Footnotes

I’ve been thinking quite a bit about collectives lately. I know that in part this must be related to being involved in a beautiful coaching and writing community. The community is populated by academics from different fields—largely the humanities. Today we had a tangential conversation about the very title of this part of the website, “footnotes.” One person gave a gorgeous description of footnotes—those dangling, space-claiming, urgent, and wandering sections of an essay—as like volcanoes: they carry their own quiet weight but are equally capable of exploding with information. I adored this geologic description of writing and it made me think about the slow and quiet ways that writing often takes shape. In fact, shapes and patterns were the focus of the workshop and I found myself tending (as always) to the branching and associative. In a her monograph Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network (2015), new formalist scholar Caroline Levine argues that different shapes and patterns, or different forms, are each imbued with their own affordances. For example, a network might afford linkage and connection, whereas a rhyme might afford rhythm and predictability. What is important about forms is that they cross textual and social boundaries. We might find rhythm in a piece of poetry, but we might also find it in the movements of a factory line. This grants form a kind of active or activating, and maybe even political, potential.

In academic writing—at least in the humanities—a great deal of weight is given to the individual. It’s not our fault, really. The way that funding is structured, we’re encouraged (and sometimes even forced) into a kind of intellectual territorialism where we mark and claim particular ideas. This is especially true for academics in precarious positions in the humanities, where securing another position is frequently predicated on one’s ability to lay claim to certain, often novel, ideas. Unlike those working in more collaborative scientific environments, scholars in the humanities are encouraged to cling to ideas like monetary life rafts. Yet, amidst the swell of uncertainty, I’m lucky enough to be part of research and wellbeing groups where I find deep connection and inspiration in the collective. So much so that I find myself asking more and more the rather ambitious question about different ways of writing and thinking beyond the individual. Academic writing in Literary Studies is inherently collective—if in a quiet way. We constantly populate our writing with the voices of others: references, quotations, footnotes. And, more explicitly in the occasional collaborations of co-writing an article, co-presenting a paper, or editing a collection of articles or book chapters.

I have been told before that I quote too much in my writing, that I take tangents, that my notes are weighty. In some ways, this might come down to a slow growth of writerly confidence, to the uncomfortable adventure of finding one’s writerly voice. But reframing this, I think it’s also a joyous crowding of the collective. I like to draw threads, linkages, tangles, and knots between my thoughts and those of others. I like to layer ideas, words, and phrases like strata—the kinds of layers, though, where thoughts cut across lines that might be disciplinary, geographic, historical. I like to create harmonies and, if not as often, I like to create cacophonies.

With this in mind, might we then revisit the footnote as a pushback against academia’s individualism and a slow and quiet activating of collective voice? What happens when we play in the margins? Do these spaces carry their own lingering potential to explode into something new and crowded, something joyous and collective?

Image: London, British Library, Harley 3487 (13th century) used in the article “Medieval Notepads” (December 12, 2014), Erik Kwakkel.