Interiors of publication practices

We are in a great period of witnessing the metamorphosis of publication history, but we can frame this history according to certain ideas at work in the Arcades Project, which itself is a kind of blueprint or evidentiary moment of the key components of that history. For instance, feudalism. If we look at I2,3 we can see a certain passage taking place where the way in which distinction is used in the bourgeois interior filters into the privileged domestic environment a "posture of struggle and defense" that derives from feudal times. This is expressed artistically as much as it is emotionally and perhaps financially. Scholarly publication practice is the same. We need only to consider how scholarship is attempting to deal with the Arcades Project itself (and my guess is that we'll come back to this when we get to more secondary literature): the professionalized, middle class apparatus of university-based scholarship needs to arrange itself around the research object in such a way that it fortifies its position, in nothing less than a medieval manner, of maintaining various hierarchies, workflows, and financial commitments, adopting at its deepest and most material levels of structuration an "unconscious retention of a posture of struggle and defense." Here is where our current theorization of textuality perhaps starts and stops. "They will never quite have done with feudalism." As we problematize scholarly discourse along these lines then, and simply following a desire, which it should be said originates precisely from the university context, we should be careful not to fall back into this so predictable and hackneyed oppositional posture, an instance of "satanic knowing" of I2,6. It seems only to be at rare moments that scholarly publication practices even gesture at distinguishing themselves from a nineteenth century domestic interior. "To live in these interiors was to have woven a dense fabric about oneself, to have secluded oneself within a spider's web, in whose toils world events hang loosely suspended like so many insect bodies sucked dry. From this cavern one does not like to stir." The courage of convictions here leads down a road of reinterpreting any given scholarly object through the lenses of historical consciousness that puts material publication practices and outcomes at the center of knowledge formation.