Zhivago in 1960 as well as
the new Latin American literature of the times was joined to a chain
of bookstores inseparable from civic sociality (Lyttelton, 61). Steven
May has drawn our attention to what he calls social editing, sensitivity by editors to context and need for revising inherited texts, and
gives as an example Dante, who was said to have invented terza rima
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as an interlocking rhyme scheme that would greatly complicate any

deletions or interpolations in his poetry (May, 207). Dante was a
great producer whose mode of writing defeated its future editors.
Genealogy has no sure footing so as to organize editing in any single, continuous telling line and arc, although one can always refer to a
past practice as something worse than the present, a narrative default
that satisfies present interests.
At another level, Ian Willison reminds us that the success of the
modern paperback during World War II and after, an initial massmediatisation of the book, belongs to both sober continuity and
wild change in the history of publication, as market logic was
blending into a cultural-imperial logic (Willison, 580). In his survey of the history of publication, Jean-Yves Mollier has it that the
editor remains a great figure of modernity, but is now menaced by
glocality (Mollier, 586). Transdisciplinary journals in the humanities such as Critical Inquiry and October were started in the 1970s to
address the rigidities of an academic evaluation and reward system
seemingly unable to accommodate publishing new and critical work;
they are now themselves venues and channels of rehierarchization
set within an arguably even more rigid academic caste system than
the early 70s (Cohen 2001). Scholars dream of receiving the kind of
review given to a recent book on Goya, in which the reviewer calls
the book dazzling, disturbing and intensely personal, spanning disjunctions between research and the public. The only thing the reviewer
of that book did not cover is what a reader is expected to learn from
it, if anything (Uglow, 10).
Modern pieties make editing serve as a benevolent, hence enlightened, practice of improving a text. A classical sense can be gleaned in
J. T. Merzs history of knowledge. He noted that eighteenth-century
German editions of the most varied ancient works were set forth to
directly historicize and scientize German culture, giving agreed values, at least for elites and those who were allowed to engage with the
German educational system (Merz, 213; Steiner). But was it normal,
as one scholar of Jane Eyre has shown, that Brontes own fair copy
(delivered manuscript) was subjected to over ten thousand corrections, including modifications of sentences so arbitrary as to have
made a pigs breakfast out of the authors artifact? (Deneau and Inge).
There is editing that updates an authors work and editing that prunes,
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or not merely cuts out but overtakes. Clement Greenberg changed the
artifacts of an artist he wrote about and had financial investments
with, such as David Smith sculptures. There is editing that restores a
fallen or forgotten text, and editing whose citations circulate bibliographies with new readers in mind. Without the compilations of Pliny the
Elder, even more of the ancient writings would be unknown (Marincola). Yet with infrequent exceptions up to now, the modern editor is
invisible to all but insiders, the functions of mediation largely unknown.
Further, as Roger Chartier has argued, early modern editing created a new genealogyhe might say a history continuous with even
cyber cultureswhere texts organize prescriptions for readers eager
to undo or subvert knowledge-truth from other groups. At the level
of an individual writer, Chartier notes that the 1499 publication of
Rojass La Celestina gave rise to divergent readings. Rojas bemoaned
editors inserting headings and summaries, which he claimed was a
custom not followed by ancient authors. Chartier shows that, from
the Reformation on out, religious and political groups savaged each
other in print; in the seventeenth century the conflicts of the Fronde
saw writers and printers politicizing each otherfrom the letter to
the gazette, from the song to the narrative accountwhere editing
was an event of cultural appropriation, offering manners of reading for highly focused groups. Chartierand I agreehas it that a
texts making distinction and divulgation in the construal of new
sociability constitutes a fluid and staggered system of editing moves
(Chartier, 157, 168, 171, 174). His argument complements Reinhart
Kosellecks notice that historicized cultural last things and the return of all thingsnotions of finalityare part of social competition, once conflicting social groups activate their own time as new
(Koselleck, 120).
New and constructed sociability has been a constant of publication since this period. One thinks of the Modern Library editions of
classics that were editorially rigorous and inexpensive, or even Classic Comics that made middle-brow literature available to the 1950s
children of the (not only) petite bourgeoisie. Further, editing is not
fixed: it pertains to multiple senses of distance within sociability,
what Chartier illumines as competition in the midst of sharing, and
the constitution of new distinctions in the very processes of disclosure. Consonant with political conflict of the early modern period
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and our own consumer society, editing functions do not only help
confer group identity but also enable the textualization of social
relations. Editing becomes opened to different socialities, including
financial impositionstoday, scholars in science must pay for their
publications, the fee (in the arts and humanities, wealthy institutions
can subvene the publication of the book-for-tenure); or in another
register, Gilles Deleuze, in referring to A Thousand Plateaus, said that
its readers should connect with it as if they were samplers. A different sociality is connected to specific modes of writing and its
consumption, making strange alliances as well. Today, editors in the
arts and humanities are absorbed with issues of readability, codified
in and circulated by book-jacket blurbs that insist texts are accessible, a tag that submits to the supposed fear of a readeran index
of changed sociability. (Making reading safe across disciplines and
knowledges thrives in the United States.) An advertisement for a
new history of lesbian art in the United States goes out of its way to
cite the authors blurb for whom the history of such art is a political
tour that is arresting and where you dont have to be a theoretician to read this book. . . . I worked very hard to write English
(Gaines). Strange that a progressive voice would insist on reading as
such a simple process, which seems to be something a conservative
like Hilton Kramer might say.
Editing also has genealogical sources in such practices as personal loyalty, not necessarily from editor to writer/author, but at
times between editor and text. Editors have enthusiasms, whether to
person and text or to a text with or without a person. The editors at
Little, Brown in 1934 let Celine keep his own translation title for Journey to the End of the Night and, after refusing to publish his declared
anti-Jewish tract Bagatelles pour un massacre, went ahead with Death
on the Installment Plan, all the while putting up with Celines insistence
that Little, Brown sell the moovie rights (Kaplan and Roussin, 380
81). Personal loyalty has signified, according to Emile Benveniste,
trust, pact, alliance, the pledged word, to inspire confidence, relations
derived from now archaic social systems. New editorwriter fusions
(e.g. The Believer magazine) self-consciously revive the editorfriend
pact. But how is such friendship calibrated in relation to profession,
market, and knowledge? If small presses are more personal, are they
really less reliable as knowledge, or does a different exposure and
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purification (review) make small press offerings sometimes more

