The Limits of Academic Legibility on LinkedIn

Writing from the Interstice of Affiliation and Exposure

J. Owen Matson, Ph.D.

To put it in a nutshell, there is no hospitality without the threat of violence, without the exposure to a violation of the law of hospitality, to a perversion of the law, without the imperative becoming perverse.

—Jacques Derrida, Of Hospitality, (1997)

This is both true and utter garbage. Of course it’s me! Of course it’s not me!

—Rachel Horst, Self Portraits in AI (2025)

I write without a current institutional affiliation. I hold a PhD from Princeton and spent years working in research institutions, but I no longer speak from within the structure of a university or department. I am not an outsider to that world, but I no longer belong to it in a formal sense. That in-between position shapes how my work is received—especially on a platform like LinkedIn, where identity is made legible through titles, roles, and the visible signs of belonging. The writing may be rigorous, reflective, or grounded in years of scholarship, but without the expected signals of affiliation, it is often passed over or misunderstood. It can appear too informal for academic discourse and too theoretical for professional discourse, and in both cases, it is read through the discomfort of placement.

This essay is about what it means to write from that position. It is also about those who choose to engage with work that does not arrive through the expected channels. When someone with visible standing responds—not to agree, but simply to take the work seriously—it alters how the writing is seen. But that act carries risk. As Derrida writes in Of Hospitality, “there is no hospitality without the threat of violence.” To receive the unaffiliated voice without demanding its proper place is not a neutral act. It risks the terms of one’s own legibility. On a platform built to reward alignment and upward motion, to listen without precondition is to step briefly outside its logic.

Rachel Horst, in her essay Self Portraits in AI, captures this tension through the language of self-presentation. “Of course it’s me! Of course it’s not me!” she writes, describing the dissonance between how one appears and how one is read. On LinkedIn, as in academic life, recognition often comes before engagement, and that recognition is shaped by expectations that not all voices can meet—or wish to meet. A name, a photo, a former title: these become the proxy for seriousness. Without them, even careful thought can seem out of place.

I write this not to request legitimacy, but to examine what legitimacy demands. In the context of a platform that organizes attention through affiliation, to write without institutional backing is to risk invisibility. But what’s at stake is not just readership—it’s the very terms by which knowledge is recognized.This essay is about platform precarity, institutional perception, and the ethics of attention. It asks what kind of knowledge practices we reproduce when we require affiliation to authorize thought—and what becomes possible when we allow thinking to speak before we know where it came from. More than that, it is about the relational ethics enacted by those who choose to listen anyway—those who think and act beyond the traditional signifiers of affiliated validation, and in doing so, make space for forms of knowledge that do not arrive fully sanctioned but are no less serious for their unsettled place.

Hospitality and Ethical Exposure

There are scholars who have responded to my work without hesitation, without waiting for someone else to move first, and without requiring the usual affiliations to justify the act of engagement. This kind of gesture is not neutral. It carries risk within a space where value is often conferred through association and where the boundaries of participation are monitored, even if not explicitly. In academic and quasi-academic settings, especially those that play out on professional platforms, attention is not distributed evenly. It is earned, but it is also withheld. When a scholar chooses to respond to unaffiliated work, particularly in a visible way, they make themselves legible as someone who is willing to open the frame. That willingness can be quietly punished. It may raise questions among peers. It may be ignored, or it may be marked as impractical, indulgent, or out of step with professional norms. In this sense, the person who chooses to listen is not only extending a form of attention to the writing, but is also putting themselves in a position of ethical vulnerability. They are stepping outside of the usual logic of affiliation and its protections.

This gesture recalls Jacques Derrida’s writing on hospitality, where he describes the ethical demand to receive the stranger without condition. For Derrida, true hospitality is not the same as inclusion. Inclusion is permission-based. It operates through control. One decides who belongs. Hospitality, by contrast, asks what it would mean to remain open to whoever arrives, even when they bring no credentials, no request, and no promise of alignment. But this gesture is not only difficult. It is structurally unstable. To offer hospitality, one must have some standing—some ownership or authority over a space. That position is what makes the offer possible. And yet, for the gesture to be unconditional, the very authority that makes it possible must be put at risk. To welcome the other without reserve is to accept the possibility of losing the role of host altogether.

