So many things matter about writing, and we rarely talk about them. In my research communication classes I try to address some of them: how we generate different affects through varying levels of distancing; how we can mess with reader expectations through creative argumentation styles; how we can use aesthetics in the form of fonts or images as part of the message we try to convey; how to strategically select references; how we can bend academic styles to move beyond scholasticism. The latter is a legacy of my Open University training, which emphasised accessibility, but also a more general desire to write something that moves beyond an boring assemblage of information. There are many other academics who pursue this aim of writing accessibly and poetically, and there is evidence in the books and journals that circulate beyond academia that this approach pays off.
Academic publishers also increasingly declare on their websites that they want to move away from scholastic writing style and publish more essayistic work. I assume that this is to improve sales by enhancing the overall appeal of the book or article (‘more than just information’). This desire for public appeal has been part of the publishing industry pretty much since the (re)invention of print. For example, in the foreword to Bernhard Varenius‘ 1649 Descriptio regni Japoniae (Description of the Kingdom of Japan), the geographer Martin Schwind explains how the publishing demands of the time affected the presentation of the material. Drawing attention to the book’s odd structure and exclusion of relevant material, he concludes that the publisher (Elezvir) tried to attract a wider audience and demanded a splitting of the material into two publications: one that focused on religion (a hot topic at the time and likely to attract a more general readership) and another that focused on other aspects of geography, but with an orientation towards popular interest (‘odd things about Japan’). The author (Varenius) himself justifies his selection of information and his style of delivery by arguing that readers need more than just a description of an environment: yes, it is true that those who do not know the physical specificities and relations of a place cannot adequately understand or describe a place; but also, those who only know the physical geography, without any description of the lives of people, will have an incomplete knowledge. Worse, authors who privilege technicalities “will send their listeners or readers to sleep”.
While Varenius may have confused scholars but attracted other readers with the restructuring of his material, it could be argued that changes in material alone are not going to make a difference. There is also a question of presentation. To me, it feels counter-intuitive, for example, that, despite their aspirations to widening appeal, academic publishers are not necessarily adjusting their way of producing literature. By this I mean the maintenance of an academic appearance of the work: no adjustments are made to, for example, referencing. I have to confess that, during my undergraduate and postgraduate studies, I absolutely loved in-text citations such as those used by the Harvard System. You didn’t have to flick to the back of the book and make sense of whatever endnote system was in operation. Neither did you have to find a tiny footnote among many others at the bottom of the page. Your reading flow was not disrupted by this kind of desperate detective work. Since publishing more of my work as part of the geopoetics discourse, however, I have found myself arguing with editors about enabling text flow. As a consequence, I have developed an obsession with referencing styles and a with eliminating in-text citations in my work. Not only does this form of referencing immediately mark work as ‘academic’; it also seems to say that this is not meant to be read as anything but a work of reference. Moreover, publishing conventions sometimes took on bizarre forms, such as the demand to include in-text citations in poetry (creating poetry with in-text citations would be quite a neat project actually, but none that I wanted to pursue at the time).
To me, the problems of in-text citations result from history of this referencing style, which derives from the sciences. In her book Evidence Explained, the historian Elizabeth Shown Mills makes this form appear rather innocent and practical. She shows that this style was developed for texts that primarily draw on published work rather than complicated sources of evidence, such as those referenced by historians. Indeed, the majority of social science and humanities based writing draws on such sources. At the same time, Mills emphasises that other styles, such as those using footnotes, have been more prevalent in the humanities, because they don’t disrupt text flow, aesthetics or even logic (see the above in-text citations in poems). I would expect referencing styles to be a major debate at publishing house meetings, if academic work wanted to ‘go public’. However, it seems that most of the social science and humanities publishers, at least those that we use for human geography writing, continue to use scientfic notation style. Why? (This is a genuine question.)
