Early this week I received a desk rejection for a paper that I had submitted a few months ago to a top journal. I wrote the paper several years ago now, and I no longer feel that it represents my best work. But I still broadly think that it contributes something to the discourse (about AI and capitalism), and had hoped to place it in this journal on account of the fact that last year I had had a paper rejected from the same venue, but with encouraging comments. The peer review timelines in the humanities are punishing, unfortunately, and so I now have on my hands a paper that I’m beginning to feel less excited about (it has been rejected from two journals now), but which I feel that I should still peddle, especially given my early career stage as an academic.
Part of my feeling divided about the academic mercantilism of pushing to publish papers in prestigious venues is that, in the very early years of my PhD, I ‘open sourced’ a paper after another paper came out that (I felt) stole the (almost inaudible) thunder of the point I wanted to make. Though I don’t feel at all that this paper was my best work, I do hear every now and then from folks who have found it on my website and find the writing useful or interesting one way or another. Had I published it in the non open-access venue for which it was written, I very much doubt it would have been read as much. Of course, releasing papers as ‘preprints’ on my website abandons the benefits of peer review, which are non-trivial when the process is done right. But I increasingly am beginning to feel as though the time-cycle of peer review in the humanities (6-12 months, sometimes more) also prevents a lot of good work from coming out in a timely fashion. Whether or not the essay that I have just had rejected is a part of that ‘good work’ is, of course, a question that I am not best positioned to answer, as the paper’s sole author and therefore someone with an emotional attachment to the piece that makes me want to see it as such.
On the reading front, I am still working my way through Kojin Karatani’s Kantian Marxian treatise Transcritique, a book whose argument will help structure the transition from Chapter 1 to Chapter 2 of my dissertation. (I currently have a full draft of Chapter 1, and need to complete a full draft of Chapter 2 before the summer is out.) I also churned through a number of the articles in the most recent edition of the LRB (having just purchased a subscription), and finally opened George Eliot’s Middlemarch, having purchased a hard copy of the novel last Christmas.