The life of the ‘theory’ journal

Interesting piece in The Chronicle of Higher Education on ‘The brief, wondrous life of the theory journal’, by Jeffrey J. Williams. The focus is especially on literary theory journals – Diacritics, New German Critique, Yale French Studies, Social Text, etc – but the point is wider. One of the key issues concerns the institutional backing of such journals when founded. It concludes with a fairly dismal view of the future:

The question of the future is the question of material backing. Today it’s clear that we have entered a different moment in the history of higher education; we’ve passed from the welfare-state university to the post-welfare-state university, determined by the protocols of privatization. Under its terms, the theory journal is becoming a residual form, like the philological journals.

Without the capacious financing for higher education, I predict that journals will return to being philanthropic projects, like the early little magazines, subject to private support, and thus the tastes and vicissitudes of that support. And they will become more rarefied as their readership shrinks—as the number of full-time faculty, who might publish in them and read them, becomes a yet smaller fraction of those who profess.

Eileen Joy responds forcefully at In The Middle, suggesting that the analysis is lacking a grasp of what has been happening in the last ten years or so, especially in the realm of open-access publishing. As well as some comments, she adds a letter she sent to The Chronicle which includes a long list of interesting, web-based journals that have been launched recently and relatively recently. As someone who has been involved in such ventures, Joy is well-placed to reject the idea that such ventures are ‘free’, noting that “immense amounts of human labor have to be donated every minute of the day to keep online journals going, for example”. But the possibilities are promising, and so Joy concludes by suggesting that:

In my eyes, the future for academic publishing looks bright, indeed, with more, and not less, of the professoriate and their students, as well as intellectuals and artists outside of the academy proper, joining together to create a more robust and diverse library among the “clouds” of the virtual and more material bookstores and libraries emerging alongside us today.

Both pieces are well worth a read for anyone interesting in the past, present and future of publishing.