Peer Review, Autonomy and the Pursuit of Excellence

Recently I've had a couple of conversations about the peer review process with students and also with fellow artists who don't write for peer-reviewed journals.
It's got me thinking about why I think peer review is a good thing, and why the process of peer review does improve writing.

I know that my own writing has always been improved in response to comments from others. When I was doing my PhD, comments were from supervisors, and then examiners. Supervisors helped me to see that I hadn't captured an argument, or where I'd been lazy in my thinking. The examiner showed me, much to my continuing frustration, that most of my fellow artists maintain a relatively orthodox Marxist set of assumptions, that if I fail to address I do so at my peril. This is a lesson I continue to forget.

Since my PhD, nearly every publication I have written has been reviewed in a blind process, where I don't know who the reviewer is, though sometimes I try to guess.

The trick is not necessarily to take on all comments that a reviewer might make, but to try to understand which of the many comments is actually relevant, what points are helpful in clarifying an argument, and which comments can be dismissed. This process is not dissimilar to being an art student.

When I supervise students, they sometimes tell me about other lecturers and the helpful/unhelpful things they say. I try to explain to them that being an art student is about learning both to trust one's own instincts and also to trust in the process of critique. It's a difficult process.  As an art student, we have to learn to tread a path between our own vision, and the views of others. We have to learn to see when others are being helpful, when others are trying to tell us we're going wrong or that we're not saying what we think we're saying.  But the art student also has to find and listen to their own instincts. It's a difficult thing to learn.

That's what peer-review does. It helps a writer to see what we're not saying and also what we're saying by accident. It's not insulting, or compromising, but I see it as a form of collective action in the pursuit of excellence.