intense, as experiences of reading? What bonds such bonds? How
can university press editors activate archaic notions of loyalty and
trust in the first place, when the contemporary academic book is evaluated, or is supposed to be, only for its addition to knowledge? Trust
is supposed to go to a text-as-knowledge; but this process is like a
closely guarded trade secret, and there is little published by editors
themselves on the history of selection processes, on what happens
inside editorial boards.
So as to resist premature narrative synthesis (aesthesis), the
world of to-edit, infinitive form, thus opens onto that onion of interpretation that Roland Barthes told us was a contest for critical reading. For instance, is Holocaust studies a discipline that belongs to
European historical destruction, or is it only part of collective nihilism in general? If the latter, will it slowly dissolve in the United States
as the generation of scholars who created it passes from the scene?
(Burleigh, 29). And if it is a discipline that today sends its workers to
edit accounts that help, say, accused German corporations come to
terms with history, what kind of discipline of editing is it when the
CEO of the media conglomerate Bertelsmann invites scholars who
will aid that company in cleaning up its past (Meier, 5)? Academic
publishing shows its contemporary structural distortions, to the
point where it is not clear what, if any, necessity drives many editorial decisions beyond survival and competition. The University of
California Press slashed its philosophy lists after a hundred years of
commitment to the area, an index of changed sociality (the United
States produces about 350 PhDs in all areas of philosophy, per year).
Is this an intensification of the narrative-story of philosophys failure
and thus a confirmation of its precarious existence?
This gets even more tangled: with scholarly books, the review
of it edits, as it were, the authors career, as the review can be the
only audience that matters to ones peer cohort, those evaluators and
scholars who decide how to reward publication and give merit. Lindsay Waters, Senior Executive Editor at Harvard University Pressan
insider if there is onehas it that publication is overly continuous
with the tenure mill, university presses now less able to publish
one-off experiments and where books published by a prestigious
press are not read despite a stamp of approval by reliable evaluators
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(Waters 2004, 38). Here, disjunction and repetition are active, where
the evaluators evaluate themselves principle can result in a Bangkoklike traffic jam of a hunt for prestige that affects knowledge. Theory
is over, declares Critical Inquiry and Henry Louis Gates, institution
and subject, and so editors can dis-invest in criticism, a turn against
theory controlled by the very critics, like Gates, who made their
reputation as critics (Shea, 94). Those for whom theory is not dead
become stranded, theory conflict declared out of bounds.
NEW PRESSURES: IMPACT AND REPUTATION

Academic publishing is presently riven by cross-purposes and is in
the process of remaking itself in response to many variables. In this,
the editing function is not so much a description as a query about the
genealogical movements of this concept, which are never unambiguous. This involves considering the normal sense of to publish, to
put in the world a discourse whose analogues range from a text
that is some authors proverbial child to a line of technical efficacy
or universal signage for airline pilots. It involves the complex senses
of an editor who can be a friend of writing, as well as a gatekeeper,
and more, where political, institutional, and psychological criteria
(and omissions) govern the entrance of said work into the world. The
genealogy of editing-functions extends to every concept of mediation, including the uses of a fictive origin. For example, John Guillory
directs us to consider communication theory on and after a debate
between Adorno and Benjamin, which gives continuity to contemporary disputes, but also limits the terms that can be used on the present (Guillory, 35558).
While shifts in editing from the early modern period are visible
via changes in disciplinary concerns, impact value is changing. I learned
about impact value from writers in science studies. Galileo never lost
sight of it, or calibrated strategies and tactics of production, making,
and conceiving with impact a constant stake. Indeed, Galileo was
far more the editor of his own authorship than any contemporary
scholar could imagine for themselves (Biagioli, 1994, 2002). The immediate impact, of say, Edward Saids Orientalism is undeniable, but its
long term effect is not so clear; there is, after all, Saids reductive
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interpretation of Foucault, and Orientalisms relation to Saids own

