New Perspectives on Academic Writing: The Thing That Wouldn’t Die 9781350231535, 9781350231665, 9781350231726

Table of contents :
Cover
Halftitle page
Series page
Title page
Copyright page
Contents
Figures
Series Editors’ Foreword
Acknowledgments
Introduction: The Thing That Wouldn’t Die Bernd Herzogenrath
Prolegomenon
Synopsis
References
1 The Structure and System of Academic Writing Levi R. Bryant
The Structure of Academic Writing
Normal Academic Writing
Strategies of Academic Communication and Their Vicissitudes
Conclusion
References
2 Walking on Sunshine Jessie Beier and Jason Wallin
Writing (in) the Educacene
Obsessional Matters
Walking (and Writing) to the Max
Downward Movements
Non-Philosophical Dehiscence
Note
References
3 Science Fiction Devices David Burrows and Simon O’Sullivan
Introduction: A Discussion with an Academic
Dhalgren by Samuel Delany
Riddley Walker by Russell Hoban
Les Guérillères by Monique Wittig
Adult Rites by Octavia E. Butler
Pharmakon-AI by K. Allado-McDowell
Flatland by Edwin A. Abbot
Conclusion: Report to the Academy
References
4 Mythoplasia and Fictioning in Academic Practice: “Writing; Other” Liana Psarologaki
The Academy Is Dead—Long Live the Academy1
Writing in Times of Post-Lexia
Creating or Becoming Scholar
Sculpting Myth: Towards an Un-Diegesis
Mythoplasia—Writing “Other”
Notes
References
5 [Fill In the Blank] Kalani Michell
Notes
References
6 How Can One Be Farocki? Rembert Hüser
Notes
References
7 Step 2 Hearing: “The Parties Agree to Use Their Best Efforts” A Dramatic Academic Work Jennifer Hayashida
Preface
Step 2 Hearing: “The Parties Agree to Use Their Best Efforts”
Note
References
8 Writing the Unwritable: Raveling Worlds Julie Vulcan
Overlays
When All is Turned to Ash
The Lesson of Ash is to Wait
Once Was Ash
Tr(ashed)
Underlays
Notes
References
9 Writing In Between Anna Gibbs
Situation-creation
Notes
References
10 Unwriting for the Anthropocene: Looking at the Disaster from the Inside . . . David R. Cole
Introduction
The Foundations of the Disaster
Deleuze, Difference, and Fire
Heading towards the Disaster
Guattari, and Unwriting the Disaster
Arriving at the Disaster
Deleuze/Guattari, and Unwriting Capitalism and Schizophrenia
Inside the Disaster
Conclusion: Unwriting for the Anthropocene
References
11 La Mise-en-Abîme: Placing Academic Writing in Scare Quotes Mick Wilson
Irritating Pedagogies
Empire of Footnotes8
Untrimmed Academic Hedges?
Notes
References
12 Abstract Academic Expressionism: An Alternative Aesthetics of Scholarly Practice Anne Pirrie
Introduction
Painting, Writing, Looking
The I/eye of the Beholder
A Bigger Splash3
Acknowledgment
Notes
References
13 Affective Academic Writing Bernd Herzogenrath
Notes
References
14 Write to Life Erin Manning
References
Contributors
Index of Subjects
Index of Names

Citation preview

New Perspectives on Academic Writing

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Alternative | Education Series Editors: Bernd Herzogenrath (University of Frankfurt, Germany) Tim Ingold (University of Aberdeen, Scotland) Alternative | Education shows how education could be reimagined so as to have its source in experimentation rather than in a formalized teaching/learning relation, and as a result focus more on thinking and studying with, rather than thinking and studying about or of. The books in this series offer a much needed idea of education that does not separate a sphere of “what one has to know” from life, but that brings life and education together, exploring ways of creating new ideas and new ways of experiencing the world. The series draws together ideas, experiences and research from across the disciplines but also goes beyond that, focusing on the practice of interdisciplinarity itself and highlighting the benefits this has not just to looking at theory but in doing theory. Advisory Board: Cala Coats (Arizona State University, USA) David R. Cole (Western Sydney University, Australia) Jan Masschelein (University Leuven, Belgium) Also available in the series: Knowing from the Inside: Cross-Disciplinary Experiments with Matters of Pedagogy, edited by Tim Ingold

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New Perspectives on Academic Writing The Thing That Wouldn’t Die edited by Bernd Herzogenrath

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BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2023 Copyright © Bernd Herzogenrath and contributors, 2023 Bernd Herzogenrath and contributors have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgments on p. ix constitute an extension of this copyright page. Series design by Charlotte James Cover image © ne2pi / iStock All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN:

HB: ePDF: eBook:

978-1-3502-3153-5 978-1-3502-3172-6 978-1-3502-3171-9

Series: Alternative | Education Typeset by RefineCatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

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Contents List of Figures Series Editors’ Foreword Acknowledgments Introduction: The Thing That Wouldn’t Die Bernd Herzogenrath 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14

The Structure and System of Academic Writing Levi R. Bryant Walking on Sunshine Jessie Beier and Jason Wallin Science Fiction Devices David Burrows and Simon O’Sullivan Mythoplasia and Fictioning in Academic Practice: “Writing; Other” Liana Psarologaki [Fill In the Blank] Kalani Michell How Can One Be Farocki? Rembert Hüser Step 2 Hearing: “The Parties Agree to Use Their Best Efforts”. A Dramatic Academic Work Jennifer Hayashida Writing the Unwritable: Raveling Worlds Julie Vulcan Writing In Between Anna Gibbs Unwriting for the Anthropocene: Looking at the Disaster from the Inside . . . David R. Cole La Mise-en-Abîme: Placing Academic Writing in Scare Quotes Mick Wilson Abstract Academic Expressionism: An Alternative Aesthetics of Scholarly Practice Anne Pirrie Affective Academic Writing Bernd Herzogenrath Write to Life Erin Manning

List of Contributors Index of Subjects Index of Names

vi vii ix 1 13 25 39 53 61 85 99 109 121 137 149 161 173 187 191 197 199

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Figures 5.1

Screenshot of Word document / submission “Seeing Crisis in Harry Piel’s Ein Unsichtbarer geht durch die Stadt (1933)” with an editor’s comment in the margins and my response. 62 5.2–5.12 All images untitled, from Evidence, 1977, Larry Sultan and Mike Mandel © Mike Mandel / courtesy of Robert Mann Gallery © Larry Sultan/ courtesy of Casemore Kirkeby, San Francisco, Galerie Thomas Zande, Cologne, Yancey Richardson, New York, and Estate of Larry Sultan. 62–65 5.13 Edited screenshot of website: https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/ news-photo/child-waits-to-be-medivaced-by-u-s-army-soldiers-fromthe-news-photo/95921976. 69 5.14–5.17 Carolyn Lazard. A Recipe for Disaster, 2018. HD Video. 29 min. Courtesy the artist and Maxwell Graham/Essex Street, New York. 72–76 6.1 “Meeting Space at a Glance,” (2015), SCMS 2015, Conferessnce Program, Fairmont Queen Elizabeth, Montreal. March 25—March 29, 2015, p. 16 85 6.2 Lee, K.B. (2015), “282. Learning Farocki: A Live Desktop Response,” vimeo, screenshot. 88

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Series Editors’ Foreword It makes a world of a difference, how one derives the etymological origin of the word education. Whereas the Latin educare points to what we traditionally read as “instilling,” the alternative educere literally means “to lead out.” The former suggests an almost feudal idea of installing socially approved knowledge into the mind of the hierarchically “lower” pupil; here, knowledge is understood as a corpus that can be transferred (or even sold) from one generation to the next, in order to produce a certain effect in the latter. Against this “strong” (or dominant) concept of education, “weak” (or minor) education stems from the idea that knowledge is generated by persons and problems. The task, then, is to create the conditions favorable for knowledge to grow and flourish. These conditions call forth an atmosphere of cooperation, of searching and researching together. Education in this minor sense is about thinking with people, about working in a spirit of hope rather than unbridled optimism. It is not so much a means of transmission as a way of “commoning”—of mutual and patient experimentation— judged not by its ends but by its capacity to inspire new beginnings. In this perspective, teaching is less a method than a heuristic: a journey into unknown territory. Most importantly, it is not a study of, but a way of studying with. University education is in crisis. In this day and age of “academic capitalism,” and in the crossfire of both neoliberal and ultra-conservative perspectives, we need to go beyond the “negative mode” of criticizing the institutional status quo, and to set out positive alternatives. This means challenging the most fundamental premises of education itself. As Rita Felski has succinctly put it: “Why . . . is the affective range of criticism so limited? Why are we so hyperarticulate about our adversaries and so excruciatingly tongue-tied about our loves?” John Cage once commented on the ethical responsibility of experimenting: “I can’t understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I’m frightened of the old ones.” Shifting the register from posited meanings to affective operations, as Brian Massumi has argued, is ultimately an ethical act, since it means allying oneself to an “ethics of emergence.” An education predicated on experimentation, instead of clinging to the status quo or to the dominant sense of education, aims not to raise students upon the platform of where they stand, but to lead ourselves and our students to a place where we have not yet been, facilitating an encounter with things beyond the reach of present thought—things which force us to think, to envision educational futures. As Jacques Rancière proclaimed: “let’s make poetry . . . together.” To take these ideas seriously, we have to rethink education, less as a “home” to which one dutifully and habitually returns, than as a form of pedagogical nomadism which seeks to create encounters and connections for thinking that are dishabituated from models that already presume how education ought to go. It is along such lines of experimentation that alternative approaches to education can be explored on behalf of vii

