canonical | commentary | quotation | reference | external |
Academic writing has numerous formal mechanisms to acknowledge, incorporate, and appropriate other's work within its own field. These are ordinarily what we do when we footnote, cite referenes, quote other work, and the various other quite legtimate activities of scholarly writing that we use to authorise our own work. While these strategies are clearly rhetorical, it does not lessen their applicability or importance as a key marker of the horizon within which we locate our own work.
However, while it is now a commonplace of cultural criticism to recognise the interest that all writing represents ("interest" here is intended in the sense in which "ideology" may have been used in 1980s cultural studies - see for instance Greco's "Hypertext with Consequences"), it is less clearly acknowledged that what informs our writing, what our writing (and thought) is a response to, always remains outside of our writing. This is, of itself, something beyond the scope of this essay, however the most suitable analogy for what is being described might be differential calculus, where we can approach infinity, but of course never arrive.
Writing, including academic writing (and this is not limited to the writing that constitutes published research in the humanities), is the expression and articulation of an idea (or in scientific reports, the description of the testing of an idea) that remains always outside of the singularity of its writing (and testing). It is approached, circumscribed, alluded to, but can never be grasped or directly stated. Our work always remains a passage towards this idea (or ideas), and so remains always as the outside of our writing but is what draws our thinking and writing on. This outside is, in virtually all forms of academic rhetoric, actively disavowed, but is constituted by those other texts and writings we rely upon, fight against, seek to better, as well as what might be thought of as noise, all those things that interfere with a clean signal. Of course, this particular essay, is most easily characterised as a form of noisy writing where other's voices as well as a noisy structure, prevail.
Adrian Miles: Hypertext syntagmas: cinematic narration with links
A performative hypertext presented by Journal of Digital Information