editorial practices, published in newspapersin which, for instance,
he insisted the very creation of Israel was an original sinand
which might make Orientalism less convincing (Said, M3). What are
the criteria to separate the productive and anti-productive in such
instances? Thomas Kuhns The Structure of Scientific Revolutions had
undeniable impact, but was this due to the epistemic change that
came out of that texts concept invention or because it was a text that
many different disciplines latched onto in order to join the game
of representing what the public could say about science? Did The
Structure of Scientific Revolutions change the way science works? Artforums transformation into a promotion venue that uses artists, curators, and academics in the name of providing a constancy of lists of
the top ten may stand for the force of confusions between exchange
value and sign value; but Artforum confirms the destruction of artistic autonomy, which now fully passes to the taste makers (editors,
curators) as it also confirms the participation of artists in anxieties of
the visible.
Todays need for impact is announced when editors insist on their
own self-transformation. Here is an editor at MIT, Roger Conover, who
invokes a new rationalization for the selection of art history books:
I think of publishing as a fundamentally curatorial practice, that is to
say, it is about the selection and placement of texts and ideas in relation
to other texts and ideas. Someone once said that the best editors are the
authors of their authorsframing, shaping, conceiving, commissioning,
and creating lines and encounters between books rather than merely
processing manuscripts. The curatorial, authorial role of the editor as
cultural producer is under-articulated in our society. I have also been
trying to stress that authors and editors have a very serious business in
common called writing. Good writing still exists, but it does not necessarily look the same way it once did. The position of language, the problem of editing, and the meaning of translation in a global culture are in
the process of being transformed. These questions also tend to be left
out of discussions about publishing, but they are far more important to
the production of value than tenure (Holly et al., 42).
Conover locates editing in so many functions that this many metaauthors Conovers editor as authors of their authors, as he calls it.
The actual subject is the sense of a repetition of circulation. His gratuitous remark that tenure is not so good for publication is not helpful.
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Why has the name curator been stripped of conflict by an editor who
sees himself as a curator? What would a genealogy of to-curate disclose? Does the need for impact revive another ascetic ideal, here a
sense of totality in our cultural proliferation? For example, the performance artist Anna Deavere Smith embeds her performances in
total editing: I seek an interpretive social science that is simultaneously auto-ethnographic, vulnerable, performative and crit ical . . . that
refuses abstractions and high theory . . . a way of being in the world,
a way of writing, hearing and listening (Denzin, 43). How could
Deavere Smiths performance exactly duplicate this description?
Impact is somewhat perverse today. Deleuze and Guattari proposed in What Is Philosophy? that contemporary critics ought to start
with the idea that the people are missing from the production of
academic and dominant artistic artifacts, their absence (perversely)
both alibi and proof of a disjunctive public life. When Gates, above,
declared theory over, does that institutionalize its poor impactand
for whom? And is it true that the peoplereduced to consumers,
the ones not involved in productiongrant the achievement or finality of impact? But how does this public receive and register it
by assigned texts to students, by going to a curated show, by . . . ?
Should reputation/credibility and its impact be understood, in terms
of books, as the review that stands for the publics editing? In the scholarly zones, as opposed to, say, the more flexible art world, where impact is inseparable from wow factors, impact is usually associated
with influence in a research discipline and institution, manifested
as reputation equals a contribution to knowledge. Every publisher
wants to print an author whose work testifies not just to the importance of research itself, but also to the institution wise enough to support such work, and to the author who is capable of putting impact
together. So does the contemporary author already come forward, or
increasingly so, as an editor of impact? Reputation is potent because it
gives off a self-evidence marker: it fuses market and sign, or exchange and gift at once. This is slippery. For example, the New York
Times reviewed Bernard-Henri Levys book about Daniel Pearls murder in Pakistan. The review focuses on the force of Levys psychological motivation for writing the book: Amid my shock at [Pearls] death
was the realization that we were entering a century in which a man
could have his throat cut for saying My father is Jewish (Riding,
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A19). Levys reputation allows him to simplify; such killings happen

all the time. Is the sense of impact really then circulation of a pathological illusion created by a fusion of author, editor, and an audience,
geared up to boost the sales figures that, in turn, stands for the public? Can scholarship live with this demand for impact, as it is impossible to specify the productive side of this public limpidly connected
to the actual life of ideas? Is reputation for public consumption so
precious because it is a short-circuiting of other processes?
It is genealogicnot yet historicalto be concerned with the
dominant circuits of both a numerically driven (impact) and an increasingly immaterially constituted system (reputation). Sorting the
criteria of academic impact/reputation is undercoded, but includes
places of publication: at any given moment some presses a jump
ahead of others in selected areas; it involves invitations to consult as
an expert inside another institution, reviewing a department as to
its competitive, national ranking, hence receiving secrets about internal dissension. Here, archaic and at times despotic courtier relations
are given a current function. Indeed, there are many kinds of secrets
academics have to keepespecially over matters they know but are
not supposed to know, another uneasy relation to knowledge production. In general, the academic assemblage now involves protection,
equalization and hierarchy, silence, ritual, de-individuation, centralization, autonomy, compartmentalization, the mixtures of which
defeat a linear narration of academia and reputation (Deleuze and
Guattari 1987, 287). Reputation is secured by more than professional
publications and, not infrequently, by discourses so indirect that their
very mode of existence calls into question everything about the public notice of ones standing (as a former colleague, Catherine Liu, once
told me, its corridor power that matters, making the latter a government). More opaque still, reputation has links to concepts and
practices that evoke an auratic world, one that incorporates an avantgarde, the adventurers of art and knowledge that is not detachable
at times from cronyism. Reputation, apart from its at times obvious
material advantages, allows for a distance for those who possess it;
yet it is not stable because it signifies both shield (aura?) and resource
to be mustered. As a question of politics, reputation can be arbitrary
and institutionalized, so that one is speaking of institutions requiring
sign value that in itself shatters the merit of competitive selections.
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Indeed, to introduce merit is almost embarrassing: there is much