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generations to come, offering an education that does not separate a sphere of “what one has to know from life, but that joins the very forces of life—forces that create new ideas, new ways of experiencing the world. Education becomes a potentiality for exploration and discovery in a terrain that is ever-unfolding. Here, theory and practice are inseparable. Could the university, after all, be the place where this kind of alternative education can be put into practice? What if the institution of the university, far from resting on a bedrock of stability, were itself suspended within a dynamic field of evermultiplying relations? Could the university become a “multiversity”? Books in the series alternative | education will address these questions. Bernd Herzogenrath and Tim Ingold Series editors

Acknowledgments I would like to express my gratitude to Bloomsbury (in particular Alison Baker) for giving us and me the opportunity to publish this book and try out “new things.” Thank you! also all those wonderful people that contributed to this volume—it has been a pleasure! Special thanks go out to Yusuf Buhurcu, for all the work you’ve put into this!

I dedicate this book to Janna and Claudia, and to the memory of Frank.

Parts of Bernd Herzogenrath’s introduction and essay already appeared as a part of his essay “Et in Academia Ego: Affect and Academic Writing,” in Ernst van Alphen and Tomáš Jirsa (eds.). How to Do Things with Affects: Affective Triggers in Aesthetic Forms and Cultural Practices (Leiden: Brill, 2019), 216–4. Reprinted with kind permission.

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Introduction: The Thing That Wouldn’t Die Bernd Herzogenrath

Prolegomenon An in|famous quip, oft-quoted these days, goes that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. One might add, it is easier to imagine the end of the world and the end of capitalism than the end of the academic essay. Even if this endeavor may seem insignificant, dwarfed by the simple fact of the much bigger problems “capitalism” or “end of the world,” this smaller issue, I argue, is still in the same gear of politics and ethics. In 2004, Bruno Latour published an influential and by now canonical essay on the state of critique, and he asked the rhetorical question of whether critique has “run out of steam” (225). Latour draws a bleak picture of how a practice of critique couched in militaristic terms (with “war,” “generals,” “projectiles,” “smart bombs,” “young recruits, young cadets”) forces contestants to take sides over an unbridgeable divide between those in the know and those duped, between appearance and reality, between surface and depth, with the critic seeing him- or herself on “the good side.” But, Latour asks, in a world in which the tools and concepts of critical thinking are more and more hijacked by conspiracy theorists and ultra-conservatives (and Latour is writing 2004, in the preTrump era, before fake news and post-factual politics reigned supreme; “Everything’s Gonna Be Alt-Right,” as the TV series Berlin Station has it), does critique, as we know it, still have value? In the aftermath of Latour’s essay, a veritable critique of critique has come out along the same lines, albeit not without elaborating on the concept. Whereas Latour is thinking of critique as based on a fundamental gap between human and nonhuman (the Kantian Critique), his call has been taken up by critics such as Rita Felski to speculate about the im possible future of criticism in terms of “critical thinking,” what Foucault called those “little polemical professional activities” (1997: 42). Felski (2015: 52–84) gives us an elaborate and convincing “taxonomy” of critique’s characteristic traits—or “tragic flaws,” one might even call them. After singling out two “default strategies” of critique—“digging down” (the Freudian/Marxist strategy of excavating, interrogating, and dissecting), and “standing back” (the cool distance of the New Historicist and the Post-structuralist, with their operations of situating, contextualizing, and defamiliarizing), we get a kind of all-points-bulletin or mug-shot 1

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of “critique.” The five qualities she lists are: Critique 1) is secondary; 2) is negative; 3) intellectual; 4) comes from below; 5) does not tolerate rivals (117–59). While much can be said about all those points (and Felski has an impressive lot to say), I am most interested in category 2) Critique is negative. Critics are always “quick off the mark to interrogate, unmask, expose, subvert, unravel, demystify, destabilize” (5); or, as Robert Koch states: “critical discourse, as critical discourse, must never formulate positive statements, it is always ‘negative’ in relation to its object” (531), and this negativity produces a “normative glow” (Coole 2000: 231) in the critic, a self-righteous halo (Felski 2015: 133) that stands in the way of being able to say “hello” to intellectual strangers. As Ien Ang puts it, “we need to engage in a world where we have to communicate with . . . people who do not already share our approaches and assumptions” (190). If, as I argue, academia needs nonacademia to survive (in particular in times like these when the humanities are on the back foot, forced to defend their raison d’être in the face of a pervasive anti-intellectualism), then the “critical reflex attitude” of “knowing best” establishes a minefield rather than a contact zone. Latour (225: 230) mentions the “patrician spite . . . As if critique should be reserved for the elite and remain difficult and strenuous, like mountain climbing or yachting.” Critique is proud of questioning and debunking the status quo, by means of defamiliarizing the familiar; this not only begs the question “for whom?” (as preaching to the converted might prove highly ineffective)—it also defamiliarizes the critic from the world, at least the nonacademic world (and here you have the term “academic” in the ridiculing and even pejorative sense of “not practical” or aloof and disconnected from “real life” (whatever that is). That is to say that critique is far from disinterested, cool, and distanced—it is by no means affect-less: critique in fact musters its own set of affects. On the one hand, the auto-affection that critique generates in the critic might ensure gratification: “Do you see now why it feels good to be a critical mind? . . . You are always right!” (Latour 2004: 238–9). On the other hand, critique’s set of affects that goes “out into the world” is a negative one, producing shame, anger, and humiliation either in those critiqued, the gullible masses, the “great unwashed” (Latour 2004: 239), or even in the critic, who, in what Elspeth Probyn calls the “risk of writing,” faces the fear and shame of “being highly interested in something and unable to convey it to others” (in Gregg & Seigworth 72). If critique has run out of steam, this might come close to conceding that critique not only depresses (the aimed target of criticism, the “sad passions” that Deleuze sees as necessary for the exercise of power-over), that it is not only depressing, but that critique is in itself depressive (I am here willfully misreading the etymology of depression, related to the Latin deprimere, “to push down”). Critique is depressive since it is deflated, has run out of pressure—its negativity has self-reflexed (a different self-reflexivity from the one that is among critique’s favorite tools). Critique as depression has lost contact with “the world,” is void of affirmative affects: “Why . . . is the affective range of criticism so limited? Why are we so hyperarticulate about our adversaries and so excruciatingly tongue-tied about our loves” (Felski 2015: 13)? So what happens if we try and change all those “sad” coordinates of academic writing? Nietzsche, in his 1872 lecture “On the Future of Our Educational Institutions,” asked polemically:

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How are your students connected to the university? We answer: Through the ear— they take part in university life as listeners. The foreigner is amazed and asks: Purely by listening? Purely by listening, we repeat. The student attends lectures. Insofar as he speaks, or sees, or walks, or spends time in others’ company, or makes art—insofar as he lives and breathes, in short—he is independent, that is to say, not dependent on the educational institution. Now it very often happens that the student writes something down while he is listening. These are the moments when he is attached to the university by a kind of umbilical cord. He can choose what he wants to hear; he does not necessarily have to believe what he hears; he can shut his ears if he does not want to hear at all. This is the “acroamatic” method of instruction. Nietzsche 2016: 75

Not so much has changed, it seems, during the last 150 years. Why? Can’t we try to infuse life, and the senses, into education? Might we need an academic unwriting to change or challenge the “gold standard” of academic critique? Could this gesture even be of the utmost importance in this day and age not just of capitalism, but of “academic capitalism”? The essays that follow aim to explore and to speculate about alternative directions, engaging in what at times turns out to be a most controversial discussion.

