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Friday, December 22, 2006
Vanity Publishing
I’m working on my MLA talk and one point I’m going to touch on is the issue of vanity publishing. Of course, the history of vanity publishing goes back and back. All you needed, originally, was a smooth surface of the right sort. The term ‘vanity publishing’ was apparently coined in 1960 by James Clifford (who now maintains a website on the subject.)
It’s interesting that the term denotes a vice on the part of the publisher but encodes a vice on the part of the author. As Nietzsche writes: “The vain man wants not so much to predominate as to feel himself predominant; that is why he disdains no means of self-deception and self-outwitting. What he treasures is not the opinion of others but his own opinion of their opinion.”
Vanity publishing is typically defined as: charging for publication of someone’s work, then charging the author again for a copy of the published work. This helpfully distinguishes between the potentially honest trades of copy-editing/book-making/book-binding, for a fee, and the rather useless service of feeding people’s delusions of authorial grandeur, for a fee. But it is interesting that, in a strict sense, almost all academic publishing qualifies as ‘vanity’, in that institutions effectively, collectively pay for the privilege of having little bits of themselves (i.e. academics) publish - sometimes by providing subventions, sometimes by underwriting the operation of academic presses; then the institutions pay again for the privilege, by purchasing copies for other parts of themselves (i.e. the library). This just goes to show that the simple definition is inadequate, not that there is anything inherently ‘vain’ about academic publication. Academic publishing has the clearly-defined mission of fostering the dissemination of knowledge and ideas beyond the point where they can be made to pay their own way, commercially.
I am flirting with the idea of trying to pin the accusation - vanity! - on certain aspects of academic publishing. The modified definition might go like so: vanity publishing is arranging for the publication of your work in a form that is self-deceptive or self-outwitting in its form, in that it effectively aims not at shaping the opinion of others, but at appearing to be the sort of thing that surely shapes the opinions of others. Example: you puff up a couple articles into a book, for tenure. And it is hardbound in a way that would surely lose money if less than a 1,000 copies sold. Handsome artifact. Makes a sound if you rap it with your knuckle. (But only 200 copies actually sold.)
But really this isn’t you being vain (god help you if I am wrong about this). Nor your publisher, for that matter (who was wearily cognizant of the terrible but unwelcome likelihood of that 200 sale - hope over experience and all that.) It is your department - your institution, your discipline, the system - which is conspiring to demand you do something you yourself probably acknowledge as at least a bit intellectually deforming. It is the system that is perpetrating vanity publishing, mooning at itself in the mirror.
Lindsay Waters gets this much right in Enemies of Promise
One of the things that makes the current situation intolerable for such publishers [those seeking to promote genuinely interesting, innovative work] is that in these circumstances an imprint functions in precisely the opposite way it is supposed to work. In a healthy situation an imprint wins a book readers. In this situation - were publication is subordinate to the tenure mill - a quality imprint means that no one needs to read the book because such an imprint means a book is of a certain meritoriousness and therefore does not need to be read. The emotional capital a publisher tries to win for his or her imprint is frustrated in our climate. (p. 38)
The principle is clear: form should follow function. But there are two functions: intellectual and institutional. The institution needs benchmarks. (This is distinct from the reputation function, which does not always entail clear benchmarks, and which is really a crucial aspect of the proper, intellectual function.) Obviously form should follow intellectual function. If you deform intellectual production for the sake of a (necessarily somewhat hollow) status exercise, you are correctly described as engaging in a form of ‘vanity’ publishing. I think it might actually be quite rhetorically effective to begin characterizing certain aspects of the publishing crisis in these terms: obstinate insistence on non-optimal forms and modes of distribution, clung to for the sake of a sense of status, should be tarred as ‘vanity publishing’. You have to be a bit careful here, of course. Because the term is too wounding when lobbed at individuals - even at individual publishers. It’s not as though the stupidity is anyone’s fault really. Still, perhaps carefully generalized deployment of the term can drive home some sense of the horror of it all.