intelligent and thoughtful writing and thinking not given merit on
account of political decisions authorized by place holders; many academic decisions can result from, say, court packing, a practice to regulate competition as well as from sheer administrative fiat. Finally,
professional reputation in the arts and humanities is about its own
archivization continuously sited/cited in such connections as tenure,
promotion review, position, group movements, places of publication, and recruitment of students. Tenure may be necessary for global
knowledge in and of the sciences, but in the arts and humanities,
tenure can be a local relation with fuzzy outcomesprecisely because
merit and production can be at odds. While all ranking systems for
professors are subject to misrepresentation, assessing philosophy
departments for 2005, the Chronicle of Higher Education had 63 percent
of professors at Penn State (University Park) with at least one book
published, and at UC San Diego, in the same top ten list, 15 percent with a book published. In the top ten for history departments,
Loyola (Chicago) professors had a publication rate twice that of firstranked Princeton. These numbers signal both the immateriality of
impacts importance as it is mixed with arbitrary yet binding local
institutional politics (Chronicle 2007). The media, such as the New York
Times, would much rather cite a professor from Princeton than Loyola, even if the public would learn more from the latter.
COMPETITION AND DISJUNCTIONS

A contemporary genealogy of to-edit indicates that the vicissitudes
of reputation and impact are enmeshed in other relations. Considering editing-functions with movements of control and market, present
trends can be elicited. Editors and authors must compete in making
the noteworthiness of knowledge exchangeable, which is also an addition to operations of reproduction. This is highly specific to active
disciplines that are required to push their boundaries so as to compete; but the arts and humanities, geared to competition for the very
few best places of publication and teaching, are now slippinginstitutions increasingly accept minimal performance for peer review.
At some institutions, conference papers carry the value formerly
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attached to published articles. Wesleyan University Press competes

to publish more fiction than previously, responding to the audience
for literary translations of foreign literature. It has changed markets,
but retains its share of status and prestige because the change is continuous with its history of publishing. As mentioned above, the University of California Press has phased out philosophy, which yields
a more desperate sociality (at least for philosophy). Soft war suggests
that for author and editor, it is recognition even in its fetishized form
that is required. Is there a more violent concept than recognition?
The psychic economy of value has to be sustained, in Baudrillards
phrase (Baudrillard, 210; Loselle, 231). This can break down if not
carefully tended: the classics must be retranslated from time to time,
as they die off; Harvards Asian series has such a long past that it
would be sheer waste to neglect it. Finally, competition can be so
fierce that names must be conserved to circulate in specific areas. The
writings of the historian Gordon Wood in the pages of the New York
Review of Books are a case in point: a writer who constantly edits (restabilizes) new writing in American history by reiterating some basic
common sense said to be intrinsic to the American people. On a different level, university presses did not publish unchaperoned French
theory, especially the work of Jean Baudrillard, until the impact of
his work was proof of a market, mostly provided by the academic and
art exchanges in New York, a big market, and Baudrillard correctly
insisted he was radically misrepresented there (Lotringer, 153).
Publishing, social impact, institutional vitality and subjective reputation, and other related concepts are muddled by unusual circumstances. The offering of a scholarly book as a gift of knowledge to
a community is inseparable now from a career move, where competition for research funds is a minefield. In the arts and humanities,
there is no coherent story between the reception of grants and a
scholars overall production: no major research university arts and
humanities discipline shows any clear correlation between funds,
research, and publicationunless compared to teaching-only institutions, where publication is mostly gone. Further, the unread accumulations and patronage as well as other political formations are mostly
off-limits for discussion in the arts and humanities, unless historicized
or located in the past. Communities of scholars and competition are
married to each other, seen in the bidding wars for hot academics.
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Corynne McSherry has demonstrated disjunctions in her consideration of scholars, objects, copyrights, and intellectual property (1620).
Scholars must publish with university presses, at least for entry to its
system of rewards, a university press being self-legitimizing because
it is based in thorough vetting; but most of these same academic
producers find themselves more than ever removed from any but a
narrow context of reception. Of the 11,358 scholarly books published
in the United States in 2002, no scholar can connect with but a tiny
fraction of them. A scholar who is not savvy in writing for a market
can lose future chances. Further, most of us have little more than what
McLuhan called a private relation to scholarship, enmeshed, as we
are, by new tribal and collective environs (371). Cornell University
Press tells us that instead of adding to the three miles of shelf space
needed for its library each year, soon we can download books and
journals on demand; editors may well serve more as data-base managers than as selectors for a public.5 Suresh Canagarajah notes that
there are now 100,000 journals worldwide, 70,000 of them in the sciences and technology, and the conventions of each now require them
to try to be instigators of policy so as to survive (Canagarajah, 33
34). Thus comes the time of the academic showcase, where even partially baked MAs must display their goods, sell themselves as both
institutional and subjective (bio)policy. As mentioned earlier, it is
perplexing that university presses can sell four to five hundred copies
of a solidly written, serious study; that scholars can find their more
intensive work out of synch with taste (aesthetic politics). Again,
should we confirm the equation that a successful career = good editing = cohesion between self and institutional management?
Competition prevails with many specific variations. Robert Wright
has drawn our attention to the fact on the ground that the national
tradition of literature in Canada has become obsolete, this because
baby boomers are more likely to purchase books than to read them
(Wright, 216). Canadian publishers compete with aging. Eva Wirten
has argued that the glocality of editing involves consideration of what
she calls transediting, part of the conglomerization of publishing and
feminization of the cultural sector as a whole. With transediting,
there is the specific outcome of an undeniable discrepancy between
books translated from English as opposed to those translated into
English. Harlequin romances are not just another imperial export:
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they are equally dependent on a strategy of localization whereby the