Synopsis We begin with Levi Bryant’s endeavor to map the structure and system of academic writing and communication. Beginning with the question of what distinguishes academic from other forms of writing, Bryant argues that all forms of academic writing are produced by an academic subject about an academic object. The essay then proceeds to articulate what academic subjects and objects are, how they are formed, and how they function. Drawing on Lacan’s discourse of the university, Bryant shows how normal academic writing strives to integrate and domesticate new cultural artifacts into existing academic objects or bodies of theory, thereby erasing the differences between these artifacts. He then shifts to the question of academic communication, drawing on Niklas Luhmann’s sociological theory that any communication system seeks to reproduce itself by finding something new to communicate. Academic communication is no different in this regard. It must find strategies for finding something new to say so as to keep communication going. Bryant explores the many and devious strategies that academic communication adopts to secure its own continuation. Through mapping these features of academic writing and communication, he aims to find alternatives within academic writing which could escape its familiar traps. Following Bryant’s fundamental perspective on the system and discourse of academic writing, Jessie Beier and Jason Wallin’s essay focuses on the nexus between education and materiality. For them, education is marked by a fundamental obsession with matter and an implicit preoccupation with the management and ordering of the material world. This preoccupation is complicit with what might be called the

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“Educacene,” that standard mode of writing a wilderness of planetary materiality into the ambit of anthropic control. In a scenario played out in schools across the world, the planet is made to “matter” only insofar as it is continually remade into an extractable resource for educational labor and commodity consumption. Constituting a geotraumatic event in which education is severed from the intensifying conditions of planetary change, the “Educacene” is today bound up with a mode of terraforming through which the world is made recognizable as an object of human mastery and surveillance. Although educational writing has endeavored to liberate matter from such prevailing models, it falls short of enacting a mode of writing capable of thinking “matter” as a fulcrum for the mutation of thought itself. Following this claim, Beier and Wallin seek to articulate not only the fate of matter under the fashions of avant-garde writing in education, but also to articulate a mode of dehiscent writing that rejoins to thought the horrors of planetary change that on all fronts thwart the presuppositions of control and standardization that yet persist within educational thinking. The following two essays focus on the idea of “fictioning” and its potential for changing the “gold standard” of academic writing. Two of its foremost practitioners, David Burrows and Simon O’Sullivan, explore the idea that fictioning can involve a kind of non-academic writing that is called forth by its subject as well as, itself, calling forth other subjects and non-subjects. As such it is a form of writing that is appropriate and adequate, at least to some extent, to its various subjects, yet makes no attempt to reductively “explain” or capture the thing being written about. This kind of writing seems to refuse critical distance, operating “on the ground” as a kind of performative and interdisciplinary ethnography. Fictioning also refuses any “standard” critical model, instead adopting and adapting different techniques and narratives, or using existing theoretical schemata, but in a non-standard fashion. Fictioning is promiscuous in this sense. It does not respect boundaries or genres. There is no desire here to “get it right.” Sometimes this kind of writing will employ various stylistic and formal experiments; at other times it might deploy more narrative tropes alongside the conceptual. Fictioning, however, differs from much fiction in the way in which it operates in a number of registers, including the conceptual, and in so far as it intersects and has traction on reality in a particular way (it does not offer an escape from the prevailing conditions, for example). This kind of writing might also entail the presentation of certain images or, indeed, the proliferation of different perspectives. In the case of Burrows’ and O’Sullivan’s own collaborative art practice, this might also involve the invention of different avatars that then speak back. Language is not used to explain anything here or, indeed, to clarify, but operates as a probe. One final way of understanding this fictioning as a mode of writing is as anamorphosis. When the correct posture is assumed—when this writing is read in a certain way—then something else besides meaning comes into focus (if nothing else, other things are set in. motion). This is where Liana Psarologaki’s essay chimes in, relating the idea of fictioning to alternative ways to approach reading and writing in academic practice, particularly in research methods training and in university courses on art and design. The academy (now known as Higher Education, and particularly in the UK) has progressively acquired—and applied in the last two decades—a plethora of business-oriented

Introduction

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strategies and principles. One of these treats successful education of the individual as effective preparation for employment, marking a notable shift of interest and effort towards “employability” of the graduate, and therefore good metrics. At the same time, studying at university has been and will continue to be an academic experience, most notable for the intellectual challenges and aspirations that many prospective students thankfully still seek. We must address as such the momentum reached by the unpopular strands of theoretical education associated with writing practice, particularly in the creative and humanities subjects, and how these may uphold rigor, interest, and effectiveness in skills acquisition. To do so, we have first to affirm how reading, writing, and text are widely used, and to stop demonizing technological advancements that come with particular intricacies of text use: social media platforms such as Twitter and Messenger, coding and programming languages, digitized and auto-corrected text, and of course the typing/writing duet. Psarologaki proposes that for these to become methods in effective academic practice, we should employ perhaps the most distinctive feature of human intellectual capacity, namely imagination. She links this to the concept of myth and method for fictioning, after Simon O’Sullivan, and interrogates the notion of fabulation by Bogue (following Bergson), using Helene Cixous’ Writing Blind to create a paradigm for “writing; other.” The latter will aim to create a nonindexed, maverick writing method using a synthesis of literary theories as methodology and posthuman (machine-assisted) text in the context of scholarly academic practice. Academic writing practice, more often than not, is regulated by a certain idea of “style.” However, the style guide is usually the last thing the author looks at. But it should probably be the first. There, one will find out not only whether to follow MLA or Chicago, but also how the argument will actually unfold on the printed page. It advises the author to avoid jargon and long quotations, making it as reader-friendly as possible. It explains how quotations should be prefaced by an author-name and, often, a national and disciplinary attribution (“As the French film theorist XYZ argues. . .”). This is of course not needed for big enough names. “A book that proceeds not in the manner customary there, but instead dialectically, runs the risk of being called ‘badly organized’ because at the beginning and at the end of each paragraph one does not announce where the paragraph will lead or why it is there at all” (Adorno [1958] 2009). Images should be sparse, explanatory and redundant, already previously explained in the text and in the caption. Subsections and headers break the flow of the text so readers can determine, at a glance, what they want to extract from it. The style guide is a key step of editing scholarly prose and, together with suggestions from the editor and peer reviewers, perpetuates the belief that conformity leads to accessibility. The result is a series of texts that fill in the same blanks with different content. As Kalani Michell argues in her essay “[Fill in the Blank],” while skipping through and scanning texts has always been part of reading practices, and academic publishers need a style guide to help make the review process more expedient, to stay under budget and to quell concerns about scholarly texts being too dense, abstract, obscure, specialized, and self-important, such conventions can nevertheless lead to a repressive conformity in academic writing. This conformity, in turn, produces texts that are often formulaic, additive, unfocused, and timid. They masquerade as texts for a general audience but follow a formula uncritically propagated by specialists. A curious

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assumption about what it means to be friendly toward the reader, and who this reader is, is manifested in this fantasy of accessibility. At a time when academic debates take place in visual and legible forms on a wide variety of digital and social media platforms, it’s surprising that even after embracing some different forms of writing, such as the “video essay” or the blog, academic publishing nevertheless strives to keep its “primary” site of scholarly writing, the book and the journal, wholly separate from this supposedly outside influence (Hüser, in this volume). This is also the case with texts on film and media studies, when one’s object of investigation already entails a contemplation of text-image relationships, which is then to be ignored and repressed in the process of writing, as if it were utterly distinct from thinking. How can one make it possible for an argument to interact with the prose and style of academic writing, rather than endlessly repeating and forcing it into every different crevice of the text, and naively assuming that this has no effect on the argument itself? How can an argument originate from and unfold throughout the choice of title that underwrites a text, the length of its paragraphs, quotational practices, introductory sentences, footnotes and images and captions? In drawing attention to conformist tendencies in the academic writing of text-image relationships, particularly the selection and integration of photographs and film stills into academic texts through the use of captions that reinforce the belief that the image is merely illustrative, Michell’s text looks for ways of filling in the blanks that are not merely additive but productive and generative. In order to draw up a first sketch of what might result in a new perspective if others draw on it as well, one has first to decide where one wants to situate oneself and what one is wishing for. What are our hopes and dreams these days? What potential pitfalls might we run into? To be able to come up with anything that might be somewhat debatable has a lot to do with one’s own awareness of, and willingness to analyze, the complexity of the situation in which one is going back to the drawing board. Which is nothing but our everyday task. How can we even process this intimidating but also somewhat comfortably stifling word “capitalism,” and quit taking it as an excuse that lets our own operations off the hook? “Capitalism,” as such, is way too big to mean anything; it is at best a placeholder for where to go in analysis. We might want to start by looking at where we can actually find the all-pervasive “capitalism” doing its capitalism-thing, and at how it is affecting our very own work of drawing. At least, this is the area we know best and in the most nuanced way: the university in times of its thorough economization of all areas through third-party funded projects. The downside of such an approach is that once we start thinking about the area that makes us—our profession and our work—and provides us with our daily regularities, it might hurt us and our projects. As integral parts of the game, we will have to decide, at some point, how far we will go to play along. The increasing reconceptualization of the humanities in the wake of their curatorial turn, as providers of happy-go-lucky outreach events, which are capable of attracting outside donors, is assigning a clear role to us. In this context and with respect to academic writing, the significance of the traditional publication (article, book) has notably declined over the last few years. At the same time, we can also witness the valorization of the bibliography. What counts is the list. Shorter and supposedly livelier texts make the corporate university happy. It is easier to sell.