This is the deeper risk. The vulnerability lies not only in receiving the unknown, but in being exposed to the collapse of the position from which the offering is made. The ethical exposure is real. It is not theoretical. It means giving up the privilege of setting terms. It means allowing the encounter to unsettle the structure that gave you power in the first place. When scholars take this risk—when they respond without asking for confirmation, when they open a space without securing it first—they are not simply welcoming another voice. They are allowing the conditions of hearing to shift beneath them. That is what gives the gesture weight. It is not the offer of space. It is the willingness to lose the ground it stands on.

In the Interstice: Neither Inside Nor Out

This tension around boundaries is not abstract. It plays out in how people respond to writing that arrives from an unclear position. When the structure of community depends on knowing who belongs, anything that disrupts that knowing can create discomfort. I have experienced this in both directions. At times, I’ve been dismissed as someone writing from the outside, as a voice that doesn’t carry the weight of institutional legitimacy. The assumption is that the thinking is informal, untrained, or not grounded in the work of the field. At other times, I’ve been dismissed because of my background—because I carry a PhD from Princeton, or because I’ve taught at research institutions. In those moments, the writing is taken as evidence of exclusion, not for what it says, but for where it is assumed to be speaking from. In both cases, the response comes not to the content, but to the discomfort of placement.

This is the paradox of community that Derrida names. It cannot exist without boundaries, and yet those boundaries always create the exclusion that makes the community possible. The person writing from the edge of that boundary—without current affiliation, but with prior connection—is not outside it, but not fully inside either. That position unsettles the structure. It makes it harder to tell who belongs, and what belonging means. And in a space like LinkedIn, where professional identity is constantly being declared and performed, that ambiguity stands out. The platform rewards clarity of role and alignment. A voice that carries prestige without an active title does not fit the pattern. It calls up conflicting readings—too much for some, not enough for others—and rarely receives the benefit of doubt.

Still, the space between inside and outside is not just a site of confusion. It is also a space of possibility. The lack of a fixed institutional role means the writing does not need to serve a formal purpose. It does not need to speak on behalf of a department, a discipline, or a professional agenda. It can operate at a slant. It can take on questions without anchoring them to a project. It can reflect on the structures of knowledge without needing to produce outputs for them. That freedom is not without cost. The writing is more likely to be ignored, or misunderstood. But it is also less likely to be captured. It makes space for a kind of thinking that is accountable only to its process, not to its placement. That kind of thinking may not build community in the usual sense, but it calls attention to what communities often leave out.

But it is not only the author’s position that causes friction. The writing itself can be difficult. It does not always follow the norms of accessible argument or platform-ready discourse. It may take time to unfold, resist closure, or ask questions it does not resolve. This difficulty is sometimes read as a performance of elitism, especially when it comes without the shield of affiliation. It can seem like an attempt to exclude, to signal expertise without justification. But that reading misses the purpose. The difficulty is not meant to obscure. It is a way of refusing what is too easily said. It is a practice of holding tension, of keeping space open for what does not yet have form. That kind of writing will never align neatly with the rhythms of a platform that rewards clarity, brevity, and speed.

In some ways, this tension is built into the structure of public intellectual life online. On platforms like LinkedIn, even thought must perform. It must be legible, framed, tagged, and aligned with a recognizable identity. Writing that declines to do this—even gently—becomes suspect. And when it speaks from a voice that does not carry current affiliation, the suspicion grows. It is not just the ideas that are questioned, but the legitimacy of the one asking them. Even when those ideas come from long study, from time spent working within institutions, they can be dismissed as pretension or self-importance. The structure invites simplification, and what resists it can seem out of place.

But again, there is something to be said for remaining out of place. There is room in this interstice to think otherwise—to approach knowledge not as a product to be packaged, but as something that unfolds in relation. The work may not be easy, and it may not always be welcomed, but it does not need to apologize for its form. The form is part of the thought. And the difficulty is not a wall—it is an invitation, if one is willing to stay with it. In that way, the work performs its own version of hospitality. It does not demand understanding, but it remains open to it.

