The Politics of Citation

Citation is at the heart of the academic enterprise as what enables us to interface with others and take our place in a delicate and complicated ecology of knowledge production. It is intimately bound up with the treatment of ideas as property, with the dynamic of exchange turning that property into capital, into a vector for intellectual value. This intellectual economy, which citation upholds and founds, has its politics—a politics that is most often submerged, obscured by the reproductive quality of citation, which compels individuals to reproduce a certain set of citations, a certain model of reference, in order to be allowed to pass through the gates of intellectual legitimacy and be recognized in turn as someone who is citable. Citation incites citation, which incites citation, which incites citation. The politics of citation, if it is to be discerned, requires the suspension of this reproductive citational incitation so that the structures of citation might be examined and critiqued: citation must be turned away from its usual function as a practice to serve instead as the object of inquiry.