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In this situation, the oral dimension of academia, even if it is written down, might be one of the most pertinent areas to look at. Rembert Hüser’s essay looks at the organization of academic party talk. He sketches out two options of how to deal with the setup of our daily routines. Both are related to the most recent dream of renewal within his field of study, film and media studies. Hüser identifies this as the recent craze for the video essay and its surprisingly quick assimilation by the institution. He looks at one example of the work of a respondent at a scholarly annual convention who, in a live-video essay performance, lays bare the very rules and silly self-complacency of our daily dealings with “author” and “work,” and the occupation of a curator who has relentlessly to coin new author-and-work events by directing all meaningful scholarship in its direction and claiming it. Both examples belong to the category of informal disciplinary communication to be found at the margins of texts, in their sometimesdirty underwear, and that are rarely discussed. How close can we get to the great artists that we admire so much? Drawing on the work of la paperson (2017), Jennifer Hayashida’s experimental essay introduces the “scyborg” as a decolonizing figure who operates fugitively within first- and second-worlding universities—imperial universities aspiring to transfer knowledge through colonization and settlement as well as the kind of worlding that takes place during and as a result of such education. The notion and urgency of decolonization has recently gained significant attention and traction, but is frequently misconstrued as a metaphor that activates “a set of evasions” (Tuck and Yang 2012). Working with Tuck and Yang (Yang also writes, perhaps fugitively, as la paperson), a “third worlding university” is a decolonizing university, and the scyborg works to advance the third university’s decolonial agenda of rematriation, regeneration, and queer futurity. In the context of this project, Hayashida reads la paperson’s brief manuscript-in-progress as an instruction manual for crashing the gears of the neoimperial academic machine. So, when la paperson encourages “a theory of action that accounts for the permeability of the apparatuses of power,” Hayashida turns to the theories of action contained in the art forms she considers most closely aligned with close readings of apparatuses of power, namely translation and poetry. If one genre of academic writing is of the sort we are all guilty of producing in an effort to both commodify and justify our positions across a range of academic institutions, the other is the writing which creates and regulates these positions: offer letters, hiring contracts, collective bargaining agreements, affirmative action policies, student loan and grant documents, and so on. In particular, this writing increasingly explains, structures, and dreams the regimes of neoliberalism and precarity that dominate the contemporary university, including a kind of academic gig economy, an orientation towards faculty and student entrepreneurship, and an erosion of institutional transparency and critical discourse—trends examined by la paperson as well as by scholars such as Kandice Chuh, Roderick Ferguson, Andrew Ross, and Eve Tuck, and then often, but not always, under the rubric of Critical University or Ethnic Studies. The decolonial call to action articulated by la paperson can, taken to its poetic and logical extreme, be a translational close reading of that second genre of academic writing, reductively described here as “the contract.” So, how can Hayashida—a

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translator, poet, and scholar with a deep knowledge of US academic contingent labor practices from the position of both abject adjunct and neo-imperial administrator— deploy a poetics of translation in order to engage in la paperson’s “system-interference”? If we demand more of academic writing, perhaps one thing we should insist upon is that it should allow for a poetics of interference into the legal-linguistic scaffold that brings our institutional positions into being. To this end, Hayashida works closely with a selection of documents originating in a contingent faculty member’s nonreappointment grievance process at a public US university. Drawing on a poetics of erasure, assemblage and translation, how can the poetic methods Hayashida is familiar with not merely sabotage a document such as collective bargaining agreement (resulting in art for art’s sake, not too far removed from academic writing for the sake of academic writing) but also allow for a new, third kind of academic writing to emerge—a writing that is experimental, cross-disciplinary, and cross-genre, and which also refuses the terms of its own production by attempting to short-circuit the systems that give it life? Maybe there’s a writing that is even more than all of these things. In her essay, Julie Vulcan explores a practice of writing-with. She shows how writing with a companion embeds theoretical concepts into the processes of everyday encounter, and more specifically, how writing companions that are not human might draw us out of humancentered patterns into more generative ways of raveling worlds. Raveling is a process of doing and undoing. It complicates and disturbs. It asks us to be attentive to our language and generous within our intellectual labor. Vulcan’s essay is a thinking piece and a writing experiment. It thinks about how a precarious world is steering us to write in particular and urgent ways, across disciplines and genres. It writes about how knowings and relatings shared across human and nonhuman continua make us think in different ways. It writes to think through urgency, flourishing bodies, and matters of flow. Most importantly it thinks into the process of writing and asks: what world am I writing into? We need to get our hands dirty. Just as the world seems closer than before, the necessary things we write and critique must also bring us closesinto the mess and into the fire, without apology. Where Vulcan focuses on a writing-with, Anna Gibbs asks what it means to write from in-between. What does it mean to be in the teeming midst of something, immersed in the materiality of writing as doing and making, a thinking-feeling sensation taking shape in action, and then shifting that shape again at the very moment it threatens to fix itself in a recognizable form? Continental feminist theory of the 1970s and 80s enacted a heuristic thought experiment as a basis for writing: what new worlds could be and what would it mean for writing if fiction, or philosophy, or indeed scholarly writing more broadly were to reflect not so much the “phallocentric” western imaginary erected on the basis of the male body, but—heuristically, speculatively, experimentally—an imaginary taking variations of female bodies as a point of departure. A direct legacy of this spirit of invention can be seen in the new experimental ethos that drives contemporary academic writing as it explores the constraining limits of bodies as well as their open-ended capacity for remaking themselves through forging new connections. This is an ethos that acknowledges writing as active encounter, aiming especially to capture and redirect human flows of affect to engage with worlds

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beyond the human, and animating these worlds so as to bring them to affective life for human readers: that is, rendering them communicable and making them matter. Here, scholarly writing also learns from the modernist literary avant-gardes and the history of experimental writing since then, especially from poetic investigations of the way language creates intersections and interstices, a space between. David R. Cole, however, follows another track in his essay. Rather than proposing different strategies of writing, he thinks we don’t need more academic production along already understood and practiced lines; what we require instead is “unwriting,” particularly because of the changing conditions of the Anthropocene, which have rendered redundant academic writing that carries on in previously conceived and practiced modes. Cole argues that the philosophical project of Deleuze, combined with the social ecology of Guattari, and the implications of the joint writing of their first collaborative piece, Anti Oedipus, draws a conceptual map of what this unwriting amounts to: to escape from, and mitigate against, capitalist influences on intellectual production. This is not a straightforward or easy task, but it is becoming increasingly significant under the universal conditions of climate change. In sum, Cole suggests that all current and future academic production has to take account of, and acknowledge, its relationship to climate change; if not, it is adding to the problem. This chapter gives readers a “way out” in terms of realigning academic production through unwriting in the Anthropocene, and a narrative example of how this might be achieved, in writing about one of the greatest disasters so far caused by climate change, the Australian bushfires of 2019–20. Mick Wilson’s essay returns us to the question and problem of the “generic constellations” of the academic writing machine: how it is to be described, analyzed and, for some critics, corrected. On the one hand, there is a widespread tendency toward a reductive account of academic writing as if there were a singular, well-defined and monolithic genre whose regime of orthodoxy stretches from genomics to art history and from literary criticism to medicine. On the other hand, claims are made for the ways in which different disciplinary and institutional prescriptions for appropriate style are both explicitly and implicitly transmitted and reproduced as part of performing and policing academic legitimacy. These tensions often generate various forms of selfreferential paradox and performative contradiction in the scholarly attempt to improve or proscribe certain writing practices. Rather than produce a theory of academic discourse, Wilson describes some of the ways in which the problematic of academic writing is rehearsed and contested in the classroom. The footnote, for example, is considered a key attribute of academic writing, and as a site of contestation over its stylistic, rhetorical, and ethical probity. Aspects of the genealogy of the footnote, and various proposed therapies of language in the service of epistemic projects, are used to position current moments of contestation within the wider genealogy of argument about writing and knowledge. And here’s a radical question: What would happen if we were to vault over conventional academic practice altogether in order to queer the academic essay? Do we need to change the coordinates of academic writing in order to put some steam back into critique? Anne Pirrie’s essay considers academic writing as an aesthetic process, an uncertain form of engagement with an unknown terrain. This raises

