18th September, 2017

I have settled into life with the natives. They are very familiar and welcoming towards me. I continue to be surprised by their charity and generosity. One of them welcomes me into their office and tells me about the various rituals of this place including the “School Forum” and the temperament of various others. I learn which people are irritable and which ones can be counted on. I am intrigued by these fascinating people. 

October 1st, 2017

I have heard the natives speak about “The Nameless Ones”. They do so with tones of reverence and mild fear as though these things decide their fates and shape their entire lives. They tell me that it is very important to them that they prepare offerings that are then accepted by The Nameless Ones. It seems that they believe that their entire livelihoods, hopes, and dreams, depend on whether The Nameless Ones approve of their offerings. One of the natives confesses to me that she loses sleep at night because she is not sure whether The Nameless Ones will accept an offering that she is preparing. 

October 7th, 2017

I observe one of the natives preparing a offering for The Nameless Ones. These noble savages seem dedicated to the practice and, with a discipline and diligence that is a marvel to behold, they often work from dawn to dusk preparing these offerings. I learn that some will spend months of their lives preparing a single offering. I was thus surprised to speak to one of the natives and hear that they believe that making an offering is like a game of chance, a roll of the dice, a question of having the right luck. Sometimes The Nameless Ones will like the offering and accept it, at other times, they will reject it. “There’s no telling which,” they say to me. Indeed, as I speak to the natives they all seem to have stories about incredible offerings that were rejected by The Nameless Ones and none of them ever fully understood why.

December 14th, 2017 

It seems that The Nameless Ones are hard to find. I speak to one of the natives who serves as a Medium, a conduit who summons The Nameless Ones to view an offering. She tells me of how difficult it is to commune with The Nameless Ones, that she invites them to view the offerings but often will not respond and the offerings often sit idle and ignored, waiting to be seen by someone.

January 22nd, 2018

I speak to one native who claims that The Nameless Ones actually really helped them. They suggest that The Nameless Ones were very supportive and helped them see what work they needed to do in order to improve the offering to the point where it could be accepted. They speak with the tone and tenor of one who has come to love the feel of the rubber of the boot that stamps on their face. I ask another native about their experience and learn that they think that it’s all about the Mediums. “If you submit your offering on the right day it will go to a Medium who is more likely to be helpful, more likely to summon The Nameless Ones to offer more helpful comments,” they say. I cannot tell if they believe this or not, but they appear to have in-depth knowledge of when which Mediums will be available.  I must learn more. 

January 23rd, 2018.

I speak to a Medium who suggests that the preparation of the offering is a collaboration between the natives and The Nameless Ones. That the process of making an offering is really about working together to “co-create” something. This seems to me to be so absurd as to beggar belief because I speak to a native who says that The Nameless Ones were ruthless in their critique of his offering, that they largely ignored it, asked him for impossible changes and rejected him when he could not deliver them. The Nameless Ones seem capricious and changeable.

Date Unknown

I have long stopped writing in this journal because I have now become obsessed with uncovering the secrets of The Nameless Ones. I find a document from a Medium that describes that they reject “around half” of the offerings sent by the natives. Of the half that the Medium allows The Nameless Ones to see, a significant number are subpar and The Nameless Ones demand changes, or reject the offering altogether. This seems perverse to me. That these natives should work so hard in order to prepare their offerings, only to have The Nameless Ones respond with scorn and indifference seems obscene. Are The Nameless Ones simply discerning and are able to see the quality of the offerings in a better way than I can, or do The Nameless Ones simply not know what they want and so mercurially demand different and often paradoxical things. I wonder if The Nameless Ones are supposed to reject the offerings so that the natives are encouraged to keep working on their offerings for the next time? There is a curious economy of offerings that I must study further.

Date Unknown

I do not know how it has happened but a Medium has offered me insight into the world of The Nameless Ones. They send me an “Invitation to Review”. I do not know what this will do but I am about to “Accept” it. 

…

I am not sure who I am or what has happened to me. When I Accepted the invitation of the Medium everything changed. The offering was in front of me but I both saw and did not see all of the work that the native had put into it. The Nameless Ones must have inhabited my body. I felt constipated. I felt self-important. I felt the onset of a migraine. I felt too busy to explain myself. I felt like I could never explain myself enough. I looked at the offering and I asked “What it is ‘contributing’ to the conversation in this journal?” I do not know what this means and realized that I had begun to speak in tongues. I have become deranged. I was always deranged. I use words like “relevance”, “structure”, and “impact” in a way that I have not ever done before. I found myself wholly present and aware of my actions, that I was passing judgement on the offering of someone who had worked very hard to prepare it, and then I was absented again and thinking about “the conversation” again and whether this offering was sufficiently important as to merit acceptance. The word “contribution” suddenly had a meaning, and then it didn’t. I lament the “structure” of the offering as a way of reassuring myself that I understand its qualities. I was a judge. The gatekeeper before the Law. An advisor. The clown of god. A research assistant in the archives looking up minutia. A harsh critic. A moron. A Socratic questioner. An expert. The memory of the world. An extraterrestrial watching a human test subject continuously doubt itself. A haze. A lament for academic careerism. A staunch disciplinarian. A rebel who encourages others to break all of the rules. A fury of words. A pedant. I was a lie about who I am….

By the end of it I had passed judgement on the offering and whispered it to the Medium. The Medium responded by thanking me for viewing the offering. They agree with what I have said about it. They praise my advice to the native on how to improve their offering so that it can be accepted. I do not feel pride or satisfaction because The Nameless Ones have left me. I only say “thank you for the opportunity” and leave it at that. I have come to no deeper knowledge of what is happening. 

*    *    *

Over the last few months I’ve reviewed papers for Organization, Organization Studies, and Gender, Work and Organization. Every time that I review, I find that it is a struggle to know what the right thing to say is. Do I think that this paper is weak because it’s not doing what I would do with the ethnographic stories that it is reporting? Am I being harder on it than I should because I want the Associate Editor who invited me to review it to think that I did a good job? Am I being fair enough and trying to understand the author(s)’s argument on their own terms? Am I being uncollegial? Am I giving clear enough instructions for what I think that they should change? Am I being too demanding? I can never tell and never feel sure. 

I decided to use the absurd and perhaps offensively colonial writing device of the found diary in order to try to underscore some of the weirdness and curiosity of the peer-review process as well as all of the mythologization and superstition that runs through it, to say nothing of the anxiety and intense feelings of insecurity, depression, guilt, doubt, and self-loathing that are often entangled within it. It is never “objective”, sometimes it does feel like random chance, and it is always a struggle to respond and comment in a meaningful and supportive way and there aren’t good solutions to this.