On April 6, 1980, Le Monde published an interview with a French intellectual, whose name was not disclosed at the time. It was later revealed to be Michel Foucault. Foucault chose anonymity not to launch a critique but because he believed that knowing an author’s identity held little value. As he would later suggest in another interview, except for a few exceptional authors, it rarely matters who the author of a text is. “It would be better,” Foucault concluded, “if books were read for themselves, with whatever faults and qualities they may have.”
These thoughts by Foucault came to me after I received a communication from an academic publisher to which I had submitted a book proposal for an edited collection. The email stated that, after considerable back-and-forth between the editor and her superior, they had one fundamental concern with my proposal. In brief, I was told that there were simply too few senior scholars (Ph.D.’s) involved in my project. At least 80% of the contributors should hold a Ph.D. in philosophy. If I wanted to proceed with this publisher, I would need to reject papers written by non-Ph.D. scholars and seek out a few new contributors who held a Ph.D. Interestingly, there was nothing wrong with the subject matter or the ideas the book was exploring. Those were just splendid. I simply needed to adjust the percentages. Once those were acceptable, the contract would be ready for me to sign.
Although I understood the publishers’ concerns, it didn’t seem correct. Titles were interfering here in a similar way as Foucault’s names had some decades ago.
However, it is important to acknowledge that the publisher is a private company, with every right to accept or reject proposals as it sees fit. Yet, given that this publisher, along with its competitors, holds a significant share of the academic publishing market, its private decisions have public consequences; and these consequences extend into the academic world itself.
It wasn’t just Foucault who came to mind as I was digesting the communication from the publisher. In fact, more than Foucault, it was Thomas Kuhn and a specific assertion he made in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions that kept returning to me. In this groundbreaking work, Kuhn argues that during periods of “normal science”—when a paradigm is hegemonic and mature, with no immediate threats of discontent or revolution—the work of scientists consists primarily of “mop-up work.” This “puzzle-solving” operates through the government of established practices and their practitioners, and has little aim of discovering or producing “major novelties, conceptual or phenomenal.” Although there is little inclination toward critically questioning foundational principles or guiding rules, and compliance is enforced through exemplary practices, all of this can still yield fascinating work as Kuhn claims (and I completely agree).
Despite having always found this argumentation theoretically convincing, this was the first time I truly experienced its practical implications. To my surprise, the presence of these rules (if we can call them that) felt confining. It was no longer a matter of navigating and playing with the borders of the scientific paradigm — a space where I have long been content to operate, aware that my academic work often exists at the fringes of both my field and academia itself. Yet, this rather banal decision by a publisher revealed the oppressive nature of these same borders. When simplistic bureaucratic rules are enforced by lateral players within a paradigm, the mop-up work and puzzle-solving becomes increasingly tedious. This, in turn, has tangible consequences, limiting, for example, what is made accessible to the scientific community.
This became immediately apparent in the changes to my project (operating at the margins, I lack the luxury of letting contracts pass by, so I had to adjust accordingly and do my best to support as many junior scholars as possible). Among the many differences, the most striking one is that senior scholars tend to mold a project to fit their existing work and ideas, while younger scholars are more willing to shape their work around the project itself, demonstrating greater flexibility and creativity. This shouldn’t come as a surprise, as seniority is a mere bureaucratic designation that has no inherent connection to creativity or the quality of work.
In an ironic twist to Foucault’s observation, we might conclude that, except in the case of some lesser junior scholar, it rarely serves any purpose knowing what seniority an author of a text is. Titles and bureaucratic credentials hardly ever reflect the true quality of scholarly work. Maybe it is time for publishers (who are not to be considered as cause of this structural problem but as part of a problematic system) to reconsider this practice.
Kristof Vanhoutte
Kristof K.P. Vanhoutte is a Research Fellow in the Department of Philosophy at the University of the Free State in Bloemfontein, South Africa. His primary research focuses on the hermeneutics of death and the afterlife. His most recent publication is The Mirror of Death: Hermeneutical Reflections on the Realms of the Afterlife (Rowman & Littlefield, 2024).