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broader questions about the epistemology, ontology, and aesthetics of academic practice writ large. Drawing on a curatorial view of the artistic process of the abstractexpressionist artist Jackson Pollock, Pirrie explores what happens when we deliberately “ex-position” ourselves beyond conventional practice in academic writing: making a splash rather than cutting a dash. The example of Jackson Pollock serves as a reminder that the protracted effort of looking at one thing, performing our mode of attention, can bring specific rewards. Imagine if the lines of academic writing, rather than a “rigorous” but ultimately sterile engagement with scholarly tradition, were more like those in a Pollock painting: ecstatic, dramatic, slow, fast, wavy or straight. What if the move towards abstraction (critique of) did not entail severing the red thread of experience (critique in) with its consequent stultification? Pirrie explores how, in conventional academic writing, the object of inquiry is rendered visible as this or that by way of a conceptual apparatus (in much the same way as a figurative painter might use an easel). Writing like this generally means adopting a particular position and privileging purely cognitive capacities. It means putting the object of inquiry under a spotlight and engaging in denunciative modes of critique. What might we learn from the abstract expressionists that would enable us to better reflect on the curious and faltering nature of the writer’s mind? How might we reinscribe humility into our practice? Pirrie wants to bring out the sheer joy of thinking, with all its risks, sudden flurries, and digressions; to see what academic writing might look like if it were to teem with life in all its vital abstractions. What if we were to write to find out what we are thinking rather than meticulously to recapitulate the views of others? Abstract academic expressionism is characterized by a dynamic relation between the abstract and the figurative. It reinstates subjectivities, desires and political projects at the very center of human endeavor. It eschews sterile “narrowcasting” and reaches out to the uninitiated in ways that remind us of the essentially relational nature of our being-in-the-world. This relational nature, this being-in-the world, is also what affects are about. Yet while the “Affective Turn,” as Eugenie Brinkema has suggested (2014), suffers from a “repetition-without-difference”-complex that uses the endless monotony of vague signifiers to refer to various art forms and media, Bernd Herzogenrath wants to “do otherwise” by focusing his essay not on affective readings of works of art, but by speculating on the possibility of an affective writing, in the context of academia. Academic writing has always stuck, and still continues to stick, to the illusion of “objectivity” and “critique”—but critique, as a normative tool, had “run out of steam.” According to Brian Massumi, if you start from the assumption that activities such as thinking and writing are inventive—that they are not “about this world” but “part of this world”—then critique disavows its very own inventiveness: “it sees itself as uncovering something it claims was hidden or as debunking something it desires to subtract from the world, it clings to a basically descriptive and justificatory modus operandi” (Massumi 2002: 12). By contrast, affect comes close to an inventive force that acknowledges a “radical situatedness” (Slaby 2017). So, what would a non-objective (rather than subjective) and affirmative (or “productivist”—the term is Massumi’s) academic writing look like? By referring both to Deleuze’s idea of “affect” (in the Spinozian sense, meaning both to affect and be affected) and perspectives from the field of Artistic Research, with their stress on both

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variations of knowledge and the importance of the “personal signature” in research, Herzogenrath enters a “playful plea” for the idea and possibility of an affective academic writing, in which it is not a question of right or wrong, judged according to an external set of moral or given rules, but of fostering, of “transmitting” affects that increase the power of acting—something that has less to do with morals than with ethics. “[R]eading and writing,” as Barad says (2012: 49) “are ethical practices.” This is an ethics of “affective operations” (van Alphen 2008). As an appropriately open ending to all those various possibilities of doing academic writing otherwise, Erin Manning adds an exclamation mark to this collection of essays in her manifesto-like “Write to Life.” Across 86 propositions, Manning’s text explores the conditions through which writing forges expressions for and with life in the making. In so doing, she decries writing white as the colonial commitment to the devaluation of thought and the violent destruction of both wording and worlding. Our (maybe not so) modest wish for this book is that it may turn out to be an inspirational seed bomb, both academic and polemic, serious and playful (playful in its seriousness, and serious in its playfulness). Of course, there’s a big difference between “Doing the Talk” and “Doing the Do.” But while we are aware of the performative contradiction of a project such as this, which cannot escape the pitfalls of “traditional academic writing” even as it attempts to put the case for writing otherwise, this paradoxical condition might be precisely what is needed to reveal “a road not travelled.”

References Adorno, T. W. ([1958] 2009), “Kultur and Culture”, translated by Mark Kalbus, https:// damagemag.com/2021/12/20/the-fulfilled-utopia, last accessed April 24, 2022 Ang, I. (2006), “From Cultural Studies to Cultural Research: Engaged Scholarship in the Twenty-First Century”, Cultural Studies Review 12 (2): 183–97. Barad, K. (2012), “Matter feels, converses, suffers, desires, yearns and remembers: Interview with Karen Barad”, in R. Dolphijn and I. van der Tuin, New Materialism: Interviews & Cartographies, 48–70, Ann Arbor: Michigan Publishing, University of Michigan Library. Brinkema, E. (2014), The Forms of the Affects, Durham: Duke University Press. Coole, D. (2000), Negativity and Politics: Dionysus and Dialectics from Kant to Poststructuralism, London: Routledge. Felski, R. (2015), The Limits of Critique, Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. Foucault, M. (1997), “What is Critique?” in S. Lotringer and L. Hochroth (eds.), The Politics of Truth, trans. Lysa Hochroth, 41–81, New York: Semiotext(e). Gregg, M., and G. J. Seigworth (eds.) (2010), The Affect Theory Reader, Durham, NC : Duke University Press. Koch, R. (2002), “The Critical Gesture in Philosophy”, in B. Latour and P. Weibel (eds.), Iconoclash: Beyond the Image Wars in Science, Religion, and Art, 524–36, Cambridge, MA : MIT. la paperson. (2017), A Third University Is Possible, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

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Latour, B. (2004), “Why has Critique Run out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern”, Critical Inquiry (Winter 2004): 225–48. Massumi, B. (2002), Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation, Durham, NC : Duke University Press. Nietzsche, F. (2016), Anti-Education. On the Future of Our Educational Institutions. Translated from the German by Damion Searls, edited and with an introduction and notes by Paul Reitter and Chad Wellmon. New York: New York Review Books. Slaby, J. (2017), “More than a Feeling: Affect as Radical Situatedness”, Midwest Studies in Philosophy 41 (2017): 7–26. Tuck, E., and K. Yang (2012), “Decolonization Is not a Metaphor”, Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, 1 (1): 1–40. van Alphen, E. (2008), “Affective Operations of Art and Literature”, RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics, 53–54: 21–30.

1

The Structure and System of Academic Writing Levi R. Bryant

What is it that makes an utterance or writing academic? What is it that distinguishes an academic utterance or writing from a piece of journalism, a poem, a work of literature, an administrative enrollment report, a piece of legislation, or a conversation about a child’s birthday party in the hallway? Clearly, we can imagine many hybrids of academic writing, where we encounter inscriptions that are both journalistic and academic, or poetic and academic. However, if we are to imagine a new form of academic writing, we must make explicit our conception of what academic writing is—at least in our present historical moment—and what distinguishes it from other genres of writing such as grocery lists, novels, and news articles. By rendering explicit our conception of this writing, no matter how imperfectly, we might more effectively formulate a deterritorialization or line of flight from this form of writing, an unwriting of this form of writing, that will perhaps allow us to imagine the academy anew. To achieve an unwriting of academic writing, a line of flight, we must carry out a cartography of what academic writing is and how it functions. In this way, we might find possibilities of egress—or, at least, provoke reflection on our academic practices—through a comprehension of how the machine of academic writing functions.

