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1. Introducing the general peer
A post of the call for papers in response to which this paper was written begins: “Shifting Spheres. Call for Papers to a special issue of Kybernetes [Clarivate Impact Factor: 1.381] [1].” Why is the Clarivate Impact Factor of the journal indicated so prominently here? The short answer to this question is: Because it signals, in the form of a metric abstraction, the value of the journal in the eyes of the “general peer” – the academic public sphere. The long answer is the rest of this paper.
As Wikipedia explains for the layperson: An impact factor of an academic journal “is a scientometric index that reflects the yearly average number of citations that articles published in the last two years in a given journal received. It is frequently used as a proxy for the relative importance of a journal within its field; journals with higher impact factors are often deemed to be more important than those with lower ones [2].” Who “deems” here? Not, as an outsider might guess, the scientific community in the sense of a group of academics who, by “public use of reason,” deliberate and eventually decide on the respective value of the different journals in their field. Such a procedure would be practically impossible given the size, complexity and functioning of academia today. What happens instead is the determination of a statistically – and only statistically – measurable value, a sort of academic “exhibition value” (Benjamin, 1969) that is assigned to publications on the basis of the frequency with which they refer to one another. An impact factor is a numerical “proxy,” as Wikipedia aptly puts it, representing a public standing which, somewhat paradoxically, does not measure or pretend to reveal the professional opinions of any individual academics. The general peer is not the sum of all specific peers; it constitutes itself in the trans-individual and self-referential communication sphere of academic publications.
The impact factor of a journal is “double blind” and does not show which researcher (or which publication) had an impact on which other researcher (or publication). What is more, it may actually be described as triple blind because it also completely refrains from explaining what the impact was – what did it...