While I am on the subject of Lindsay Waters, he sure manages to end on a sour and (not to put too fine a point on it) wrong note, having started not too badly (per above):
Some have suggested that the new possibilities for electronic publishing will alleviate our problems. In the wild ideas of some dreamers [count me in!] the new world of electronic publications will actually be an improvement over books. To think this way is to fail to understand that electronic publications will only make the situation worse. Moreover, it will make things worse in a way that undermines the principles behind the culture of the book. We had better put an end to such foolish talk and keep pressure on the librarians and ourselves to value the book better.
But I cannot finish with Waters today. Indeed, for all I know he has softened his stance since 2004. (In fact, I tried to email him to ask, today. But I only have a general HUP contact email. If anyone out there knows Waters personally, could you ask him whether he still believes what he wrote back in 2004?) So I’ll just conclude with another nice Nietzsche bit. Waters quotes Nietzsche in support of his position - from Human, All-Too-Human: “One should speak only where one must not be silent.” This dovetails - in ways I cannot quite spell out just this minute - with Waters’ sustained championing, in effect, of the Romantic genius of the book, qua form. He defines ‘book’ the same way Wimsatt and Beardsley defined ‘poem, propounding their ‘intentional fallacy’: “The book features the highest signal to noise ratio possible of any means of communication.” He also rages against attempts to treat books and widgets the same, as though they could just joggle around in any market and settle their value that way. Well, I don’t think Nietzsche would necessarily have agreed.
Cult of the genius out of vanity.— Because we think well of ourselves, but nonetheless never suppose ourselves capable of producing a painting like one of Raphael’s or a dramatic scene like one of Shakespeare’s, we convince ourselves that the capacity to do so is quite extraordinarily marvelous, a wholly uncommon accident, or, if we are still religiously inclined, a mercy from on high. Thus our vanity, our self-love, promotes the cult of the genius: for only if we think of him as being very remote from us, as a miraculum, does he not aggrieve us (even Goethe, who was without envy, called Shakespeare his star of the most distant heights ["William! Stern der schönsten Ferne”: from Goethe’s, “Between Two Worlds"]; in regard to which one might recall the lines: “the stars, these we do not desire” [from Goethe’s, “Comfort in Tears"]). But, aside from these suggestions of our vanity, the activity of the genius seems in no way fundamentally different from the activity of the inventor of machines, the scholar of astronomy or history, the master of tactics. All these activities are explicable if one pictures to oneself people whose thinking is active in one direction, who employ everything as material, who always zealously observe their own inner life and that of others, who perceive everywhere models and incentives, who never tire of combining together the means available to them. Genius too does nothing except learn first how to lay bricks then how to build, except continually seek for material and continually form itself around it. Every activity of man is amazingly complicated, not only that of the genius: but none is a “miracle."— Whence, then, the belief that genius exists only in the artist, orator and philosopher? that only they have “intuition”? (Whereby they are supposed to possess a kind of miraculous eyeglass with which they can see directly into “the essence of the thing”!) It is clear that people speak of genius only where the effects of the great intellect are most pleasant to them and where they have no desire to feel envious. To call someone “divine” means: “here there is no need for us to compete.” Then, everything finished and complete is regarded with admiration, everything still becoming is undervalued. But no one can see in the work of the artist how it has become; that is its advantage, for wherever one can see the act of becoming one grows somewhat cool. The finished and perfect art of representation repulses all thinking as to how it has become; it tyrannizes as present completeness and perfection. That is why the masters of the art of representation count above all as gifted with genius and why men of science do not. In reality, this evaluation of the former and undervaluation of the latter is only a piece of childishness in the realm of reason.
Here is my hope for the day: may everything serious I write always exist on the web in some unsatisfactory, draft form - so that this particular piece of childishness about the nature of my work is defeated, enemy of promise such as it seems to me to be. (Not that it’s wrong to be Romantic. I hope we all are.)
[Updated slightly for clarity and typo of book title.]
Comments
John, to respond just to the witty conclusion: I’d like us to have a well-developed way of talking about the refinement of particularly attractive, problematic ideas. Some of the novelists I like best—D. H. Lawrence and Jeannette Winterson come to mind—have an embarrassing tendency to publish whole novels (like Oranges Aren’t The Only Fruit and The Plumed Serpent) that represent unsatisfactory “drafts” of the same ideas that animate their best works.
