I don’t know if this is just an idiosyncrasy on my part, but I tend to think of performative language as though it worked the same as descriptive language, as though the language reported on some event that had already occurred, or at least had occurred separately in some sense, rather than being simultaneously the event and the reporting of it. I look for the event that is being reported, there is no such event, and my mind proceeds to chase its tail in various unhelpful ways. Or, if I’m the person who is supposed to engage in performative speech, I feel like I’m supposed to wait for some event to happen so that I can then report that it happened. I think ritual plays a role here. Performative speech tends to be ritualized, or at least to adopt a very formal and stilted tone. “I now pronounce you man and wife,” for instance, when saying simply, “You are married,” does not differ appreciably in content but doesn’t have the gravitas we expect from performative speech. Or, even in an informal context, there is a particular pattern of words that has become ritualized as the performative form. If you ordered food at a restaurant the same way a priest performs a wedding, you might say something like, “I am now ordering a taco.” In this informal context we express it as though it were an abstract desire, something that we hope will come to pass through the beneficence of the universe. “I would like a taco.” In that phrasing, it seems to report on a desire that exists in a private reality, despite functioning performatively.

There’s a little black hole hidden in there somewhere into which my mind falls on occasion, and I can’t really pin it down. A feeling that there should be an external cause or justification when there simply isn’t. Whatever exactly this vortex is, it is not unique to performative language although this is the form in which it presents itself to me today and in which it seems to be at least a little more tractable than usual.

Today, it is brought to light because I decided to have a self-published journal for research articles. When I mentioned this idea a couple months ago, an online friend of mine said, “That sounds like a blog.” Yes, it does, except that it would seem very odd to write a blog post in the form of a research paper. Put the label “academic journal” on it, and suddenly uploading words to a website is in a totally different social context. The format is also performative. For instance, would you format a blog post in two columns? I’m sure someone has, but again this would be quite odd. For a research article, though, using two columns gives a set of words some extra unit of real research article-ness. Sure, some academic journals use a single column–but, come now, is that really any different than a blog post?

One of the particular examples I ran across is accepting an article for publication. One of the sticking points that really does matter for self-published research is that it needs to be accessible and archived in a form that will be widely accessible into the foreseeable future. The obvious venue in biology is bioRxiv, and realizing that bioRxiv can fulfill this role is what led me down the self-publishing path. I realized it was possible, and then it started to seem like a good idea. In any case, bioRxiv kind of occupies a weird space in relation to performative language and “real” academic journals. BioRxiv is, basically, a publisher of unpublished papers. If you compare bioRxiv to online publication of an academic journal, it’s hard to nail down a definitive distinction between the two except that the academic journal puts a pdf online and labels it a published article, while bioRxiv puts a pdf online and labels it a pre-print article. You might think–ah, but the academic journal has peer review and institutional legitimacy and all that! Well, first, bioRxiv doesn’t publish just any old pdf. There is a review process, even if it is very rudimentary and the bar for acceptance is explicitly very low. The review process is more about making sure this looks approximately like research rather than looking like porn, and explicitly not about making sure it looks like good research. And, on the academic journal side, there is a cottage industry that sells the appearance of being a real academic journal. The whole point of these journals is that they look exactly like journals and have the words on the website saying they are peer-reviewed and everything. There probably even is a peer review process, although it probably isn’t much more rigorous than the review process for bioRxiv. Some of them even have impact factors, a measure of academic importance that looks incredibly silly once you know that the kind of publication run by someone sends spam emails saying, “Hey, I saw your paper on an obscure plant, would you like to submit your next paper to our prestigious journal on cancer research?” can rank higher than the kind of publication that is run by people who have dedicated the last few decades to studying obscure plants. By any quantitative measure of research quality used by universities to evaluate faculty, you could basically publish your bellybutton lint to one of the spam journals, and if it had “coronavirus” in the title it would rank higher than the work of someone who has spent the last two decades studying taxonomy of the genus Fissidens. Which is to say, academic culture is clickbait culture in many ways but–for god’s sake–at least with two columns if you want to be taken at all seriously.

I got rather sidetracked there, but maybe it’s an amusing rabbit trail so I will leave it. In any case, bioRxiv is a preprint archive. So, when you upload a paper, at one point you must click the box to affirm, “I know this is a preprint server, and I solemnly swear that this paper has not already been accepted and published.” For a self-published journal this is a bit of a quandary. I have some idea in my mind about whether the paper is ready to be published, sure, but can we let performative thought in the door? Surely not. So, what constitutes “being accepted for publication”? Well, getting an email from the editor of the journal saying that your paper has been accepted. I thought ahead at least far enough to create an email address for the editor of my journal. So, I can click that box in good faith until such time as an email has been sent from that address stating that the paper has been accepted.

That’s a lot of words for what is, basically, a joke that is mildly amusing to a very small set of people. This touches at least tangentially on some mysteries that preoccupy me, though. I doubt any light has been shed here, but sometimes I think that if I keep going long enough mere duration can perform the work of insight.