Skills Not Taught
I come to academia already having a career and life before it. I come then with skills learned elsewhere for other outcomes, with other cultural-odors and assumptions attached. Bluntly said, academia is slow compared to other work practices, and because its products are not of much value, vanity has a lot of room to seep in. When an academic's work is deemed valuable, it's value so far outpaces that of their peers that vanity, once again, has a lot of leg room to stretch out.
99% of academic work is read seriously by 12 people. That's 2 reviewers, a handful of colleagues, and an inconsistent group of what I'll call 'swing readers', in allusion to 'swing voters', i.e., those who vote some of the time for some politicians based on impulse or circumstance. Swing readers are not the ideal audience but I can tell you, as a newly titled academic, it is fun to see tiny numbers of reads, downloads, and citations come through in an email notification. It's like catching the eyes of a stranger on a bus; weird, not altogether comfortable, don't know how I feel about it. With 50 or 90 downloads, I could feel like the best-looking person at a bar might feel; with just a random few I am in this weird position of wanting more of the attention of strangers, but not wanting if I really want that, or if its just the game I've convinced myself to play.
Speaking of games I've convinced myself to play, academia fits much more neatly into gameified logics than other more tangible fields. Firstly, it's never clear when the game is done. In the introduction to a very good book I once read, the author bemoaned the speed of events and updates in her field while also complaining about her creaking, sagging bookshelves full of the books she'd already read. A published, tenured author lamenting the sad state of her overstuffed personal library (of which, remember, she's read all the titles). When I was very young I remember struggling to beat the bonus levels in Super Mario. Oh, I had come so far. But oh, it was so hard to have come so far.
As usual I try to use this essay space to put my thoughts in a straight line so that I might see them better. If academia had more tangible outcomes, and if the workdays ever seemed to truly end, I think there might be less space for the vanities I sense proliferating quickly in rooms full of peer reviewed and surveilled authors.
No doubt other professions suffer from a lot of peer review. Colleagues check on each other not so much to assess the other but to self-assess, keep pace, and so on. We're all runners in some race and we'd like to know we have a good chance of finishing based on how fast others are going in that moment. But with academia a very sick thing was done in the name of science. Add it to the list of awful things done historically in the name of science: peer review.
Institutionalized Vanity Leakage
Before I go for the jugular, I'd like to say the good things about peer review. One, it keeps people sharp. Two, it gives people jobs. Three, it suffers only particular kinds of fools rather than any kind. And four, it facilitates the production of satirical numbers of neologisms which is, when all is said and done, the clearest legacy of scholars.
Proponents of the system will suggest peer review does what it says on the box: weeds out bad ideas, refines good ideas, and does an overall quality control of knowledge production as an industry.
I'll take a risk and say: no, it doesn't. Peer review does nothing that it says it does. Plenty of bad ideas get published. Read through the latest offerings of your favored journal of the moment, and imagine putting your name to all of them. As for good ideas, look: half the game of citing others is drudging up some thread or reference they make and developing that into a new sub-sub-sub area. We are always, collectively as bad authors, telling our readers that this or that question has been left unanswered, this or that topic is not correctly understood. We bludgeon to death the efforts of our peers, because we need to kill the bodies to make space for our own (to be in turn bludgeoned and thrown in the mass grave). This isn't a bad thing, but it requires that most journal articles don't have truly good ideas. If they did, all the good ideas would be taken, see?
As for suffering particular kinds of fools, well, attend any big conference and have a good look at the mostly homosocial circles of people forming. Look at their haircuts, look at their scarves, look at their designer glasses. Notice one trend and soon you'll see nothing else. Conferences are ball pits of fashion, and I mean that they are colorful, chaotic, and a bit bacterial. Ideas spread in conferences, and I don't mean intellectual ones. People cite each other's fashion sense a bit more frequently than their writing, and it shows. In review, peers have little choice but to select for the people driving just about the same speed and wearing the same intellectual outfits. Clothing facilitates the homogeneity; it tells us quickly who might be on our side. After that, it's a matter of arguing with our tiny circle of niche experts about the small differences between our prejudices. Or, put another way, is indigo better than purple? Perhaps, gasp, they're the same! More research is needed.
And lastly to the neologisms: look these are just fun. Every field needs its fun. Doctors get needles, lawyers get big heavy books, academics get...well we get lecterns, and scarves, and robes at graduation, and we get to act like ideology grants insight but not in that bad, religious way...but longer-lasting than anything is our mandate to make up new words for the slight variations in universal constants. Gender is now this; race is this; work is this; children are that. Managers are doing this; workers are doing that; transportation has introduced this. As a student the neologisms are agonizing. They do no service at all to the majority of academics who are, in fact, very poor writers. Accurate to stereotypes, many pure bred academics in particular were failures as social creatures growing up. I don't mean they didn't have friends. I mean they didn't have many. Communication skills are not very necessary if you spend most of your life with the same small number of people, and this describes most bookish students. So when it comes time for these inward looking scholars to speak out to the world, they have barely any practice doing so. Fortunately all the best thinkers are also bad communicators, and through the magic of peer review, these loners can collude on making academic writing as confusing and tortured as possible. It might be true that philosophers of this kind have, truly, the most interesting insights into the issues. But if a tree falls in a forest it would have hit the ground before an academic got through writing the abstract of their analysis.
