Carol Bacchi

Part of my frustration with academic journal publishing (and I'm sure others share this frustration, too) stems from the narrow conception of "peer review" that seems to predominate today. Now, I should preface what I'm about to say by noting that I've had mostly good experiences with peer review, so I'm not advancing this criticism to express "sour grapes." Instead, I think it's worth questioning the extent to which assessment by two or perhaps three anonymous "experts" constitutes a "peer review." I also think it's worth thinking about the conditions under which this particular system of review arose. They seem to me quite different, technologically speaking, compared to the prevailing conditions today.

So instead of resting on our laurels, why not begin thinking about how to make peer review work even better, given the current technological context we inhabit? Here I'm imagining a system that would utilize some form of crowdsourcing as the platform for peer review. Now, I know that opens up a whole can of worms, one I'll need to deal with in the next paper. But all the same, there seem to me untapped opportunities to make "peer review" a more genuine, and indeed rigorous, peer review.

The even more abstract (in a good way) point you raise, "Kindle may represent a step toward commodifying the discursive constitution of practices," may share an affinity of sorts with the post appearing below, "What is the Commodity Here?" But in light of my response to that interlocutor, I'm beginning to wonder if indeed Amazon is "commodifying" reading (or discursive practices more generally) or if indeed the company is discovering ways to "monetize" them—two terms I admittedly conflate in the paper that may not refer to exactly the same processes after all.

Perhaps some correspondences are beginning to emerge here, something like:

• labor —> commodification
• fixed capital (human resources) —> monetization?

I'm genuinely just spit-balling on here, but this seems to be one way in which the conversation is headed….

A couple of things here. First, in my background reading for this paper, I ran across Eileen Meehan's idea of "cybernetic commodities." It came up in a quite interesting discussion of commodification in Vincent Mosco's The Political Economy of Communication (p. 150). I wonder if this idea might mediate the tension that seems to be arising across several of the comments here, namely, between the labor of Kindle reading and the acts of discursive production that must take prior to and alongside that labor so as to render it value producing. I'm inclined to see an opening here—plus, "cybernetic commodity" would seem to account for the fact that the labor of Kindle readers isn't what's getting commodified per se as much as the data they're producing.

Second (and I'm not sure exactly what to make of this), it strikes me as odd that, with Kindle, "labor" and "commodity" seem to be severed so starkly from one another that even a classically Marxist framework cannot quite account for what's going on. There seems to me a double alienation taking place here whereby (a) audience labor is alienated from readers by Amazon and (b) those readers produce a kind of raw material (data, information) that the company may then choose to commodify or otherwise use. But what's interesting to me is how, in this scenario, human labor power is not a commodity to be bought and sold at all. Instead, it's more akin to fixed capital—a "human resource" in the baldest sense of the term.

All this suggests that I need to go much deeper in terms of exploring the relations between laboring subjects, capital (as in value producing assets), and cybernetic commodities.

You've really opened some doors here. THANKS!

What I'm more curious about is how exactly we can speak of commodification in this situation, a curiosity prompted by the discussion above around the production of the discursive objects necessary for commodification and the continued circulation of capital. Comparing the work of the Kindle to Smythe's "audience commodity" seems to muddy the waters around the commodity. In Smythe, the phrase "audience commodity" makes sense insofar as audience attention is the commodity. It is literally our act of attending to advertisements that is sold to advertisers (indeed, if the TV in on but I'm not paying attention to it, it would seem that, at least in that particular case, my own attention is not commodified by the network). But it doesn't quite make sense to call "reading" the Kindle's commodity (in the way that web advertising very directly commodifies web-surfing). It is an exploited labor, to be sure, but one that goes entirely unsold and unpaid—the commodity would seem to be the information generated about the reading selection and practice (assuming that Amazon is selling that demographic info in addition to using it themselves). In the case of television, attention is sold to companies that sell goods and services. In the case of Kindle, information about human activity is sold to marketers working on behalf of those selling goods and services. This discussion does, I admit, remain within a fairly classical Marxism, and would probably be a lot more useful in dialogue with work on immaterial and affective labor.

Reading thus becomes a value-productive activity, but not itself a commodity. The upshot of this, for me, is that Kindle owners could conceivably organize a sort of demographic noise-bomb by "reading" books interminably, taking nonsensical or deceptive notes on their Kindle "books," and otherwise scrambling the data gathered by the device. Detourning the device in a way that could perhaps detourn the discursive production of reading as object, returning reading to the realm of practice and invention (even if mischievous invention). Of course, this requires buying the device and some books in the first place, but it is something one can't really do with one's relation to TV commercials—there's no talk-back with commercials, no opportunity to lie about whether or how you're watching them.

To the degree that the Kindle catalyzes the objectification of "reading," it *is* discourse. That's what I meant by referring to its effects as "alchemy." So when you say that the process is oblique, I understand this to be the rhetorical achievement of the technology itself. To the extent that it literally transforms an amorphous constellation of activities into a commodity, it performs the same "reifying" action as a name, a definition or a hegemonic signifier, at once dissimulating its own performative efficacy in doing so. This, in turn, is possible in part because it "reads" like, or comes pre-coded as, an object *rather* than a discourse.

At the same time, insofar as this sort of dissimulation is the condition of possibility for any meaning or objectivity whatsoever, it becomes important to note that, in addition to commodifying already preconstituted practices of reading, the Kindle may represent a step toward commodifying the discursive constitution of practices—or discursive tokens—as such (since reading is not just one practice among others but overtly involves the production of meaning).

I'm so glad you brought up the issue of reception studies. The field seems to me to be begging for some really solid intellectual-historical work that would document the connections between its "discovery" of the active, empowered consumer in the 1970s and efforts among marketers to champion exactly that image of the consumer from the late 1960s on. The coincidence, it seems to me, is no coincidence at all.