The Structure of Academic Writing Academic writing, it would seem, must be related to the academy—to the universities, colleges, and institutes—in order to be academic writing. Academic writing requires the site of the academy to exist. This is not a spatial hypothesis. All sorts of utterances and writings occur within the halls of the academies that are not academic. Students and faculty have conversations about their weekends, bands, and cooking in hallways. Jokes are told. People comment on the strange weather. Administrators draft expense reports and plans for new buildings. People ask where the nearest restroom is. None of these are academic utterances or writings, though perhaps they could become so under certain conditions. In order for an utterance or writing to be academic, a threefold structure is required: First, there is, of course, the academic utterance or writing itself. Second, it must be articulated or written by an academic subject. Third, it must be about an academic object. As we will see later, these three elements are a necessary but not sufficient condition for academic utterances and writing. Academic objects can be thought as 13

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transcendental objects belonging to a discipline. Academic objects are the a priori of a discipline in the sense that they are objects that precede any particular or specific or concrete objects investigated by a discipline. They are objects before objects that predelineate appropriate empirical objects of investigation within the discipline. In this regard, they are conceptual by nature and cannot be touched, measured, seen, tasted, smelled, or heard. They differ from discipline to discipline, and have a history. In speaking of academic objects as the transcendental objects that are the a priori of a discipline, I only mean to say that these objects are what the discipline recognizes as the object of study or investigation in its discipline. For example, in Literature the academic object would be “literature,” what counts as literature, and what distinguishes literature from non-literature. The concept of literature as an academic object will govern what empirical objects—various texts—can legitimately be investigated as literature and will distinguish literature from non-literature. Often it will go without saying in the discipline and will not be clearly articulated by the discipline. It will be “what goes without saying” in the discipline and explain why everyone knows why Facebook Marketplace advertisements and pulp romance novels are not appropriate or suitable objects of investigation in literary studies. It is crucial to note that academic objects are not Platonic forms or essences. They have a history, change within disciplines, and have boundaries that are contestable. One can always make a go, for example, of expanding the boundaries of the transcendental literary object in such a way that certain comic books and mass market novels fall within the purview of empirical objects suitable for investigation by literary studies. Academic subjects are persons who have undergone or who are in the process of undergoing formation or subjectivization within their academic discipline. In the Critique of Pure Reason Kant spoke of a transcendental aesthetic as the condition for both receptivity and mathematics. “Aesthetic” does not here refer to art and beauty, but rather the capacity to sense, hence receptivity in the sense of being able to receive. In order for any object to be encountered at all, he argued, it must be encountered within the a priori forms of space and time. According to Kant, space and time do not arise from experience, but are the framework within which any experience is possible. There is something akin to this in the case of academic subjects. As persons who have undergone formation within their academic discipline, academic subjects are able to discern empirical objects through the framework of academic objects belonging to their discipline. They are able to discern which empirical objects are suitable and promising objects of investigation, what questions to pose of these objects, and how to submit these objects to reigning theoretical paradigms within their discipline. For example, the academic subject in Literature is able to identify ideal textual and cultural artifacts (empirical objects) for deconstructive, Marxist, feminist, posthumanist, speculative realist, new materialist, psychoanalytic, etc., investigation and analysis in the production of academic utterances and writings. Academic subjects are therefore subjects that have been authorized to make academic utterances and engage in academic writing by the broader academic community. Often the route to this authorization will be through the academy, but there are other routes, albeit unusual and improbable, as well. Academic utterances and writings are therefore statements formulated by academic subjects about academic objects within the framework of disciplinary academic

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objects. However, we should not conclude that the mere fact of being articulated by an academic subject about an empirical object within the framework of an academic object entails that the utterance is an academic utterance. In this connection we can speak of proto-academic utterances. Every proto-academic utterance is, within the academic community a wager that may or may not be successful as an academic utterance. In other words, it is not the agent, the academic subject, that ultimately decides whether the utterance is a genuine academic utterance, but the broader academic community. Proto-academic utterances are determined as academic utterances through procedures of peer review, dissertation defenses, conference committees, editorial boards, and many other agencies beside, all determining whether, according to criteria of academic rigor and the academic objects of a discipline, the utterance is suitable for further discussion whether in the form of debate, refutation, or citation in support of further academic utterances.

Normal Academic Writing In light of the foregoing, we should recall Lacan’s theory of discourse and, in particular, what he calls “the university discourse.” Before proceeding, it is important to remember that while Lacan refers to this discourse as the university discourse, its structure is not unique to the university. For example, discourses in bureaucracies are equally examples of the university discourse. There is thus nothing about the university discourse that is unique to academic utterances and writings. For Lacan, a discourse is not defined by its content, but by its structure. Where we might commonly talk about the discourse of sexuality or physics drawing attention to the content of these things, in Lacan discourse is a social relation between an agent and another that has a particular structure. The root structure of Lacan’s theory of discourse is as follows: Agent → Other _____ _____ Truth // Product In each discourse we have an agent addressing an other driven by an unconscious or excluded truth, producing a product (Lacan 1998: 14–17). The four elements that fill the various spaces are: S1 = S2 = $ = a =

The Master-Signifier Knowledge The subjective surplus jouissance

I hasten to add that as we shall see, these symbols can be interpreted in a variety of ways depending on our purposes. The structure of the university discourse is as follows: S2 → a ______ S1 $

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In the position of the agent, we have “knowledge” addressing “surplus jouissance” producing a divided or alienated subject with the master-signifier in the position of truth driving the discourse. Translating this a bit, we can think of S2 as an academic object for a particular discipline. It can be a theoretical paradigm such as phenomenology, deconstruction, or Marxist literary criticism. In this regard, S2 can be thought of as a system of classificatory categories or as the commitments of a theoretical paradigm. Objet a, in the position of the other, can thus be thought as empirical objects that have not yet been integrated into the system of S2. In the case of Literary Studies, it is the text or cultural artifact that has not yet been submitted to a deconstructive, Marxist, feminist, speculative realist, environmentalist, etc. reading and interpretation. In short—and we can call this, taking a page from Thomas Kuhn (2012),“normal academic writing”—the aim of the university discourse is subordinating and integrative. At the outset of the academic process, the empirical object presents itself as something of a mystery or a secret. Here we encounter the new text or cultural object. What does it mean? What does it signify? What is its significance? The aim of normal academic writing is to decipher and decode the mysterious empirical object that is currently in the position of objet a. If successful, the product of the academic writing will be $, the empirical object subordinated and integrated into the academic object of the discipline. Two things will be at work here: On the one hand, in successfully integrating the empirical object as objet a one will have confirmed the academic object in the form of dominant theoretical paradigms. One will have shown, for example, that actor-network theory or Marxist theory is adequate to deciphering even something as innocuous as John Lasseter’s 1995 film Toy Story. On the other hand, secret or hidden knowledge will be shown to reside in the empirical object; a knowledge that can’t readily or immediately be deciphered simply by viewing the object. Rather, it takes the academic subject that has undergone a proper formation within their discipline forming the right sensibility to skillfully unlock the secret of objet a as objet a. Through the skillful work of the academic subject, a schematism between the academic object and the empirical object is effectuated, producing a $ or divided object, which is to say—in this instance—a cultural object integrated into the academic object of the discipline. It is for this reason that we find S1 or the master-signifier in the position of truth in the discourse of the university. Truth here should not be thought in terms of correspondence as an adequation between proposition and reality, but rather as that which drives the discourse or propels it forward. If it is the master-signifier that drives normal academic discourse, then it is because this form of writing is a will to mastery. The mysterious object in the form of the empirical object as objet a must be integrated in the system of knowledge or the academic object. It must be shown that this object too can be deciphered and decoded within the predelineated framework of the academic object. It is in this regard that the product of the university discourse is a “divided object” or $. Lacan argues that the subject is divided between the ego or conscious portion of the self and the unconscious that thinks behind our back. The subject, he says, suffers a twofold alienation in the form of an illusory ego and an unconscious that thinks within it unbeknownst to it. Similarly, we can say that the normalized empirical object of academic writing is an alienated object. While something of the mysterious empirical object as objet a is ventriloquized through the academic subject that integrates it into

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S2 or the academic object, the objet a tends to only be approached in terms of its suitability as a candidate for decoding within the theoretical paradigm of the academic object. That in the objet a which does not fit with the paradigm tends to be brushed aside. The academic subject tends to find within the empirical object what they already expected to find, though tailored, of course, to the specific cultural object in question. For example, the Marxist academic subject “discovers” that Toy Story is yet another commentary on class struggle or neoliberalism, and the Lacanian psychoanalytic theorist discovers that it is a commentary on how the sexual relationship does not exist or the structure of fantasy the frame of reality. The truth that the empirical object itself as objet a might have to speak is foreclosed and erased as the object is integrated in the existing knowledge paradigm of the academic object. There are two ways in which the empirical object as mysterious objet a is an alienated object upon being integrated into the system of S2 of the academic object. First, was we have just seen, it tends to undergo a sort of academic reduction in the process of being subordinated and integrated in the system of S2. At the risk of hyperbole, the object will now be this and nothing but this. Second, because the object has been integrated into the signifying system of S2’s of the disciplines academic object, it tends to be replaced by those signifiers. One need no longer attend to the object because it has now been decoded and deciphered.

