The crisis in scholarly communication systems is both a topic of philosophical and pragmatic concern. It is traditional to elevate theory above practice, so I begin with the philosophy of the crisis. Or is it the crisis of philosophy? The literature of contemporary philosophical and cultural theoretical crisis is too vast to attempt here even a brief analysis of the ways in which the many Postmodern crises of knowledge can be equated or mapped to a perceived crisis in academic communication systems. With the exception of Lyotard who is one of my central foci, my approach here will not be to recount the litany of the descriptions of crises in representation, crises in terms of the age of mechanical reproduction, crises in legitimation, and all the other forms the rhetoric of 20th century philosophical crisis takes. I will rather take the simple tactic of acknowledging the elephant in our midst. The status of knowledge and the academic enterprise in the 20th century has shifted, to the extent that we can speak of a "rhetoric of crisis in higher education." [Scott, 1995] I cannot analytically prove all the elements of the crisis have one intelligible source that it makes sense to talk about: no one knows if that is the case or not. But there are some things that we do know, and I will resort to relating them as a fable. If poetry and fable were good enough for Walter Benjamin, they are good enough for me:

Once upon a time the blind men had a dog that led them around. The dog was called the Modern Age. Then something appeared and killed the dog. The blind men could not fathom it, other than through their isolated gropings. Since it killed the dog, and remained there after the dog, they called it the Postmodern Age. The name "elephant" has to stand in here for the unknown creature, but the blind men of course do not know about what an elephant is. They know about leaf-like ears, tree-like legs, crises in representation, etc. I am one of these blind men. I know about the ears, let's say. Like the rest of my blind tribe, I have come to think that there is a creature with all these seemingly different attributes that is terrorizing us. I cannot prove this. If you ask me to prove to you that the crisis in scholarly communication systems (an ear) is part of the same crisis as, say, the Postmodern crisis of the legitimation of knowledge (the foot), I cannot do that for you, here and now in this brief space. I don't even know if it is one elephant, or a herd, or a whole zoo of creatures. All I can say is: trust me for now, and follow me along the paths I can take you on. I tell you that there is an elephant (or some rampaging thing), and that it hasn't killed us yet, but that we need to understand it and begin to tame it, or at least to make friends with it.

That is my goal: to get to know the elephant (or at least its ear) and be friendly with it. I have two blind friends, named Bourdieu and Lyotard, who know much more than I about other parts of the beast. I will see if I can tell you a story about where the creature is going from all the parts that we three have studied.