Cécile B. Vigouroux* and Alfonso Del Percio Reading or writing is not the question: politicizing the politics of scholarly production and reception [Language, Culture and Society] https://doi.org/10.1515/ijsl-2024-0061 Received May 5, 2024; accepted August 27, 2024 Abstract: This commentary is a response to Wolfgang Klein’s paper: Writing or reading, but not both, or: a proposal to reintroduce cuneiform writing using the hammer and chisel. Keywords: academic labor; politics of writing; politics of reading; academic field; gate-keeping Wolfgang Klein’s article, which we were asked to comment on as editors of Language, Culture, and Society, opens a much-needed conversation about the overwhelming production of academic writing. However, framing the issue according to a less-is- written-more-is-read logic fails to address the politics of academia that is at the heart of the matter and that each of us – editors, authors, consumers of scholarly work, members of hiring committees, assessors of colleagues’ academic performance, or reviewers of funding projects – help enforce, maintain, and reproduce. The question to be tackled here is less about the imbalance between how much is published (rather than written) and how much is cited (rather than read); it is about the social, political, and economic conditions that shape academia as a field of struggle (Bourdieu 1976). Therefore, writing and reading should not just be analyzed as practices through which scholarly work is performed but also as forms of labor anchored within unequal structures of value and power. In conversation with the contributors to the special issue Manufacturing Academic Knowledge, we already addressed some of the aspects of the politics of knowledge production and reception in our editorial (LCS 5:2; Donzelli 2024; McAllister 2024; Signorini 2024; Soler et al. 2024; Veret 2024). We did so by tracing the historical continuities and transformations of the academic publishing industry that *Corresponding author: Cécile B. Vigouroux, Simon Fraser University, 8888 University Drive, Burnaby, British Columbia, V5A 1S6, Canada, E-mail: cvigouro@sfu.ca Alfonso Del Percio, FHNW University of Applied Sciences and Arts Northwestern Switzerland School of Business, Riggenbachstrasse 16, CH – 4600, Olten, Switzerland IJSL 2024; 289–290: 105–110