Strategies of Academic Communication and Their Vicissitudes In an amusing passage, Niklas Luhmann writes: Society does not weigh exactly as much as all human beings taken together, nor does its weight change with every birth and death. It is not reproduced, for example, by an exchange of macromolecules in the individual cells of a person or by the exchange of cells in the organisms of individual human beings. It is therefore not alive. Nor would anyone seriously regard neurophysiological processes in the brain inaccessible to consciousness as societal processes, and the same is true of all perceptions and trains of thought occupying the attention of the individual consciousness at a given time. Luhmann 2012: 7

Based on considerations such as this, Luhmann concludes that society does not consist of persons, but rather communication. Persons, while necessary for communication, are, argues Luhmann, outside of society. As he puts it, “[h]umans cannot communicate; not even their brains can communicate, not even their conscious minds can communicate. Only communications can communicate” (Luhmann 2002: 169). A communication system is moreover not what an individual does, but is an event that transpires between individuals. The elementary unit of communication is not therefore the utterance or writing, but rather is an event that transpires between the one and the other. It is the system as a whole that one must consider, according to Luhmann, not the individuals that compose the system.

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More properly, Luhmann argues that communication systems are autopoietic communication systems. That is, they are systems that reproduce themselves across time through their own operations, which is to say, through ongoing communications. Communication systems therefore always need further communications to continue to exist. They exist only in and through communication and cease to exist when communication ceases. For this reason, Luhmann remarks that . . . the entire world of social communication is set up so that monotony is excluded and one can communicate only by changing themes and contributions. If there is nothing to say, then one must find something. In no way is one allowed to repeat what has already been said until something arises and forces one to say something new. Luhmann 1995: 64

I say “the sun is rising.” You say “the sun is rising.” I say “the sun is rising.” And so it goes. Eventually one of us gives up and walks away in exasperation. In this instance, the communication system—composed of you, me, and our utterances—collapses. Rather, the system can only continue to exist if new things are found to be said. Although many of us like to think of ourselves as anti-Cartesians, eschewing, for one reason or another, the Cartesian subject, we still have a tendency to think of individual authors, their intentions, and their aims despite all of the critiques of the author to date. However, if Luhmann is right, then the academic system and academic writing are also a communication system, subject to the same imperatives of autopoeisis, such that we cannot take the author as the unit of academic writing. If academic writing is a communication system, then this entails that it is necessarily driven by the imperative to communicate the new. This means that the system must devise strategies for articulating what is new. Successful academic communication will not reside in the utterance or writing itself, but in its capacity to generate new further communications. Only in this way can the academic system continue as a communication system. While we, as individual authors, might very well pursue aims of truth, knowledge, justice, and emancipation, these aims are depressingly not necessarily the most successful strategies for achieving communicative autopoiesis on the part of the academic communication system. On the one hand, the academic writer paradoxically is possessed of a drive to create non-knowledge. To the same degree that the academic writer strives to produce knowledge—or at least candidates for knowledge no matter what knowledge might be—they must necessarily produce non-knowledge as well. For without non-knowledge, without mysterious objet a’s, there is nothing new to say. In order for academic writing to exist as a communication system, it must therefore continuously produce a reserve or reservoir of non-knowledge. Of course, the academic can repeat various classic interpretations and findings within the space of the classroom, yet in the halls of conferences and the pages of journals, such repetition would never be tolerated. In some respects, this is the function of citation in the academic article. It is not merely a matter of bolstering ones case by citing others, but also 1) functions as a shibboleth to show that one is fit to speak as an academic subject, and 2) that there is a hole in the academic object that needs to be filled. To the same degree that the academic system pursues knowledge, it also pursues ignorance.

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On the other hand, as a communicative system, the academic system tends to favor those utterances and writings that tend to produce further communications. All of us have experienced the painful sting of giving a conference talk that generates no questions or discussion—or merely polite questions and discussion to put us out of our misery—or of publishing the article that never gets cited (the fate of most articles). In those instances, system autopoiesis has failed to take place. An utterance in the form of speech and writing has taken place, but communication has not taken place. An article or talk might be profound, of the finest quality, and filled with important truths, yet within the academic system if nothing subsequent comes from it, then within a Luhmannian framework it is a failed communication. Again, communication is what is between. For this reason, the academic system tends to evolve strategies—many of them unsettling and depressing, while nonetheless being readily familiar to academics— for producing communicative autopoiesis or continued communication. In the remainder of this section, I will outline a few of these strategies.

Writing Machines While aiming at understanding that leads to the citation of work in subsequent publications, it is sadly not necessarily among the effective strategies. Counter-intuitive as it might seem, understanding can, actually, be an impediment to further system autopoiesis. The reason for this is that where understanding has been achieved, there is little more to say. We nod our heads and move on; communication fails. In this regard, communication should not be restricted to the model of a sender exchanging a message to a receiver that then decodes that message so as to articulate the intended meaning. There are all sorts of other communicative events that are genuine communicative events that do not fit that model. In this regard, we might recall James Joyce’s quip that he wished to write a novel that would keep the critics busy for at least three hundred years. His novel was successful in achieving this aim and can be thought as functioning as an attractor structuring communications in Joycean studies. The brilliance of Joyce’s novel is precisely that it does not communicate in an ordinary commonsense conception of communication as a message exchanged with a receiver, and therefore communicates brilliantly in Luhmann’s sense. Because the novel is uninterpretable due to its puns, double entendres, and layering of the world’s language—or because it is endlessly interpretable; it functions as an irritant producing endless communication. Our inability to pin it down, to understand it, is precisely its communicative success. Joyce’s Finnegans Wake is therefore what we might call a writing machine. It is a writing machine in the sense that as an element in a communication system it produces endless writing and utterances. Interpretation after interpretation of the work is offered. Countless conference talks are given. Tribes advocating different strategies of interpreting the text arise and debates among them emerge. It is the slipperiness of Joyce’s text, our inability to pin it down once and for all, that renders it so successful at communication. It is precisely that we fail to understand it that spurs us to endlessly discuss it, so long as we don’t throw it down in exasperation, of course. In the world of philosophy and theory we might therefore wonder whether this partially accounts for the communicative success of thinkers such as Hegel, Heidegger,

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Lacan, Luhmann, Deleuze, and Derrida? I do not wish to minimize the contributions of these thinkers, nor suggest that they have not contributed tremendously to our understanding. I myself have written a great deal about these thinkers and every aspect of my own work is powerfully informed by their thought. However, is it simply the power of their thought and the importance of their concepts that accounts for why the work of these thinkers generates so much scholarship? Is it not also, in part, that their works are writing machines in the sense that Joyce’s Finnegans Wake is a writing machine? Works such as these, so elusive and intimidating, demand an endless work of commentary. Returning to the themes of the last section, they present themselves as a mysterious objet a, inscrutable objects, that hint at the secrets of the universe without ever fully articulating them. Just when we think we are approaching their truth, just when we think we have grasped the text, our mastery slips away. A curious thing happens at this point. Ordinarily we pick up an academic text because we would like to understand something of the world, culture, and society we live in. I pick up Lacan, for example, because I would like to understand something of myself and others and the relationship between myself and others. I was not interested so much in Lacan, but in what Lacan was talking about, the object of his discourse. This does not change. We value these thinkers because they teach us something of the world. Yet now an imperceptible shift takes place. Because we feel that the text is just about to reveal the truth, because we feel that we are just about to fully grasp it, our communication shifts from being about what the text is about, to being about the text. Year after year conferences are given devoted to deciphering the works of these thinkers. Article after article is written striving to decode them. Book after book is written. Many scholars spend their entire careers devoted to deciphering a particular thinker. Returning to the discussion of the discourse of the university in the last section, the opaque and mysterious text now becomes the objet a that the scholar strives to capture within the net of knowledge or S2’s. Where before we encountered a divided object ($), subordinated to the academic object or theoretical paradigm, we now have a properly divided subject ($) alienated in the text of the thinker. The scholar begins by which to know something of what the text is about such as the meaning of being (Heidegger) or desire (Lacan), only to end up trapped in the spider web of the text such that their work becomes about deciphering and decoding the text. Through this, we end up becoming disciples of the thinker, further and further estranged from the world outside the text, which is why S1 appears in the position of the master-signifier. There is a supreme irony here for thinkers such as Lacan, Derrida, and Deleuze, for all of these thinkers in their own way critique master-signifiers and masters, yet the thinker behind the text comes to function in this place. Our work comes to be about the thinker, rather than the world. Nonetheless, in their elusiveness these texts function as exemplary writing machines in their capacity to generate endless communication.

