About vicarious blame, containers, and contents: Rejoinder to le Grange

Résumé 0

In this article, I reflect on le Grange's (2019) response to my article (Maistry, 2019) on predatory publishing. I engage with his critique on various levels. While I agree with the notion of embracing positive action, I analyse the usefulness of the dichotomisation of ethics and morality in understanding how this phenomenon should play itself out in academia. I contemplate the "container" versus "contents" debate, and its implications for the South African scholarship context. I also draw attention to the workings of two neoliberal markets at play in the academic publishing space: the neoliberal market for publishing services, and the market for published scholarship and offer some tentative implications for academics who have to inhabit this space. Finally, I argue that for debate to reach a high level of robustness, it has to start somewhere. For a phenomenon like predatory publishing, it might mean accommodating multiple perspectives, be they moralising, engaging an immanent ethics, even defensiveness. In fact, immanent critique urges the need to resist the temptation to "moralise" right or wrong approaches to debating this phenomenon. I reflect on how le Grange has extended the debate to include predation for publishing, an issue I argue is complexly connected to the historicity of containers (journals) serving as conduits for the propagation of racist ideology.