nonEnglish speaking subsidiaries are responsible for publishing the
titles they want . . . translating and editing them, and finally printing
and marketing them. . . . [T]he work of the translator extends into
editing . . . that sometimes result[s] in the construction of a totally
new text (Wirten, 56770). Book editing has become more porous as
it makes more connections, as audiences are objects of a competitive
hunt for readers.
I want to bring the previous sections to a temporary pause with
a discussion the edit-in of professors. I take seriously writers such
as Donna Haraway who insist on the multiple truths of the ways individuals tell stories about professional and personal bonds, which
concern an existence risked and at stake. But the unstable story elements here are not part of personal existence as much as they outline
active disjunctions that are impersonal.
There are about 1,100,000 professors in the United States, working
in different hierarchies. Full-time employment has fallen by about 20
percent since 1983. Tenure is now a minority phenomenon. At even the
best institutions, only one in five arts and humanities graduates with
a doctorate will achieve a research university position; increasingly,
service to an institution can be at odds with scholarship. Scholarship is
riddled with vigilant and insomniac rationality (Deleuze and Guattari 1983, 112) put to ambiguous goals, and general arts and humanities publication rates are, by discipline, modest.6 In general, there is no
strong correlation between institutional position achieved and scholarly production. The University of California system has 30 percent of
its tenured faculty unable to complete their second book ten years after
tenure (stalled). The California State University system is abandoning, department by department, the requirement of publication except
as minimal entry dues. And today the edit-in of a professor and its
typical publication narrative is straightaway co-coded with terror narratives, made redundant in places like the Chronicle of Higher Education, with story after story about scholarly failure to achieve position
and recognition. At times, the Chronicle reads as an academic version
of soft-slasher films, with nice people to whom bad things happen.
Indeed, graduate training is a plunge into a selection-editing process. It occurs as arts and humanities Ph.D. programs are strangely
under constraints and self-controlled: for 20068, fourteen European
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historians at UCLA signed off on three dissertations for the research

period 1815present.7 For historians in particular, what matters today
so as to secure research funds is institutional support in relation to
an ever-renewed recoding of positivism, the demand for new facts,
even the creation of sellable databases. The recent Grateful Dead
exhibition at the New-York Historical Society came from an archive
purchased by a university, which then rents out the artifacts (Rohter).
In fact, many scholars are increasingly measured by their ability to
attract funds. Entrepreneurship in the arts and humanities is escaping the wicked artist taint and threatens to become a requirement,
in some cases. No Mary Douglas style isolates need apply. In terms
of any given discipline in the arts and humanities, the dynamics of
a young professors connections with the rhapsody of discovery (a
wild variable) yields to making contacts and finding workable sponsors. Much academic writing, if not generated through reciprocity
patronage, is still part and parcel of what Pierre Bourdieu called academic collective defense mechanisms, with a multiplicity of scales
of evaluation saturated in both vagueness and hierarchies, political
alliances in the making (Bourdieu 1988, 19). An editor at the Modern
Language Associations prestigious publication unit announced in
2001 that for the first time in their journals long publication history,
not one article that had arrived unsolicited for the journals consideration, [and] undergone its review process . . . [had] been accepted
for publication; submissions from authors to that journal had fallen
below two hundred per year, considered normal when each issue is
filled in advance with invited, solicited materials. Yet the editor insists
that the MLAs journal is premier and vets its authors. It guarantees what it publishes, but will not account for inside processes
(Alonso, 915). That is not a good sign of an active intellectual life,
based on bonds of trust and openness to share competence, the circulation of ideas. It is a strong disjunction. The narrative of discovery
is weakened, to put it mildly. Thus, is the journal of the Modern Language Association almost now entirely a private venture with public
impact, where the (unknown, quiet, secret) uniformity of the solicited
articles coheres with a local despotism, like the entanglements of a
BankAmerica Dean, officially designated at UC Berkeley, the donor
function inseparable from the outfitting of a good name?8 Indeed,
donor pressures are so powerful that thirty years after affirmative
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action, the UC system steals superstar women from other campuses

