Citational Practices: Knowledge, Personhood, and Subjectivity

Citation is a foundational dimension of human language and social life. Citational practices attribute utterances to distinct speakers, beings, or texts. They also connect temporalities, joining past, present, and future discourses, documents, and performance practices. In so doing, citational practices play a pivotal role in linking particular articulations of subjectivity to wider formations of cultural knowledge and authority. We explore how this linkage operates via production formats, participant structures, genre conventions, and ideologies of personhood. We then consider approaches to citation in the domain of legal discourse, an arena that relies on specific, patterned forms of citation that are historically rooted, institutionally perpetuated, and subjectively reenacted.