Citation as Exchange Value

Abstract

This article focuses on the interplay between correlated textual subject positions, insofar as they are differently legitimated across the New International Division of Labour (NIDL). In examining the academic system of referencing or invocation, I will pay particular attention to how it functions as a circuit of value production in the cultural domain. Marx’s theory of value production will be used as an exegetic tool to locate the workings of economic power in the referential apparatus of the contemporary academy, showing how Third-World symbolic production is undervalued despite its existence, since economic conditions retroactively foreclose the validation of Third-World intellectual and artistic production as cultural capital. As a case study, I will analyse some of the citation strategies of postcolonial theorist Anthony Appiah in In My Father’s House, which operates within the presupposition that textual subject positions (the place of enunciation in particular) are made available only to privileged subjects in the extra-textual world. Appiah’s methodology opens up what I call a circumscribed redistribution of cultural capital across the NIDL. Hence, I take In My Father’s House not only as an object of analysis but also as a critical source to understand how value production mediates academic writing, allowing Appiah’s conceptualization of the relationship between textual and social subjects to inform my own.

Keywords

• value
• new international division of labour
• citation
• subject