using such funds rather than take a risk on younger women (Leovy,
A3). Given resources, it is far less expensive to buy a brand name, merited or not, than to invest in a plurality of new and potentially contentious agents. In sum, the genealogy of editing-in professors looks
like narratives of knowledge mixed with business ventures, resulting in a minefield of political decisions surrounding the merit of our
artifacts. Importantly, the process of doing scholarship is turned into
legitimizing products, which effectively subverts a critical process of
scholarship itself (Deleuze and Guattari 1983, 362).
Obviously, this is discordant material. Disjunctions matter, which
is, again, perhaps the main reason to resist a finalizing story-narrative.
Nonetheless, tentatively, one could say that a partial synthesis of
editorial functions shows a series of operations that machine the
conditioning [and] interdependence of disintegration and reproduction
(Luhmann, 48). Scholarly publication incarnates reliable knowledge,
moment by moment, yet it must give way: in the arts and humanities
the relation between past-reliable and present selections is political,
though one hopes it is more than that. Disintegration and reproduction are conditions of existence where competition and selection
are activated in securing a future environment for writing and teaching. But production now encounters new distinctions: for example,
there is more screen-reading than reflexive reading and publication, more timely writing than ever, but also smaller shares for it,
among other distinctions that could be made (de Zepetnek).
BY WAY OF CONCLUSION: EDITORS AND

DISRUPTED SUBJECTS
I think it clear that the category of to-edit is opened to the point that
it is not set within any clearly demarcated practice or narrative, since
it joins production, evaluation, circulation, reviewing, dissemination.
Plus reputation, credits, resources, and money. As said above, academically trained lawyers intelligently argued that plagiarism should
be evaluated only from its consequences, that a plagiarized book that
has brought history alive to many thousands of ordinary readers
trumps the act of plagiarism that produced it (Green, M5). Something
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scary comes when product takes over process. Today an editor has to
work the roles of investor, possible censor, rival claimant, and friend
of ideas, straddling the public consumption of scholarly discourse
and its producers. These are relations that involve emergent bonds
and new sorts of certifications, part of the overall aporia that critics
such as Bourdieu have called the theodicy of the competent. This
aporia involves professors as being at once producers and marketers
of ideas, who offer knowledge as a gift and self-investment, a present,
as it were, to the knowing and not-knowing, yet often themselves
dominated by writing bureaucracies, those who, at different thresholds, assess the possible market for such work, including its rewards
(Bourdieu 1998, 43). In this, any singular subjectivity of scholarship
is disrupted. Our MIT editor cited earlier who sees his work as a
super-curator announces that impact recognition matters, at least for
those sectors of academe that try to make new intellectual problems,
where scholarship and avant-garde sometimes cross. All this belongs
with Chartiers sense of a continuous history of sociability, previously discussed, but here too genealogy suggests new critical problematics have emerged.
A genealogic figure for what is new is that of a disrupted subject, which cuts across scholars and editors as well as institutions.
Disrupted means rules of production and consumption are deeply
politicized. As previously noted, the journal of the Modern Language
Association may not take unsolicited articles, as it announced in
2001, but it certainly solicits and invites contributions when its editors
want to. If the mechanism by invitation only controls production,
is this a return of courtier-type processes, a return of magistrates of
writing? The journal boundary 2 recently closed itself to unsolicited
articles.9 How does the impact of appearing in boundary 2 or the MLA
public offering offset the process of its noncompetitive selection? These are
questions of genealogy: the continuity of such privatization is transpolitical and goes with disrupted subjects. How can public significance be discussed, let alone rewarded, when it is so thoroughly
mixed with the private, in so many senses?
Thus the Senior Executive Editor at Harvard University Press
publishes in venues where he competes with authors Harvard might
publish (Waters 2001). He insists that academics are not necessarily
intellectuals (true) while his own writing invokes Biblical Last Days
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about the confusion between scholarly innovation and conformism.

He defends de Mans notion that art does not teach morality (Waters
1995, 300), but intones that with de Man we saw evilreal evil
and [we] rushed to cordon it off. That is precisely and excessively
moralisticgiving the critics of de Man their truth, and thus
plunges discussion of de Mans work into an acceptance of the reactionary critiques of it, the discourse laudatory and condemning at
once. The discourse here is not Professor X from University Y; this
is the senior executive editor of a major press, versed in the academic
life, trained as a professor. Disrupted subjectivity means the editor is
mixing roles and judgments, on the edge of incoherenceand inside
the politics of publication.
Thus, in another venue, this editor calls French theorys sense of
incommensurability (Lyotard) an idea likely damaging on human
life itself, and quotes as proof an author he has published; is he selling a book and the value of a press in the name of serving intellectual life? Incommensurability legitimates a blinkered, absolutist,
non-pluralist relativism. It marks the return of a certain kind of
Romantic thought. Given that it was de Man who showed that
Romanticism was epistemically acute, that writers such as Shelley
carefully discussed incommensurability between past and present
senses of aesthetic completion and historical understanding, how can
it be that incommensurability is a prohibition on the operation of
intelligence . . . the exile of . . . reflection and theory? Our editor is
self-disrupted or becomes a judge when he declaims that incommensurability has to be ditched because it is corrosive and must be
replacedAs the Animals song . . . declares, we gotta get outta this
place (Waters 2001, 134, 145, 149, 168). Published in boundary 2, what
kind of editorial evaluation happened there to disrupt more critical
and responsible scholarship?
As Emile Benveniste has explored in his extraordinary analysis
of Indo-European language and culture, writings a society deems
worthwhile are inseparable from the discourses of praise, blame, and
the censor, whose role has never been only to block the publication or
circulation of a text, but also to assert with authority [a text] as being
the truth; to say what corresponds to the nature of things; to proclaim
the norm of behavior. He who speaks is thus in a position of supreme
authority; by declaring what is, he fixes it; he proclaims solemnly.
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For Benveniste, editing, censoring, and authoring could hardly be