Advocacy as Relational Ethics

In this unsettled space, some voices have responded differently. They have not asked for credentials. They have not looked for signs of belonging. They have responded to the thought itself. Their actions have not been loud or dramatic. Often they are small gestures—a comment, a reference, a moment of engagement that carries weight not because of who gives it, but because of what it makes possible. These scholars do not act as gatekeepers. They do not guard access or confer legitimacy from above. What they do instead is hold open a space where thinking can remain unfinished, and still be treated as serious. Their presence shifts the frame, not by claiming authority, but by refusing the demand that it be proven first.

I have sometimes thought of them as a kind of bodyguard—not of the author, but of the openness that makes thinking possible. They do not shield the work from criticism or disagreement. They do not lift it up as right or true. What they protect is something more fragile—the right of a thought to be heard before it is placed. In doing so, they are not performing an act of generosity in the casual sense. They are taking on a risk. In a space where affiliation is currency, to take seriously a voice that comes without it is to risk one’s own alignment. To say: this is worth listening to—not because of where it comes from, but because of what it is doing—is to stand with the work in a way that can be read as disloyal to one’s own standing. That is not a small thing.

This kind of action enacts what can only be called a relational ethics. It is not based on the authority of the one who responds. It does not demand shared training, shared institutions, or even shared conclusions. It is grounded instead in an ethic of listening, of allowing what is unfamiliar to take shape in its own terms. It is a practice of making space without claiming ownership over what that space contains. It is neither abstract nor theoretical. It is lived in moments of reply, in the willingness to be changed by something before deciding whether it fits. And in a context like LinkedIn, where so much depends on visible identity and professional belonging, these gestures matter. They perform a different way of being with knowledge—one in which thought is not evaluated by its source, but entered as something we are co-responsible for sustaining.

Their presence does not erase the structural forces that shape who gets heard. It does not remove the precarity of speaking without institutional shelter. But it does something else. It creates a moment where thought can move across those structures, where affiliation does not determine possibility. That is not a solution. It is not a fix. But it is a practice. And in a space where so much depends on keeping lines clear, those who make room without redrawing them offer something rare. Not permission, but relation. Not agreement, but acknowledgment. Not protection, but the quiet act of standing beside.

This kind of action enacts what can only be called a relational ethics—not in the abstract, but in the thick, situated sense proposed by thinkers like Levinas, Bakhtin, and Arendt. For Levinas, the ethical relation begins not in agreement, but in exposure—to the presence of the other as an irreducible demand. There is no security in that relation, no shared premise that guarantees its safety. It is a responsibility that precedes choice. When a scholar listens without needing to know where a thought comes from, they are stepping into that exposure. They are allowing the thought to address them, not from a place of shared affiliation, but from the uncertainty of difference. It is not hospitality in the institutional sense—it is a welcoming that risks undoing the very position from which one welcomes.

Bakhtin offers a parallel but dialogic account. To respond is never neutral—it is to enter into a relation that transforms both speaker and listener. The scholar who replies to an unaffiliated voice does not simply affirm it. They become part of its unfolding. They respond not just to what is said, but to the vulnerability of saying. In doing so, they refuse to collapse the other into a category. They allow the voice to remain specific, situated, and still taken seriously.

Arendt, too, helps clarify what is at stake. For her, political life—and by extension, ethical life—depends on plurality, on the presence of others who are not the same as us. To act in public is to take the risk of appearing without control over how one will be interpreted. The scholars who have engaged my work without requiring prior affiliation have made that risk feel slightly less isolating. Not because they remove it, but because they share in it. Their gestures do not erase the structures that make participation uneven. But they do create moments in which those structures are not determinative.

This is what makes their actions more than kind. They perform a way of being in relation where listening does not collapse into agreement, and recognition does not require assimilation. It is not that they validate the work. It is that they remain open to it. And in doing so, they carry forward an ethics that makes room for thought—not by controlling it, but by letting it be difficult, uncertain, and still worthy of response.