As part of my arguments with editors (who have mostly been undestanding even if they could not accommodate demands) I have been looking at recent academic work that has enjoyed wider circulation. I have especially focused on looking up work that is known for its literary qualities as well as its content. For example, I was initially quite shocked to find that literary scholar Christina Sharpe‘s book In The Wake (published with Duke University Press) is using in-text citations. My initial pessimistic interpretation mourned the fact that Sharpe probably had to surrender her writing ethos to the house style of her publisher. However, given her deliberate play with stylistic form, I began to wonder whether she deliberately plays with the referencing method, for example to emphasise the violence of ‘knowledge making’ and institutional embeddedness, or to stress the voices that shape her own. This statement from her book In the Wake seems to hint at the performance of this struggle with on-going colonial impositions: “We have been reminded by [Saidiya] Hartman and many others that the repetition of the visual, discursive, state, and other quotidian and extraordinary cruel and unusual violences enacted on Black people does not lead to a cessation of violence, nor does it, across or within communities, lead primarily to sympathy or something like empathy. Such repetitions often work to solidify and make continuous the colonial project of violence. With that knowledge in mind, what kinds of ethical viewing and reading practices must we employ, now, in the face of these onslaughts? What might practices of Black annotation and Black redaction offer?” It is perhaps interesting that much of Sharpe’s writing does not require referencing, because of the autobiographical elemements. Further, the many contestations of knowledge through deliberate disruptions, e.g. ‘blacking out’ words, draw attention to the problems of knowledge presentation. (Her method of ‘blacking out’ words also made me think of the German antifascist equivalent of erasing references to fascist authors when their work is being discussed.)
Sharpe’s focus on the Middle Passage made think about the work of Michel Serres whose work is inspired by the violence of Hiroshima. In his philosophical experiments, Serres attempts to counteract the horrors facilitated by science and ‘knowledge making’ in general. This focus has not only influenced Serres deliberately associative and ‘fertilely chaotic’ style, but also his attitude towards citation. For example, he largely refuses citation in his writing, because he associates it with a display of mastery (‘I have mastered those sources’). As he explains in an interview with Bruno Latour: “an authentically philosophical book is often distinguishable from a learned book. The latter, loaded with quotes and footnotes, struts its erudition; it flourishes its credentiais in the academic milieu, brandishes its armor and its lances before its adversaries. It is a social artifact. How many philosophies are dictated solely by the preoccupation with being invulnerable to criticism? They present themselves as fortresses, usually sheltering a lobbying support group. In the wide open spaces of fear only trepidation reigns. I have come to believe that a work achieves more excellence when it cites fewer proper names. It is naked, defenseless, not lacking knowledge but saturated with secondary naïveté; not intent on being right but ardently reaching toward new intuitions. A university thesis aims at the imitable; a plain and simple work seeks the inimitable.” At the same time, Serres’ method could be accused of hiding his sources and relying of people’s expert knowledge to ‘get’ the references, much like an film-maker whose references can only be decoded by film buffs. While you can enjoy a book or film without being able to trace these references (as Serres maintains), the people who are able to, will likely trace them to iconic authors, thus maintaining the established genealogy of philosophy.
I don’t think there can ever be a satisfying approach to referencing, given the actual travels of information. It is inspiring, however, to engage with different attempts to question practices of referencing, whether for academic or non-academic audiences. In my own publications, so far, I have experimented with referencing in a limited way. Recent examples were less inspired by the work of specific authors than by the demands of a particular piece of writing. The resulting negotiations with editors have been insightful, both in terms of the origins and ingrainedness of stylistic constraints, and the potential means of subverting conventions. In most cases, I was able to find a work around my referencing issues, but I also know that I will not always be able to. Perhaps, social or time constraints will lead me to not even question my own adoption of conventions enough (I need to think more about the way I use hyperlinks, for example). It remains important for me, though, to stay with this discomfort and to see what can be done in the future. I also hope that this is a debate that not just authors, but also publishers are having, because it might actually benefit both sides.