distinguished in certain circumstances, where authority can cause
to appear, promote . . . the quality with which a high magistrate is
endowed, or the validity of a testimony or the power of initiative . . .
applications being connected with . . . auctor (Benveniste, 422).
Today, we see that editors want to be authors and curators, disrupting lines between auctor and author. This is different from the editor
who told Jean-Paul Sartre that Nausea was a better title for the market
than melancholia, Sartres titlethat Nausea was, so to speak, less
distressing to potential readers (Sheehan, 4).
In any case, running through scholarship are modes of soft censorship that might be in conflict with knowledge production. The
humanist insistence that common language must not be disrupted
by excessive theoretical discourse becomes censoring when invoked
to make writing easier for readers; common language can become
an effective mechanism of soft despotism where scholarly books join
weak knowledge and ease of consumption, and readers are protected
from writing (Giordano, 86). To-edit in the arts and humanities is
continuous with operations of cultural warfare.
The discourses used to select in the scholarly and art world(s)
keep censorship at arms length. Yet peer review is more than a fuzzy
concept or practice. Peer review is political, as is the sociality of
scholarly book production. Today, genealogical issues are shown in
the rise and dominance of scholarly defensiveness in relation to privileges (e.g., tenure) that have been fully capitalized. A scholar today
at a decent institution has a lot to lose, and a lot to gain, from the
system. In addition, writers such as Corynne McSherry have worked
on some edgy aspects of academic consecration, or the ways our
processes and products are legitimized (or not). In her framework,
when an editor at a university press receives scholarly writingleaving aside the somewhat desperate situation of the book sent in that
will secure tenureit seems clear that editors should engage with a
gift of knowledge. But it is by no means clear that receiving authorship credits from a good university press means that acceptance of the
work makes the author a member of the academic community (McSherry,
83). Why? Because scholarly employment is not determined or tightly
pegged to publication, which is another disrupted relation. Increasingly, the scholarly aspect of the academic community is at odds with
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the politics of each communityits organization of position, credit,

and reward, or rights of reproduction. Genealogic critique indicates
that knowledge and merit do not necessarily cohere. Again, one does
not achieve academic recognition and its full propriety/property
rights without having ones gift of work acceptedproperty and propriety are thus also inextricably mixed. But acceptance is not the end
of it. Editors who evaluate the intellectual merit of a work while being
in competition with it suggests that professional bonds of trust and
reciprocitypeer reviewcount far less than political and market
criteria. The infamous ideal of a third-party evaluator becomes thus
more mythic (Strathern).
In sum, how can a disciplinary community such as professional
historians or editors, subdivided by institution, rank, publication,
and reproduction, make appropriate decisions about what counts
as good work? To-edit for publication involves judgment as to what
the public receives and is connected to propriety stories; for example, for more than thirty years we have been told that deconstruction
is bad for society, a measure of how vexing arts and humanities
knowledge has become. But imagine that deconstructive methods
had become the norm for writing American history . . .
What is allowed to count as knowledge for the public remains
disturbedthat public does not read difficult books. In any case,
should peer review be conceived as an extra-normal (Nietzsche)
practice, like rhetoric was a wild card for Paul de Man? Apart from
questions about institutional credibility that require formal commitment to peer review, it seems obvious to say that peer review for
publication does not necessarily exist to get product to market.
Peer review can mean what not to get to market, that some products
do not negatively rebound on the mediator, those who hold access to
the contracts for publication as well as to the whole community of
scholars who could be interested parties. Here, liability and reputation mix or enter the other as threat, as liability.
Thus, knowledge in the arts and humanities is subject to purification through the burnishing of gate-keeping functions, what Deleuze
called a mixture of archaicism and futurism, or local despotisms
grafted to global processes. At a certain indiscernible threshold, all of
this passes into issues of control. Editing functions in the arts and
humanities are politicized in every direction, following in the wake
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SANDE COHEN
of competition and selection having been mostly used to devour alternatives. After such knowledge, whats left? The certification processes
that are supposed to support the making of the typical humanities
book open to an intellectual impasse, once the evaluators become
competitors, the competitors in turn subject to political decisions
and threats of obsolescence, to the point where the credibility of the
entire process may not, at times, be dissociable from anti-production.
Despite all the truly intelligent books one could read.
Notes
1. Lamont, B13. For Lamont, scholarly credibility is secured by the reception of grants, which she insists closes controversy. She makes a scary projection: that the scholars she interviewed share the same value of deliberation in
considering one anothers work, where they know that they are judging not
applicants . . . but each others behavior. One would like to understand the distinction between an applicant and an applicants behavior.
2. Haraway, 3, 9. Thanks to Mario Biagioli for showing me this text, as well
as for constant provocation about criticism, intellect, and institution.
3. But the notion of professional and its conjunction with information is
highly unstable. I benefited from the discussion by the Australian Broadcast Corporation. What kind of information can one expect from a book on Clinton/
Lewinsky (Berlant and Duggan), with its repetition of our, which forces continuity, that is, creating an identity-based cultural-political subject? Is this the way
a new discipline, cultural studies, can expand its range, becoming an inclusive
discourse, even if this risks a certain emptiness? The notion of alternative is regularly presented as different. The Los Angeles Weekly was an alternative to the
Los Angeles Times; but it has its own interested trajectoriesfor example, a more
than frivolous story written by one of its editors, Marc Cooper, was an excerpt of
his just published book, advertised only at the close of the excerpt (see Los Angeles Weekly, March 1925, 2004).
4. Suing, 6. Of course, the media throws out such stories to attract readers;
but the type of statement from this professor is not so unusual, as such statements
make up part of the table-talk of contemporary academia, usually repressed.
5. See Carlson, 29; Bartlett; Ault. It should be said that the tribulations of
university presses adding value to a scholars career and serving the public
are becoming more extreme. Harvard University Press recently published A New
Literary History of America, posting its own Web page to promote the book; the text
was reviewed before publication in places like Salon.com. One of the editors, Greil
Marcus, claimed the rationale for the book was to have authors write as if they
were the first to seriously consider what a given figure, book, film, song, or speech
meant in the life of the country. Werner Sollars, coeditor, insisted, The whole
05 Cohen_CC #74 7/7/2010 12:17 PM Page 143
world is curious about American culture, its pervasive passions, its energies, and
its idiosyncrasies. Both statements could be read as confirmation of the insularity of American intellectuals. And certainly not many university presses can compete on this scale. See A New Literary History of America: About the Authors,
http://newliteraryhistory.com/authors.html (accessed April 12, 2010).
6. Compare, for instance, history departments for 2007 (http://chronicle.
com/stats/productivity/page.php?year=2007&primary=10&secondary=95&byc
at=Go [accessed August 4, 2008]) with humanities units (http://chronicle.com/
stats/productivity/page.php?year=2007&primary=10&secondary=182&bycat=
Go [accessed August 4, 2008]).
7. See Department of History, UCLA, Recent Graduates, http://www.his
tory.ucla.edu/academics/graduate/recent-graduates (accessed April 12, 2010).
8. Here, the concept of power is sustained by the notion of relevance, both of
which are rigid and porous notions, subject to opportunity and survival. See
Manovich, who was solicited by the magazine to render futurism and fantasy
as optimistic alternatives to art; and see Obra, Schwandt and Woodall.
9. See Derrida, 2. Derrida has it that an important sense of the archive
formation is the residence of the superior magistrates, the archons, those who
commanded. The Web page for boundary 2 puts their situation this way: The
editors of boundary 2 announce that they no longer intend to publish in the standard professional areas, but only materials that identify and analyze the tyrannies
of thought and action spreading around the world and that suggest alternatives
to these emerging configurations of power. To this end, we wish to inform our
readers that, until further notice, the journal will not accept unsolicited manuscripts (see http://www.dukeupress.edu/Catalog/ViewProduct.php?productid
=45602 [accessed April 20, 2010]). Clearly, the editors have declared a state of
emergency.
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05 Cohen_CC #74 7/7/2010 12:17 PM Page 114

