Resistance to allowing scholarly production to take non-textual form runs deeply in many fields, and particularly in those that have long reinforced the divide between criticism (art history, literature, media studies) and practice (studio art, creative writing, media production). But one of the explicit goals of many media studies programs over the last ten years has been finding a way within the curriculum to bridge the theory-practice divide: to give our production students a rigorously critical standpoint from which to understand what they’re doing when they’re making media; to give our critical studies students a hands-on understanding of how the forms about which they’re writing come into being. And yet it remains only the rare scholar who brings criticism and production together in his or her own work – and for no small reason: faculty hired as conventional scholars are only rarely given credit toward promotion for production work; faculty hired to teach production are not always taken seriously as scholars. In fields such as media studies, we are being forced to recognize, one tenure case at a time, that the means of conducting scholarship is changing, and that the boundary between the “critical” and the “creative” is arbitrary, if it exists at all. My colleague Alex Juhasz, for instance, has written critically about YouTube but has also done a tremendous amount of work on YouTube, work that is inseparable from the critical analysis. Eric Faden, in a slightly different vein, is a film scholar working almost exclusively in the form of the video essay. In the coming years, more and more scholars in fields across the humanities will be taking up such unorthodox means of producing scholarship, in order to make arguments in forms other than the textual. Other scholars, including Tim Anderson and Tom Porcello, are working on audio in audio form, and in digital media studies, the list of scholars both writing about and producing interactive work includes Ian Bogost, Mary Flanagan, Noah Wardrip-Fruin, and too many others to name here.

Numerous possibilities exist for these future argument forms across the humanities: exciting historical work is already being done in digital form, through the production of interactive archives and exhibits; visual anthropology has long used documentary film production in ways that other scholars in the field might adopt. Scholarly analysis, in other words, can take the form of video, producing a visual response to a cultural object or phenomenon; it might take the form of audio, layering sound in order to focus our attention on that which we ordinarily miss in the world around us; it might take the form of an interactive game, in which we encounter an interpretation of a scenario in the rules that govern it. It’s not too much of a stretch, after all, to argue that if authorship practices have changed, the very nature of writing itself has changed as well – not just our practices, but the result of those practices.

What other examples of specific scholars or more general scholarly methods might I include here? I need to keep this section fairly tight, but I don’t want to overlook anything that would make the point that much more clear.

One of the most-commented paragraphs in the project is the zombie paragraph, which several people urged me to go a bit further with. Accordingly, I’ve moved the appropriate parts of the footnote into the main text, and have pressed a bit harder on the main point, such that the paragraph — now two — reads like this:

The suggestion that one particular type of book might be thought of as undead indicates that we need to rethink, in a broad sense, the relationship between old media and new, and ask what that relationship bodes for the academy. If the traditional model of academic publishing is not dead, but undead – again, not viable, but still required – how should we approach our work, and the publishing systems that bring it into being? There’s of course a real question to be asked about how far we want to carry this metaphor; the suggestion that contemporary academic publishing is governed by a kind of zombie logic, for instance, might be read as indicating that these old forms refuse to stay put in their graves, but instead walk the earth, rotting and putrescent, wholly devoid of consciousness, eating the brains of the living and susceptible to nothing but decapitation – and this might seem a bit of an over-response. On the other hand, it’s worth considering the extensive scholarship in media studies on the figure of the zombie, which is often understood to act as a stand-in for the narcotized subject of capitalism, particularly at those moments when capitalism’s contradictions become most apparent.[5] And, of course, there’s been a serious recent uptick in broad cultural interest in zombies, perhaps exemplified by the Spring 2009 release of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies.[6] If there is a relationship between the zombie and the subject of late capitalism, the cultural anxiety that figure marks is currently, with reason, off the charts – and not least within the academy, as we not only find our ways of communicating increasingly threatened with a sort of death-in-life, but also find our livelihoods themselves decreasingly lively, as the liberal arts are overtaken by the teaching of supposedly more pragmatic fields, as tenure-track faculty lines are rapidly being replaced with more contingent forms of labor, and as too many newly-minted PhDs find themselves without the job opportunities they need to survive. The relationship between the zombie status of the scholarly book and the perilous state of the profession isn’t, of course, causal, but nor is it unrelated, and until we develop the individual and institutional will to transform our ways of communicating, we’re unlikely to be able to transform our broader ways of working, either.

But just to be clear: I am not suggesting that the future survival of the academy requires us to put academic publishing safely in its grave. I’m not being wholly facetious either, though, as I do want to indicate that certain aspects of the academic publishing process are neither quite as alive as we’d like them to be, nor quite as dead as might be most convenient. It’s likely that we could get along fine, for the most part, with the undead of academic publishing, as studies of forms like radio and the vinyl LP indicate that obsolete media forms have always had curious afterlives.[7] There are important differences between those cases and the case of academic publishing, however: we don’t yet have a good replacement for the scholarly monograph, nor do we seem particularly inclined to allow the book to become a “niche” technology within humanities discourse. It’s thus important for us to consider the work that the book is and isn’t doing for us, the ways that it remains vibrant and vital, and the ways that it has become undead, haunting the living from beyond the grave.

I’d love to know what you think!

As it turns out, however, this CommentPress installation runs in this nifty software package called multi-user WordPress — you may have heard of it! — which allows blogs to have as many authors as the blog’s owner (that would be me) would like. And those authors can create posts themselves, can organize discussion themselves, can tag their ideas themselves, and so on.

Boy, it’s amazing what these blogs can do!

(Ahem.)

So… the short of it is that the developers have woken me the rest of the way up and shown me how to provide a much more free-form space for open discussion of the book. All you have to do is register for an account by clicking “Log In” in the toolbar, and then clicking “Register” under the login form. Those of you who’ve already created accounts have been made authors, so you now have full posting privileges; I’ll add those privileges for other registered users as they appear.

I hope you’ll use the blog however you would like, to have any discussions around the book that you’d like. I’ll be interested to follow along!