When a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, do I accumulate symbolic capital?

On publishing, community and knowledge production
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Essay by Arja Karhumaa
Cover illustration by Nejc Prah
October 2024

I find it fascinating how many things we call publications, how many practices get referred to as publishing. I often find myself thinking about publishing, weaving together various threads of practice. One thread for the designer, one for the academic, one for the publisher. 

I’m a practising graphic designer working in university education, the most recent years a tenured professor. That’s a thread that comes with increasing expectations towards one’s contribution to the discipline. 

Running along this line, I feel the push and pull of two slightly different communities: the community of practitioners and community of scholars. They are part of the same fabric but made up of different fibres. So one ends up finding methods of weaving different yarns in different times and different ways. 

I view these communities through the lens of publishing, and at publishing through the lens of knowledge production. Because if I’m invested in the development of both arenas, what and how exactly do they expect me to publish?

My questions begin close to home. What to publish? For whom? What kinds of publishing practices do I subscribe to already? How are communities formed and maintained through various acts and practices of publishing? 

Acts that count as publishing: I publish as the author. I publish as the co-editor. I publish as the translator. I publish as the publisher. These might also form various combos and constellations. What is their value and where do they take me?

And why is it sometimes so hard to shed the idea that publishing has to take me somewhere? Often where it takes me is lost in what Janneke Adema calls the “reputation economy”.

I’ll elaborate. When I publish a scholarly anthology with a multinational academic publishing conglomerate, will my designer colleagues next door hear me? When I publish another writer’s text in a window on a small street in Helsinki’s Vallila district, does it make a sound in the high ranking university striving for pioneering excellence? When I publish in my own language, will the reader-ship sink? When a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, do I accumulate symbolic capital?

Systems of scholarly publishing are, first of all, well established and secondly, sometimes brutal. Scientific knowledge at large is produced and distributed through academic papers in respected journals published by multinational conglomerates. To publish a paper in a scholarly journal, the writer submits their text to an evaluation called peer review by anonymous experts in their field: an editing process which ensures the quality, validity and contribution of the research. 

Peer review as a practice is 350 years old. Over time, it has extended to not only ensuring the quality of a research paper, but also having a direct impact on the academic careers of individuals. When academic faculty is evaluated for recruitment or tenure, the significance of their research is often measured by quantity: the number of peer reviewed contributions in their CV. 

This type of scholarship is “created to function as a product to exchange on the reputation market”. 

The market is not only symbolic. It also produces big bucks for the publishers. Peer-reviewed articles are collected in issues of academic journals which are sold (and priced) to institutions, not individuals. To avoid paywalls and publish their work as Open Access, writers can be asked to pay extra charges of thousands of euros. 

Designers tied to universities, students and faculty, have free access to academic journals through their institutions. Individual design professionals, however, are unlikely to follow the discussion taking place within research communities. 

They don’t have to. Practitioners interested in discussions altogether might find the most relevant writing outside academia. This is where practising designers and thinkers have published significant contributions to the field over the last decades. There is a good amount of high quality writing mostly, but not exclusively, from the Anglo-American discourse in the field. 

These publications are not peer reviewed but worked through the editorial process of publishing houses of various shapes and sizes. They’re available in more or less specialised bookshops at retail price. They are written for and within a community of practitioners. Urgent topics can be released at a relatively swift pace. And whereas academia still relies heavily on scholarship modelled on printed forms, professional writing explores online and hybrid forms in more agile ways.

As I was writing this essay, AIGA announced their decision to take down their Eye on Design online magazine. To me this publication has represented a continuation of the critical writing produced by American design practitioners in earlier decades, now with a more urgent tone, and a keen eye on contemporary essentials such as decoloniality and intersectionality. 

The magazine had become well known for publishing insightful texts written by interesting and emerging practitioners, so the shutdown triggered an outpouring of dismay on social media from designers and educators. 

Why? Well, imagine a budding academic who had their essay published in this respected online platform, and by doing so also gained an item for their CV valuable in advancing their career – gone. Imagine a graduate student who cited an article in their thesis – gone. Imagine a design educator who used several Eye on Design essays in their classroom – all gone. Imagine a busy practitioner at a design agency who saved the interesting link to their reading list. In all cases, the references would now lead to broken links, and the sources could only be found through extensive searching, if at all. 

I’m using this case as an example of a division between professional and academic communities and their ways of sharing knowledge.To do so, I’m offered more clarity during a guest lecture at my home university where researcher Antoinette Rouvroy proposes a distinction between knowledge and insight. 

Knowledge, Rouvroy says, aims to gain robustness and reliability. This is discernible in how scholarly writing is scrutinised and edited layer by layer by peers before accepted for publication. Insight, on the other hand, according to Rouvroy, is agile and rushes to get there before the competitor. 

The distinction bears little value judgement but is instead an epistemological one – addressing what we think is knowledge and why and how that knowledge is produced. In my mind the coarse division I’ve made between academics and professionals parallels Rouvroy’s distinction of knowledge and insight. 

For known reasons, design academics lean towards the system of making their knowledge robust through the established system of scholarly gatekeeping. The scholarly community has internalised writing as the principal vehicle for producing and storing knowledge, so the references and links between writings are cherished and maintained, and their original authorship respected. Academia works with longer time spans across the board, and has established, if not perfected, processes for archiving. 

The downside of the robustness is that the processes of academic publishing are extremely slow for today’s world. 

Professionals,on the other hand, would seem to be committed to insight: they have something to say about their perceptions based on their practice and they put it out there. This is what is appealing in writing by practitioners: the word gets out faster, it does not follow the rigid structures of scholarly papers. Writing as such is secondary to practice, and so is its preservation. 

Writing by professionals tends to be more provocative and aims to impress: “The New Typography.” “Fuck Content.“  “CAPS LOCK.” The writer is lucky if a soundbite is connected to their name. Something in this suggests to me that the writing published by professionals, based on insight, is injected with some of the logics of commodity that the whole modernist graphic design industry is (rightly) criticised for. And why wouldn’t it be, being so close to the practice itself? 

The downside of professional insight is, as the AIGA shutdown exemplifies, that in its focus on practice, individuality and urgency, the professional community might not be as invested in the longevity and the communal aspects of its knowledge as it could be.

Questions I keep returning to: Does publishing equal writing? What counts as knowledge and for whom? How do we provide the existing knowledge with sufficient care and attention, so links are maintained and not broken? Are there particular links between these communities that can be cherished through publishing? 

The academic keeps away from independent publishing because the scholarly system does not reward it. The design practitioner keeps away from academic publishing because she is foremost a real-time communicator. Editorial processes might be time consuming everywhere quality is made, but the extended timeframes of academic publishing can seem excruciatingly long for professionals used to getting work swiftly into distribution. 

Both figures are tied to a reputation economy but each with a different twist. What I’d like to see is communities resisting the pressures of these mechanisms and leaning on their shared knowledge instead. 

Because ultimately, are the communities of practitioners and academics as separate as I feel? 

Surely there are other people besides me feeling they belong to both? Why is it difficult to find individuals publishing on both of these arenas? Do these communities listen to each other? 

In ”Living Books”, Janneke Adema articulates some of the underlying assumptions linking knowledge to print-based stability and authorship, and how practices built around those assumptions ought to transform scholarship altogether. I feel those changes are also imperative to increase the granularity in relations between professional and academic communities – to create what Adema calls “communities to come.” 

I find myself ending this text by reaching for a starting point: where can others turn if they too are interested in shaping their own publishing communities?

One place I recommend to begin is the Experimental Publishing Compendium.