PUBLICATION, KNOWLEDGE, MERIT

Civilization . . . has entrusted the conservation of its own traditions to a

INTRODUCTORY: GENEALOGY AND HISTORY

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PUBLICATION, KNOWLEDGE, MERIT

In this essay, I wish to open up the distinction between history

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PUBLICATION, KNOWLEDGE, MERIT

This essay is devoted to making editing a subject of critical discussion.

05 Cohen_CC #74 7/7/2010 12:17 PM Page 118

reconciliation, but to a metaconcept of dissymmetry . . . force, a

DISTURBANCES AND THE POLITICS OF EDITING

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PUBLICATION, KNOWLEDGE, MERIT

05 Cohen_CC #74 7/7/2010 12:17 PM Page 120

(or misrepresentation in the case of Bellesiles). It was the readers of

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PUBLICATION, KNOWLEDGE, MERIT

Thus, the discipline and control required by scholarship is regularly

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THE EDITING FUNCTION: MULTIPLICITY IN ACTION

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PUBLICATION, KNOWLEDGE, MERIT

Editing certainly straddles discipline and control, and is not at all

05 Cohen_CC #74 7/7/2010 12:17 PM Page 124

as an interlocking rhyme scheme that would greatly complicate any

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PUBLICATION, KNOWLEDGE, MERIT

05 Cohen_CC #74 7/7/2010 12:17 PM Page 126

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PUBLICATION, KNOWLEDGE, MERIT

purification (review) make small press offerings sometimes more

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NEW PRESSURES: IMPACT AND REPUTATION

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PUBLICATION, KNOWLEDGE, MERIT

interpretation of Foucault, and Orientalisms relation to Saids own

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PUBLICATION, KNOWLEDGE, MERIT

A19). Levys reputation allows him to simplify; such killings happen

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Indeed, to introduce merit is almost embarrassing: there is much

COMPETITION AND DISJUNCTIONS

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PUBLICATION, KNOWLEDGE, MERIT

attached to published articles. Wesleyan University Press competes

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PUBLICATION, KNOWLEDGE, MERIT

they are equally dependent on a strategy of localization whereby the

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historians at UCLA signed off on three dissertations for the research

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PUBLICATION, KNOWLEDGE, MERIT

action, the UC system steals superstar women from other campuses

BY WAY OF CONCLUSION: EDITORS AND

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PUBLICATION, KNOWLEDGE, MERIT

about the confusion between scholarly innovation and conformism.

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