On writing differently: an essay on the rigors of academic discipline.

This essay is the introduction (prolegomenon) to ;a collection of three texts that re-organize and rework a book that I wrote 15 years ago. That book was about sovereignty and property in the life sciences, and it combined political theory with science and technology studies. So does this one, but it is rewritten from the standpoint that the approach and its application has never fully found its way into the academic writing that followed.

The earlier version was unburdened by academic convention, even if it was flawed and showed inexperience, from the standpoint of specialist writing. However, it was more than the sum of its parts. The journal articles and the book that it inspired never managed to replicate this. While it has become somewhat easier to write texts in academically acceptable ways, this remains true. The restrictions on “how” writing is supposed to be done, make it impossible for the approach to be brought to completion.

This essay reflects on how narrow the stylistic requirements of today’s academic writing are. This includes the field that is most influential, “science and technology studies” (STS)., but it it is a more general problem. The essay is the start, with as its  goal is to (re-)create some intellectual distance from its rather arbitrary stylistic requirements, which are indicative of today’s academic writing and editorial conventions more generally. Eventually it should help in recreating how the earlier writing on the life sciences could engage with problems without being burdened by increasingly inflexible understandings of what reading and writing are.