The difference between the ghastly echo chamber of indulgence and fantasy in The Plumed Serpent, and the piercing and restorative vision of Women In Love, seems to be two things. First, the internalization of other critical voices. Second, the admission of the costs to oneself and others of one’s ideal.
There are drafts which are simply inchoate, and drafts which are too tentative and influenced. And then there are drafts in which the writer is surprised in a moment of blind wishing, before her dream has been revised for seaworthiness. I believe Nietzsche would understand a certain delicacy that makes one shy away from such revelatory drafts, even if they do find their way onto the web or into the Collected Works.
Thanks Joseph. I didn’t mean really that all drafts should be published. And I certainly don’t mean to mandate my ideal for any writers who found it a hindrance, i.e. an unendurable airing of dirty laundry/manuscripts. But generally - at least in my case - there was SOME draft, penultimate, suitably developed - that needed a good knocking about. And the best place to get that these days, for me, is on the web. Post a draft. Get responses. Make improvements. The fact that then there is generally some artifactual record of the knocking-about is a plus, not a minus.
Waters makes the claim (now I can’t lay lands on the little book - somewhere around here) that good writing does not emerge from cacophony but from silence. That is, we should not expect good work to emerge from an environment in which overproduction is mandated. I can agree with the latter sentiment. But the truth is, I think: good writing DOES emerge from the cacophony of your own thoughts, in the draft stage, and in collision with all the intelligent things one’s peers could say in response to those drafts. Good writing out of silence imagines the writer - she must be a genius to be doing this - just pulling the glorious final product out of sheer silence. Waters is not really so naive as to suppose this happens. He is an editor, for pete sake. No editor can believe in the cult of the unmediated genius. Still, this ‘silence rather than cacophony’ is not a helpful image, as a guide to the design of an environment in which good writing is really likely to emerge. It is too Romantically wishful. What we need is better social software, as it were - better environments in which work can be mediated and worked through. Doing it in front of 6 billion people on the web isn’t the point, obviously. It’s not exhibitionism. Doing it with the help of a few considerate, critical peers is the point.
Also - I didn’t really push this in the post - I don’t really agree with Waters notion of the finality and completeness of the book. Signal to noise. Realistically, books always have problems and are always subject to criticisms. There is always something about the book that, two years later, the author realizes should be changed. One thing that electronic publication could conceivably end is the FINALITY of the book. This is a delicate point, because you have to preserve an inviolable archival record of what was written. But it ought to be possible to create version 2.0 of your book, in response to criticism, if version 2.0 would really be a lot, a lot better. Second editions are, of course, nothing new, so this isn’t so shocking. But there ought to be MORE second editions; and also a few third and fourth editions. One of the great values of electronic publishing is making this possible in cases where it would be a good thing. You are not lashed to the old version by the cost of firing up the paper machine to churn out a whole new run.
Joseph, I’m no fan of Lawrence or Winterson, but for the sake of those cribbing grad students SEK doubts, shouldn’t it be noted that some people think/feel very highly of both those books? Steweds Aren’t the Only Vegetable Preparation and all that. (But that probably feeds into your own Robbins thang....)
This is probably just one of those “Wow, I was listening to James Brown on Christmas Eve!” shit-and-garbage comments, but the most interesting (to me) academic journal piece I read last week was John Barnard’s “First Fruits or ‘First Blights’", which according to Barnard introduces the theory that John Keats’s first disastrous book was self-financed. Mostly Barnard plays up the expected embarassing aspects, but then ends on an unexpected (to me) note:
The gamble of financing Poems (1817) himself proved to be the first step towards possible commercial success. In a matter of weeks he no longer had to finance his own publication out of his own resources, and had a contract with a forward looking firm in the process of building up a new list of poets. He had leapt ahead of Shelley, who never managed to obtain a successful commercial publisher (indeed, later that year Murray refused Laon and Cythna and Shelley had to fall back on the Olliers).
When he left for the Isle of Wight on14 March 1817 to begin writing the 4,000 lines of Endymion, Keats’s confidence had been greatly boosted by the knowledge that in six months he had advanced from having a single initialized sonnet in print to being a young poet with a contract for his future books, and, what was more, a contract with an established publisher who believed in his genius. Fortunately for Keats, John Taylor never gave up that belief.
Big Money in Dixieland!