There is no doubt that the online environment has changed our intellectual culture around the globe. One consequence of the kind of celebrity intellectual culture which has developed since the turn of the century is the production of open access online journals devoted to theorists such as Jean Baudrillard, Alain Badiou and Slavoj Zizek. I am personally strongly committed to open access and I think on balance these projects are an overwhelmingly good thing and hope they continue long into the future. They are not the be all and end all in publishing but are certainly valuable digital contributions to knowledge in these ‘theoretical times’ alongside myriad other platforms, digital and analogue. They are relatively young ventures; nevertheless they have already showcased some very interesting work on notoriously complex theories and diverse topics and have introduced plenty of previously unexplored connections between theorists themselves. The International Journal of Baudrillard Studies began in 2004, the International Journal of Zizek Studies began in 2007 and Badiou Studies began in 2012 and mostly publish two or three issues per year. I have been involved in both the Baudrillard and Zizek ones and would recommend anyone to write for them and to regularly read them. In each case I was approached to write for specific special issues and my experience of them as an author has been really rewarding and as a reader I have learnt a great deal from the published articles. The Baudrillard one was strongly supported by Jean Baudrillard personally until his death in 2007 and has gone from strength to strength in the last decade. Post-Baudrillard Studies indeed! The Zizek one has had a thorough digital revamp recently and the subsequent archives are well worth trawling through for some fine essays and provocative ideas.
In some cases the open access journals overlap: for instance in 2016 the International Journal of Zizek Studies has already published an excellent special issue on Slavoj Zizek and Jean Baudrillard around the theme ‘Before Zizek – There was Baudrillard’ with an article by Zizek himself. Indeed Zizek has published in it before and has supported the journal widely. But beware! In a rerun of a scandal from the 1990s, recently 2016 Badiou Studies hit the headlines for having to retract their acceptance (and publication in Vol 4 No 1) of an article purportedly by a single author which turned out to be a hoax by two authors writing about Badiou, raising comparisons with a similar hoax by Alan Sokal in the mid-1990s which supposedly sought to expose ‘postmodernism’. In the 1990s case what happened was this. Alan Sokal, a physics Professor, submitted a hoax article to the journal Social Text. It was accepted for publication and then Sokal himself revealed the essay as a hoax aimed at ‘unmasking’ the ‘intellectual imposters’ then masquerading as so-called ‘postmodern theorists’. Furore duly followed and theory and theorists were mercilessly trashed in the global media. Not satisfied with this outcome, Alan Sokal, with a fellow physics Professor Jean Bricmont, published a ludicrous book called Intellectual Impostures (French, geddit?), lamely picking apart the work of the likes of Jean Baudrillard, Jacques Derrida, Paul Virilio and Bruno Latour. The aim of the physicists was to show that such global luminaries ‘misused’ science – its terms, concepts, methods and so on. And to denigrate their work as ‘fashionable nonsense’. Alain Badiou gets the same treatment in the recent scandal – though as he rebuked them in a short reply, he was always a classicist scholar rather than any kind of postmodernist. In the 2016 Badiou Studies ‘rerun’ this time there were two authors (both philosophers) who masqueraded as one (with a made up ‘continental’ name) and in a postmodernish parody of the first scandal ‘came out’ as hoaxers once the publication had been achieved. Times are different though today. Digital online publishing means, as an editorial board of a journal, you can just press delete and the hoax article is gone. The ‘real’ Badiou Studies 4.1 (and all the previous issues) exists online in all its glory and is well worth reading. Who are the Intellectual Imposters now?
