by Timothy Brennan
“When should I publish?” seems like a logistical question, but it is really an intellectual one: do I have anything to say? Acquisitions editors from academic presses have been busy roving the country delivering the bad news that too much is printed, and too little read, in our circles. But who’s to say it will be you whose work ends up in that stack of old journals littering the trash bins of professorial offices? So, the better, more optimistic way to pose the question is: “When should I begin to think about trying to publish?” Or, “When is the right time for me to publish this or that?” These are different matters, and I’ll take them in turn.
When to publish? Now, in graduate school, in my opinion. You will never be as creative as you are now. Everything you do later in life is inside you now waiting to spring forth. Speaking personally, the essay of mine that has gotten the most attention, and been most widely cited (even recently, twenty years later), I wrote in graduate school. We have all heard the saying “no wine before its time,” and anyone who reads for journals or has had to plow through the pretentious essays held together by deferential quotations, can only agree with this advice. But the fact is that ignorance is also productive. Thinking in new ways depends on not knowing all the good reasons for refusing the attempt. Experience makes writing deeper and more beautiful, but it also creates a wilderness of second-guessing which is the dead center of a lot of academic writing, marked as it is by an imperious caution. Certain ideas, after all, are open only to the newcomer, because a person does only what he or she has not learned is impossible.
Anyway, trying to get something published forces you to come to know the journals, the magazines, the newspapers, and the publishing houses, learning what they like, what their formats are, who they are talking to. You begin reserving a day every month to go to the current periodicals reading room (or its on-line equivalent) to devour contemporary criticism of all kinds, in all venues. You begin to remember the names of editors, and start paying attention to the book series of various publishing houses, and who runs them. It makes you think about audience. This whole process begins to move you crucially from the point of affection for a style (mimicking Badiou, Ranciere, Zizek) to the act of actually making a style.
The counter-arguments to getting published too early are well known. They say you’ll be stuck with inchoate mutterings, now fixed, hanging around your neck like a smelly fish for the rest of your career. But if you place an inferior piece in a low-grade journal, very few will read your essay anyway. Nothing is really lost. If you place one in a crossover publication or middle-brow magazine – which is unlikely, since they are very hard to break into — the shelf-life of their articles is at most six months. After that it will be old news, and will not be part of anyone’s discussion – so, again, no blood. Does trying to publish in graduate school interfere with the dissertation? It could, but the whole profession is set up to make crazy multi-tasking demands, so having a number of projects underway at once is good practice, and it is the only way to ensure that, over time, you will have work at various stages of completion for the purpose of refining over the one- to two-year period it takes to make it good enough to see the light of day.
A few other reasons for my view: Ideas do not get stale just because the delay in expressing them allowed others to get there first, or because the episteme has shifted, but because the “you” who might have done justice to the idea no longer exists. You no longer have the energy, you stumbled into other distractions, or you were approached to attend a conference or contribute to an anthology, and now there’s nothing left. It all amounts to the same thing: you waited too long. Another way to look at it is that whatever you learn in the process of publishing will strengthen the dissertation, and will make it seem less like an exercise, and more like a book that addresses an actual audience.
“When” is everything. You can be too original to be heard (too early); or hold onto something in the name of an impossible perfection (too late). The graveyards of graduate programs are loaded with those who read too long before trying to speak — those who thought too highly of themselves, imagining they were already the critics and theorists they were emulating. So when it came to putting their own thoughts to paper and to living up to their own self-image, they of course seemed shallow in comparison – even to themselves. Not being able to handle the gap, they ended up paralyzed, unable to write at all.
Likewise, there are moments for an idea’s reception. In the early 1990s, I sent in a piece on rap to Critical Inquiry, which I did precisely because they had never published such a thing, nor did they seem likely to. Rap was all over the headlines, but only as a sociological problem, not as an art form or cultural practice. I reasoned that a piece on the aesthetics of rap in a journal where one expects forums on 19th-century French painting could just as easily work for me as against me. Within six months of submission, the piece appeared in print, thanks to the catholic outlook of the editors. Had I done the same thing five years later, it would not have worked.
Still, the profession largely has a collective mind, which means more than that it follows fashions. The avenues of circulation are paved by over-worked, nervous intellects who, by a mysterious process of selection, and usually unable to read and consider a truly broad range of work, determine that some, and not other, ideas will be declared the center. It’s a labor-saving operation more than anything (which means that the intellectual “periphery” with the wrong views, and above all, the wrong footnotes, doesn’t have to be brooked). And then there’s also a lot of unacknowledged censorship. If you cross the wrong schools in our circles, you can spend your whole career outside the “when,” and remain beyond the pale. Consequently, a lot of people refashion the “what” to avoid banishment. For this reason, I’ve had better intellectual experiences with commercial publishers of serious non-fiction, like Norton, than with the gatekeeping journals of postcolonial or cultural studies, since the former do not assume that a particular school of thought has clearly defeated its rivals, and brought a necessary and exclusive language in its wake. The fact of the matter is that big serious non-academic publishing houses are trying to reach a bigger world than is the case with academic publishing.
Let me conclude with two more general points. We were asked by the panel organizers to relate the best piece of advice we received about publishing when we were younger. To tell you the truth, I don’t recall getting any publishing advice as a graduate student. Like a lot of other programs, the one in which I now teach offers professionalization seminars, elaborate mock interviews, faculty mentoring, library workshops and so on. None of this existed at Columbia in the mid-1980s when I was in graduate school. So maybe we’re over-compensating. It has always been hard to get a job in this profession (it was so even when I was an undergraduate), but it’s almost as though our answer to the desperate state of reified knowledge, commercialization, and contract labor is: more advice.
Finally, we may think of neoliberalization as the enemy from outside that enters our world to slash resources, foreclose tenure-track jobs, and promote instrumental knowledge. A lot of graduate students today seem to think of the PhD as merely a necessary accreditation. They tolerate it to get the authorization they need to say what they already know, or think they know, before entering the program. What they want is an entrée, and they’re not interested in mastering a field of knowledge or opening themselves up to an unruly breadth of sources in a non-teleological pursuit of whatever is interesting. So we see here a new kind of instrumental thinking, in other words, working on behalf of aestheticized thought whose validity lies in a politics of running-and-dodging – a politics that thinks not being pinned down is the ultimate virtue. In my opinion, this sort of radical entrepreneurship is an expression of neoliberalism itself. What we should all be fighting is spectatorship and the entertainment of thought (no less than the thought of entertainment). A lot of writing today puts its money on walking the walk (trying on someone else’s voice). But what we need are positions clearly taken, defended with evidence, and based on a concept of ground and of correspondence. This may sound simple-minded, except for the emphasis in our circles on the business of getting it into print.