In defense of the book you will never read

Alistair Rolls, co-Editor of Unbridling the Western Film Auteur

What greater success could a book have than to become a bestseller? After all, wouldn’t it be wonderful if an academic publication could change the hearts and minds of the public, or expand people’s understanding of the world around them?

The prospect is tempting, but the truth is that genuine academic research does not work that way. Public consumption will come later, if it comes at all. First there is research to be done, and then conclusions to be drawn and publication of the results. That publication is written by academics for academics. Shorter, watered-down versions of those publications then occasionally reach newspapers, TV spots and possibly YouTube channels.

Until recently, this cycle seemed to work just fine. The publication of “dense” and “inaccessible” books allowed for a continued exchange of ideas among academics, while the general public was satisfied with newspaper summaries that gave them the “gist” of what was being discussed in certain academic circles.

A shift in practices

The problem with books written by academics for academics is that they don’t “go viral”. As a result, there is a growing desire to dumb down academia. Universities and publishing houses are becoming organized along distinctly commercial lines. Knowledge value has been replaced with quantitative data such as hits, impact, outreach measures, etc. Buzz words not normally associated with the academic pursuit of knowledge, such as “clients”, “KPIs” and so on are now finding their way into academic vernacular. In other words, the emphasis is shifting from “knowledge/research produced” to “dollars earned” (ostensibly in order to do research). Watering down academic texts might make those books more prone to becoming bestsellers, but it risks putting the cart before the horse.

Without academic texts, we are left with nothing but fun facts and buzz words, which on the surface might seem sufficient, but which in reality are void of any context or real meaning.

That isn’t to say that knowledge should be kept locked in an ivory tower somewhere, but rather that there is no reason, beyond obvious financial imperatives, that texts written for the general public should be given greater academic value and prestige than academic work written by academics for academics.

Knowledge is a process

Knowledge cannot be gained through the exchange of viral tweets, but neither, of course, should it remain a matter of academics “preaching to the choir” in endless echo chambers. On the contrary, genuine collaboration is not about two people who know a lot about something coming together to make a research output more expedient; instead, it is about two or more people leaving their respective areas of disciplinary expertise to extend into a common area that they do not know.

This kind of knowledge creation is one that has always appealed to me. Nothing shuts down discourse more dramatically than “too great a knowledge of the field”. How many books have been poorly read or passed by unread, because “everyone knows” what that kind of book is about? Agatha Christie is a good example. How many people remember the scene of lesbian lust at the start of The Body in the Library? No one, it appears. And yet, there it is, in full view, obscured only by the knowledge that Christie wrote traditional, cozy whodunits — three words that mean only one thing: that no one has troubled to engage with the texts. As Stephen Greenblatt laments in his manifesto for cultural mobility, academic silos and ivory towers have a tendency to create dogmatic thinking, of fixing and taxonomizing.

This kind of knowledge creation is not designed to be of the top-down variety: it is not, for example, written by the academic for the general public. People will not be queuing up to discover how, for example, auteur theory can be rethought or subverted. This is old-fashioned peer-to-peer research designed to reach out to that handful of other scholars interested in playing with films and their theory. This is not, in other words, commercially important or, as we now put it, “strategic” research.

Without the support of publishers who put academic pursuit before large financial gains, academia risks facing a crisis. The number of publishers who still value academic pursuit in this way is dwindling, and with them the number of venues through which academics can have a genuine exchange of ideas, free from the pressure to perform in an incredibly competitive book market.

Our recent publication, Unbridling the Western Film Auteur, would be hard to sell to a University Press for the very reason that it does not appeal to a wide readership. A subvention was required to make this book happen. These subventions are not requested because the book is not of a high quality, but simply because books that add to the canon of knowledge, or better still that challenge it, are not designed to have commercial success. Subventions support small print runs and are necessary for us, in some disciplines, to conduct research that really matters.