But the ethics of witnessing are never abstract. They take shape in systems that extract value from attention, bodies, and affiliations. To advocate for another’s voice is to risk one’s own, especially in spaces that reward polish over complexity, cohesion over rupture. These are not just epistemic risks—they are aesthetic, rhetorical, and professional.

Reading as Relational Ethics

There is an ethical dimension to reading that is often overlooked. Not just in what is read, but in how. Reading is not only a means of interpretation—it is a mode of relation. To read closely, carefully, without knowing in advance what will be found, is already a gesture of hospitality. It is the choice to stay with unfamiliar– often difficult–language, unfamiliar ideas, and to resist the impulse to judge them by proximity to what is already known.

Jonathan Boymal recently shared an article by Carl Hendrick, reflecting on the moral work of deep reading. Hendrick writes that to read is to become unmoored from the narrow orbit of the self, stretched by the interiority of other voices. He sees reading as transformative not because it deposits knowledge, but because it alters the coordinates of perception. Boymal’s act of sharing is already part of this ethic—he extends the reading publicly, and with it, an invitation. I respond, not to correct or claim, but to continue. He replies, not to close, but to hold the space open.

This is what makes reading an ethical practice: not just what it does internally, but how it performs relation externally. It becomes a site where attention is extended, and where ideas are allowed to breathe before they are categorized or dismissed. In the exchange, what emerges is not consensus, but co-presence. The act of listening happens through words, but it does not end with them.

I argued in that comment that language itself is already an ethical relation. For Levinas, subjectivity begins in being addressed by the other. For Derrida, each word arrives already inhabited—citational, never purely one’s own. In this sense, deep reading is not only an encounter with content, but an exposure to the structural alterity embedded in language itself. To stay with difficult language is to stay with the difficulty of relation. And this difficulty is not an obstacle to ethics—it is the condition for it.

This complicates what it means to write from outside a community of affiliation on a platform like LinkedIn. Because here, reading is already a deviation from the expected use of the medium. These moments of reading—public, generous, engaged—resist the flattening logic of platform performance. They model a different possibility: that epistemic co-responsibility can take place in plain view, even under conditions that discourage it. That to read another is already to offer something more than endorsement. It is to perform the ethics the text proposes.

Platform, Precarity, and the Corporate Edge

LinkedIn is not a space built for reflection. It is not designed for thought that doesn’t already know where it belongs. What it rewards is affiliation, clarity, and the efficient translation of identity into value. It wants roles, upward motion, evidence that something has happened and that it will happen again, in the right direction. Writing that comes from outside these terms—writing that is unaffiliated, that reflects more than it resolves—sits awkwardly inside that frame. It arrives without the signals that help others recognize what kind of voice is speaking, and without those signals, the platform tends to move around it. The work doesn’t vanish. It just becomes hard to see. And when it is seen, it is often understood through misalignment.

Still, the structure does not fully explain what happens. What matters is not only the writing, but what happens when someone chooses to respond. When a scholar or professional with standing stops and gives that writing attention, it changes what is visible. On this platform, responses are not private. They show up in timelines, in notifications, in networks where people are watching one another to know what is worth their time. To engage with a voice that lacks affiliation is to link yourself to something the platform doesn’t know how to place. That link is not neutral. It becomes part of how both people are read. Some notice it and move on. Some understand what it means. Some don’t respond, but take it as a signal. Either way, it leaves a mark.

That mark is a risk. It may be ignored, or it may shift how others see the person who responded. In that sense, to reply to unaffiliated work on this platform is not simply to open space for someone else. It is to step slightly outside of alignment yourself. That movement may be small, but it happens in a space where boundaries are policed through performance. It matters who you stand next to, and it matters whether others have already agreed that the voice belongs. There are people who choose to take that risk. They do not ask for justification. They do not wait for permission. They respond not to the credentials, but to the thought. Their actions are not loud, but they are not quiet either. They travel. They shift the edges of what can be seen.

