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| 257 18 DIY Academy? Cognitive Capitalism, Humanist Scholarship, and the Digital Transformation Ashley Dawson The University of Michigan Press recently sent me (and other authors who have published with the press) an e-mail announcing the debut of a “transformative scholarly publishing model,” the product of a cooperative agreement between the Press and the University of Michigan Libraries.1 Starting in July 2009, the letter said, all future Michigan publications are to be made available “primarily in a range of digital formats,” although high-quality print-on-demand versions of the e-books are also readily obtainable by bookstores , institutions, and individuals. The Press’s long-term plans call for books to be “digitized and available to libraries and customers world-wide through an affordable site-license program,” as most academic journals currently are. Moreover, these digital books, the communiqué informed me, will be “candidates for a wide range of audio and visual digital enhancements—including hot links, graphics, interactive tables, sound files, 3D animation, and video.” This announcement by a major academic press is the harbinger of a seismic shift in the character of scholarly knowledge production and dissemination. Over the past thirty years, the university presses have been pushed by academic administrators to act like for-profit publishing ventures rather than as facilitators of the professoriate’s publishing ambitions in the erstwhile Fordist-era university.2 As universities have cut back funding for both the presses and tenure-stream faculty appointments, turning increasingly to the precarious labor of graduate students and adjuncts to staff their core courses, the academic presses have become the de facto arbiters of tenure and promotion in the increasingly pinched world of the humanities and social sciences. The result, as a well-known letter published by Stephen Greenblatt during his tenure as president of the Modern Language Association attests, is a crisis in scholarly publishing.3 It has become harder to publish in general and virtually impossible to publish books that do not ride the latest wave of theory. 258 | Ashley Dawson At the same time, the remorseless creep toward informal labor has made it increasingly necessary to crank out books in order to survive in academia. The upshot is an increasingly Darwinian world of frenetic competition and commodification in which scholars illogically hand over their hard-won knowledge virtually for free to presses that then limit the circulation of that knowledge through various forms of copyright in order to maintain the precarious revenue stream that keeps them in business. To what extent does digital publishing provide an exit from this dystopian world? As Michigan’s announcement makes clear, digital publication clearly offers exciting possibilities for multimedia, interdisciplinary work. But this shift also opens broader vistas. Why should scholars not take publishing out of the hands of the academic presses and establish their own online publishing schemes? Within the sciences there is already a strong trend toward the publication of papers in open-access archives. Peer-reviewed, open-access journals are beginning to pop up in fields such as cultural studies. With support from their institutions or far-seeing not-for-profit foundations, scholars could publish and disseminate their own work freely. The potential for significantly democratizing knowledge represented by such developments cannot be gainsaid despite the enduring significant inequalities of access to digital information within the global North and South. We are, however, a long way from such developments becoming the norm. The danger is that the earthquake whose first tremors we are currently feeling will take us unawares and will make us passive victims rather than the architects of more egalitarian and socially just forms of learning and communication. There has, after all, been relatively little theorization of this tectonic shift in the modes of knowledge production and dissemination.4 When not commandeered by progressive movements, technological innovations can all too easily be used to exacerbate existing forms of inequality. In this essay, I situate discussion of the open-access movement within academia in the context of contemporary theories of the knowledge economy and immaterial labor. For theorists influenced by the Italian operaismo movement, shifts in the production process in advanced capitalist nations have produced a massification and commodification of intellectual work over the past several decades.5 Today, the most strategically significant sector of the capitalist production process, the one that sets the terms for all other sectors, is what operaismo theorists term “immaterial labor”—the production of new software programs, novel social networking technologies, coding of genetic materials, and so...

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