Peer review keeps us sharp, produces jobs, gatekeeps, and makes new words. Those are its virtues.
Envy Networks
Astute readers will pick up on my strategy of perverting peer reviews' virtues into vices. Apologies to the administrative staff whose jobs rely on this large, hulking industry of emails, proofs, copies, "publishing" - whatever that means when everything is data in networks. I am a middle-class supremacist: I want there to always be a place for the copy editors, the office managers, the associate editors, and so forth. But I don't know how we can all keep taking seriously the "publishing fees" of online journals being so high. I can download the entire Western literary canon in less than an hour over networks. The revolution sure did happen in a weird way.
Back to it, though: peer review is the floorplan for the envy networks driving the majority of academic work. We work not to produce knowledge, but to produce knowledge our peers did or could not. We work to force open gaps in the ideas of others. We are taught to express at abstract, irreplicable levels of thought and exploration so that we leave in our wake many dozens or hundreds of untrodden paths.
If academia were good at finding things out and communicating them, there'd be far less to do. Better to make a lot of strange and tortured research questions loaded with all sorts of worldly prejudices, and then fire these out to an unknown smattering of readings. In this sad digital age, I am to publish ideas as I see them for people I can't see, to add to that horrible word, 'discourse'.
Disembodied, decontextualized, chaotic. I take from the noise some insights, and fire off into the void some loose articulation of them. Who reads it? Who replies?
I shouldn't fall into despair. For, you see, peer review is on the way. Peer review will contextualize my attempts. It will comment and condemn until the ugly wooden horse I've whittled is made of plastic. Organic matter must be made to fit the mold. The most exciting thing in the world to an editor is to see a name they've not seen before; another new laborer to pour their work into my factory for free. And the editor can say (they can say!) whether what I've done is work or a waste of time. They can say it nicely, or cruelly, professionally or pathetically. Their purpose ultimately is to grant me entry into the network of envy: see, here, you must cite so-and-so. You are lacking engagement with him-and-her. Don't forget them-over-here, and of course they-over-there are also worth considering. Peer review tells us, in refreshing albeit brusque terms who we ought to envy.
Networks are not about choice
Lost in the flurry to call internet networks the solution and then the problem of humanity is the reality that networks existed prior to digitalization and that they are never voluntary. Families, friends, classmates - we are born and bred into networks not of our choosing and many of us spend the first third of adulthood trying to find or make networks we actually want to be a part of. I am not sure how many succeed.
To call peer review the blueprint or floorplan for envy networks maybe makes me sound...I don't know, juvenile? Immature? Prematurely bitter, maybe angsty? I'll own these terms, all of them. But just because I'm angry doesn't mean I'm wrong. I began this essay with the thought that academia doesn't do much in the world, and as such its products are assessed not for their value but the vanity of their authors. I stand by this. We care less for ideas than we do for names, in academia. And the names accrue their worth through citations. Citations are in theory dependent upon good ideas. Yet what makes an idea 'good' is how many cracks others can find in it, so that their citing of it is bundled with critique: despite its utility, this neologism has an oversight...
This is the bludgeoning, or perhaps the paper-cutting academics ritualistically perform on one another. Peer review is the first and most important round of this. Having passed the formalized version, authors then submit to a general paper-cutting by their homosocial readers. One could make a very straightforward art film: a body, naked, surrounded on all sides by faceless hands reaching out with tiny slips of paper, the hands moving in slow or rapid movements cutting open miniature wounds all over the arms and legs of the body. This is peer review, and later, the downloads, reads, and citations that academics life off of.
So the envy I speak of has a distinct feeling. For some more than others, the stinging pain of papercuts can be somewhat pleasurable. Pain, after all, signifies your presence in the world. For people to hurt you, they have to have acknowledged your existence. I don't mean to take a self-help turn here - I'm not endorsing abuse. Whatever else it may be called, though, peer review certainly has some things in common with abuse. It causes no small amount of trauma and self-harm, for one thing. We keep coming back for more, for another. And we learn over time to replicate the act on to others: we become peer reviewers ourselves.
Why come back? Not for the painful recognition, no. For the envy: to feel it and then to cause it in others. Networks are agreements between people to effect one another. If you join with me in my network, you're agreeing to let what I say and do have some impact on you. And I am also agreeing to that, regarding what you'll do. I agree to peer review not because I think it makes my work better, I agree to it because the dynamic flow of vanity out and envy in is the true spirit of academia.