This question—of who is read and who is passed over—is not new. It is built into how communities recognize themselves. A community needs boundaries in order to function. It has to be able to see what belongs. But those boundaries always involve exclusion. As Derrida wrote, the act of welcoming always draws a line, and that line produces an outside the community must push away in order to recognize itself as such. On LinkedIn, the boundary is marked not only by who you know or what you do, but by how your identity is presented. The image, the title, the rhythm of your words—they all work to confirm whether your presence here is expected. And when writing appears without those markers, it is not just unfamiliar. It is often treated as illegible.

Rachel Horst writes about this in her essay on academic headshots, and her account names something most people recognize but rarely say. She describes how the headshot functions as a credential, how it arrives before the person, and how it stages both recognition and misrecognition at once. Her portraits—distorted, reassembled through generative tools—don’t try to escape the gaze. They make it pause. They ask what is being seen, and why. Horst does not reject the structure. She inhabits it while pulling it slightly out of shape. In a space where the face is often mistaken for the person, and where recognition comes before engagement, that gesture has weight. It doesn’t call for refusal. It calls for attention.

These signals are part of a broader economy. Tressie McMillan Cottom writes that expertise, in digital space, has become a performance, one measured by reach rather than depth. Wendy Hui Kyong Chun calls this the replacement of substance with spread, a shift from memory and thought to repetition and recognition. What moves is what matters. And what does not move is rarely treated as knowledge. Benjamin Bratton offers a more structural account, describing platforms not just as tools, but as architectures that shape cognition. What can be said, what counts as contribution, how meaning is formed—these are all governed by the design of the system. To write on LinkedIn is not simply to speak. It is to speak inside a machine that formats meaning before it is received.

And yet, this is where the writing happens. Not in the places where thought is easily placed, but in the gaps—where affiliation is absent, where position is unclear, where the usual structure of validation is missing. The writing still comes. It may not reach far. It may be dismissed. But when it is met with attention, that attention is doing something more than responding. It is refusing to let the structure decide in advance what counts. It is making a small space where thought can exist before it is categorized. That space is fragile, and often brief. But it is real. And the people who create it—by responding, by standing beside the work without asking for credentials—shift the conditions of what can be seen. They do not erase the system. But they allow something else to begin.

A Tribute and an Invitation

What I’ve tried to say here is simple. The writing continues because a few people have chosen to make space for it. Not by granting it value, but by not demanding that it prove its value in advance. Not by agreeing, but by staying with what they did not already recognize. These gestures have changed what is possible. They have shown that it is still possible to listen without needing to know where the voice comes from. They have modeled another kind of relation—one that does not seek to own or validate, but simply to remain open long enough for something to unfold.

This is how knowledge survives in precarious spaces. Not through the preservation of institutions, not through formal continuity, not through the assurance of recognition. It survives through relation. Through small, unannounced acts of attention. Through the willingness to let thought remain unfamiliar. It survives when someone decides that affiliation is not the only way to read a line, or that a lack of institutional place is not the same as a lack of seriousness.

At the same time, I want to say clearly that this kind of exclusion is not unique. Others face it on far more insidious and entrenched terms—on the basis of race, gender, sexuality, and other forms of structural marginalization that shape not only who is heard, but who is allowed to speak in the first place. My experience exists within that broader landscape, and it is shaped by it. To write from this in-between position is difficult, but it is not the same as being silenced by systems designed to deny voice altogether. That distinction matters.

The politics of recognition grow even more complex in an era anxious about authorship. As panic mounts over how to identify the origins of thought in the age of AI, the act of meeting work on its own terms becomes both rarer and more radical. To engage a text without demanding proof of human origin is to shift the frame of recognition—from identity to attention, from authorship to thought. It means reading not for verification, but for rigor, resonance, and the ethical weight of encounter. It means remaining open to the otherness of an idea, even when it arrives from terrain beyond the expected, beyond the verifiable–spaces that exceed the instrumental reach of AI.

So this is a thank you, but it is also something else. It is an invitation. Not to protect. Not to confirm. But to keep a space open where thought is allowed to arrive without proof of origin. Where voices do not need a credential to be met. Where the work can be difficult, partial, uncertain—and still be met as work worth engaging. That space is fragile. But it is enough.