With that said, I do believe the contemporary moment is a genuinely mixed one: there are more outlets for active, engaged, grassroots "participatory culture" (a la what we're doing here on D&R^W) than ever before, and only some of those result in direct, value-generating activities such as those I describe in the paper. Of course, I say that not knowing exactly what if anything, Wikidot (the host for this site) does with the information we're posting on it. I suppose I should look into that……..

Thanks for the comment, Dave. Like those preceding it, it opens up some important directions I'll need to explore further. For now, embrace your inner idealist and demand transparency. Heaven knows, we're in a rare moment in which people are beginning once again to see the virtues in regulation.

One thing that struck me about this section is that it seems to equate amazon's outbooking the book not only with an attempt to alienate the labor of reading and reap financial reward, but also with an attempt to out-theorize reception theory. In fact, the whole thing really substantiates something that I've long believed about these savvy new multimedia, multi-international businesses: that they're always a step ahead of the academic disciplines that try to analyze them for some productive social end. While media reception theory (as practiced by academics) in usually attempts to address certain imbalances of power (as here, between the producer and the consumer—although I know that this isn't really a work of reception studies itself), corporations like amazon seem to be using the same theories (although with much better tools at their disposal) in order to accentuate precisely those imbalances within processes of distribution. To my mind, this raises some thorny questions about what theories of epistemology, of knowing what it is consumers actually think and know, actually contribute: is there anything we can do that can't be improved upon for a specifically capitalist gain? The idealist in me wants to agree with your plea for more transparency in how this data is used, but the cynic in me questions whether such businesses have any incentive to do that all…

Dave M.

Thank you so much for your observations and comments!

I personally own a Sony Reader and find it a bit ironic that a company like Sony which is known for particularly harsh DRM and a self professed desire to invade every single aspect of the consumer's "digital life" has missed an opportunity like this.

For me, what's intriguing to note here is how this "selling" seems to occur obliquely. The company never comes out and says, "we're turning reading into an economically lucrative, value generating activity." It just kind of happens, no doubt the result of extensive internal documents and memos, combined with the technology, Kindle, which you might think of as a material bearer of these and other discursive practices. I suppose I'm trying to open up three questions here: (1) is it worth thinking about discourse and technology in cause-effect terms, and if so, which is which? (2) to what extent do we (researchers) have access to the discursive conditions you're speaking of (other than via proxy)? and (3) how would one intervene so as to constrain what you aptly call "discursive largesse?"

Again, a really provocative comment—one that will lead, no doubt, to a broader reconceptualization of the paper in subsequent drafts.

But it may be worth retaining, for critical purposes, some notion of paradox within the newly posed problem; after all, reading becomes labor only when this alchemy is performed. One might argue that what Amazon is selling is just as much the rhetorical technology that objectifies and commodifies "reading" as the activity or products of reading itself. A useful response to such a claim might be to stress the sociality of another, anterior mode of production: the discursive production of *transparent* objectification.

Your astute observations remind me that underneath every form of commodification—of labor, of consumption, of risk, etc.—is a kind of discursive profligacy that makes objectification possible, turning, to read Marx via Bataille, fluid and thus irrepressibly munificent signifying capacities into an infinite variety of relatively stable tokens. This would suggest that, beyond the problem of expropriation for private gain, there is a problem of constraining this discursive largesse, restricting its scope by, in effect, turning it against itself. Is it a coincidence that at stake in the emerging forms of commodification are processes of signification itself?

What's especially interesting to observe here is how Amazon is in the midst of transforming itself from a business into a business "platform," upon which others may now opt to run. I'm not entirely sure of what the implications are of this move, but Amazon may well be reshuffling the deck in terms of our understandings of the relationship between class, power, and ownership.

My impression from having looked both formally and informally at years of journal advertising is this: rarely do different publishers' journals compete explicitly with one another (in the humanities, anyway). Most seem to stress impact factors, rankings within a particular discipline or subject, and other such quantitative measures. And to my knowledge, I've never seen price stressed as a selling point (perhaps because so many journals are published by expensive presses). However, some publishers do emphasize their brand names (i.e., what used to be called their imprimaturs) when advertising their various journal products. But here name recognition seems to me more the issue than the press' prestige per se.

As to the second point you raise, I do not really know how the accounting works, exactly. My understanding is that, while most university presses have seen subventions from their home institutions dry up substantially in recent years, many still receive at least some subsidy. So, yes, this would in principle help keep the price of their journals lower. And indeed, private, for-profit publishers must inflate prices to guarantee profits. The only question I have here, though, is this: To what extent do they need to do that? In the full version of "Acknowledged Goods," which I hope to post here on the D&R Wiki one of these days, I talk about how companies like Taylor & Francis/Informa and Wiley-Blackwell are billion-dollar enterprises. Something tells me they could cut their journal prices were they so inclined.

Thanks again for your comments and questions!

One other question: I don't know much about how these various presses operate-can Duke afford to price its journals lower (and thus make their appeal to institutional subscribers higher) because of its institutional affiliation, whereas Sage, as a private company, might have to make prices higher in order to guarantee its profits? Or is the Duke press fully unsubsidized by the university?

Certainly journal prices are high, in part, because the vast majority of them maintains a very limited readership. And so the point you raise is an interesting one: if we made our research more accessible, would a broader audience be willing to buy (or otherwise engage with) it? And would the journals then be cheaper and more accessible? I'll have to ponder those issues some more, but I like where they're taking me. I may well revisit them in the conclusion to the paper, which will show up here eventually. For now, thanks very much for your comment!