Critique We can think of academic writing as a way of observing something. We would like to know something of the text, the cultural artifact, society, or the world. The text strives

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to bring such things into relief. Yet, as Luhmann argues following the renegade mathematician Spencer-Brown, in order to observe anything, we must first draw a distinction (Luhmann 2002: 128–52). Every distinction has a marked space and an unmarked space. The marked space of the distinction is the field of what is given to be observed, whereas the unmarked space of the distinction is what is set aside. In this regard, distinction can be thought as imperfectly analogous to a window. A window gives a field to be seen, but there is also that which is “out-of-field” and therefore beyond visibility. Similarly, in our approach to deciphering a cultural artifact, we operate with a distinction that pre-delineates what is of significant in a text. That distinction brings certain elements of the text into relief and gives them to be seen. Therefore, for example, in a Marxist analysis of a film our distinctions that allow us to observe the text might be those pertaining to class struggle or ideology. We search for those features relevant to that marked space and set aside everything else. In every observation there is therefore a blindness. To the same degree that a field is brought into relief to be seen, there is the unmarked space that is set aside. There is thus a blind spot in every act of observing. It can be no other way. It is crucial to note that we can use our distinctions or we can observe our distinctions but we cannot observe our distinctions and use our distinctions. Distinctions can be thought of as transcendental conditions for observations or the a priori of observations. As we operate with distinctions—which is to say, as we make observations using our distinctions—our distinctions fall into the background, and therefore become a second blind spot within the field of observation. Just as we do not see the region between our eyes but our brains fill in the blind spot within our vision, there is a twofold blind spot in all observation. We cannot say it all. In the drive to find something new to say, critique therefore becomes an appealing option. Speaking of deconstruction in particular, Luhmann explores the ways in which deconstruction can be thought as observing the observer (Luhmann 2002: 94–112). Shifting from first-order observation where we make observations by operating with distinctions, we can draw another distinction and observe the distinctions through which the observer observes whatever texts or features of the world they strive to decipher. In this way we can observe what the observer does not observer, that is to say, their blind spots. For example, by engaging a second-order observation of an academic text that engages in a marxist analysis of a text, we can observe the blind spots of this form of analysis, noting that it does not observe environment, gender, race, or rhetoric at work in the text. We can then communicate both about the text and about what the text does not communicate about, producing another text alongside the text that says something new. However, it must be remembered that the necessity of drawing a distinction in order to observe is a feature of all observation, including second-order observation. This entails that when we engage in second-order observation, our second-order observations contain their own blind spots as well. We operate with a distinction of which we are unaware as we operate with it and our distinction creates an unmarked space. Our second-order observations of the text therefore create the opportunity for others to engage in second-order observations of our second-order observations, marking our blind spots and creating a text alongside our text. That text, in turn, can

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become yet another opportunity for second-observation. We then fall into a sort of bad infinity—an N+1—where there is no end in sight. The value of critique is immense both in what it discloses—new fields of inquiry and new ways of deciphering objet a’s—and in its ability to generate further academic communications. Those submitted to second-order observation defend themselves, sometimes indignantly, enriching their paradigm of observation. The others, in their turn, critique their defenses and further enrich and develop their positions. If critique is so effective in generating academic communication, then it is because it is structurally impossible to say and cite it all and there is therefore, in any text—even Hegel—that which is unsaid that can be brought into relief, demanding its right to be written. However, it is notable that in engaging in second-order observation, in observing the blind spots of the observer, critique has a tendency to become increasingly about texts rather than the world. Disciplines in the humanities increasingly become reflexive analyses of their own disciplines, becoming more and more remote from the world. The text becomes the world.

Bomb Throwing A third strategy for producing academic communicative autopoiesis lies in bomb throwing. The bomb thrower generally makes a claim that is both critical and that appears, on the surface, to be absurd and outlandish. Here we might think of Derrida’s Of Grammatology (Derrida 1997). In making the claim that the history of Western thought is organized around presence to oneself in speech, that writing is not a sign of speech, and that speech is always already pervaded by writing from within, Derrida makes a claim that initially seems absurd. He has thrown a bomb into the middle of the room—the academic community—and now others can respond. Some can set about denouncing the absurdity of the claims and how ridiculous it is to suggest that the presence to oneself sought after in speech can serve such a decisive function in thought, and what nonsense it is to claim that writing precedes speech—a claim he does not make—or that speech and presence are always already contaminated by writing. In other words, one contingent can set about defending the rights of common sense. Yet others can give a quasi-class critique, arguing that clearly such claims are a scholar’s conceit that would like everything to be a text to be deciphered, thereby making the academic the sovereign of the universe. Yet others can set about defending his claims, striving to demonstrate “writing” is not to be taken in its common sense connotation, but must be thought of as difference that precedes and renders possible any presencing whatsoever, such that it is a condition of being and givenness as such. A similar bomb would be Graham Harman’s Guerrilla Metaphysics (2005). In defending a realism of being composed of objects independent of subjects, the thesis that objects are thoroughly withdrawn from all relations, and the claim that no objects ever touch or directly relate, he throws a bomb by making a number of claims that seem to be profoundly incoherent. If objects cannot relate, and we are also instances of objects, then how could we ever know such a thing? Such a claim seems to transgress sacred cows of philosophy and theory, claiming that it is able to have metaphysical knowledge of beings independent of the subject, culture, or language. Insofar as it is a subject making such a claim, is not his thought related to the object and therefore

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contradictory from the outset? Does not he use language to speak the object, opening himself to the objection that he cannot determine whether his claims about objects are a product of linguistic structure or manage to get at the being of the things themselves. In making a series of claims that violate reigning consensus and that seem to so clearly be contradictory, his text becomes generative of all sorts of academic communication. Once again, people can line up denouncing the incoherence of the claims and showing why and how they’re incoherent, while others can defend them and put them to work. In a number of respects bomb throwing can be thought of as a form of critique. The bomb, by virtue of how foreign and strange it seems, comes to function as an instigator to second-order observation, leading us to become aware of the distinctions through which we make observations or our own blind spots. The strangeness of the bomb, the way it violates our cherished axioms and assumptions, leads us to observe ourselves and the world anew. Often the bomb communicatively leads to a retrenchment of these axioms even when it is not dismissed outright, but in those instances where it is not dismissed out of hand academic communication finds that it must respond to the bomb, and in doing so it is forced to develop our claims, our academic objects, and send them in different directions. Something of the world that we did not see before comes to be seen and those things become a new objet a to be thought.

Conclusion My aim here has not been to denounce normal academic writing, writing machines, critique, nor bombs. Sometimes and often powerful and valuable things come from all of these forms of academic writing. Rather, my aim has been to carry out a cartography or a map of a number of common features we encounter in academic writing. My premise is that we can be enmeshed in systems and structures without being aware of the ways in which we are enmeshed. Here, for example, we might think of Foucault’s Discipline & Punish. Foucault provides little to nothing in the way of solutions or alternatives, but merely maps disciplinary techniques in the production of docile bodies at the level of the prison, school, factory, workplace, and military, and how we undergo subjectivizations of power whereby we become our own jail keepers through panoptic organizations of society. Foucault’s book might appear pessimistic, leading us to think there is no escape. However, in mapping these mechanisms of power we become aware of how they function in our own lives and society and can begin to build alternatives. We begin to pose alternative questions and problems that, in their turn, might lead to new forms of life. In striving to map certain dimensions of academic writing—and far more needs to be said—it is my hope that we might begin to imagine and enact alternatives.

References Derrida, J. (1997), Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Spivak, Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press.

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Foucault, M. (1995), Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan, New York: Vintage Books. Harman, G. (2005), Guerrilla Metaphysics: Phenomenology and the Carpentry of Things, Chicago: Open Court. Kuhn, T. (2012), The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Lacan, J. (1998), Of Feminine Sexuality, The Limits of Love and Knowledge 1972–1973: Encore, trans. Bruce Fink, New York: W.W. Norton & Company. Luhmann, N. (1995), Social Systems, trans. John Bednarz, Jr. and Dirk Baecker, Stanford, CA : Stanford University Press. Luhmann, N. (2002), Theories of Distinction: Redescribing the Descriptions of Modernity, ed. William Rasch, Stanford, CA : Stanford University Press. Luhmann, N. (2012), Theory of Society: Volume 1, trans. Rhodes Barrett, Stanford, CA : Stanford University Press.

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Walking on Sunshine Jessie Beier and Jason Wallin

Writing (in) the Educacene The “standardization” of reality that inheres within education and its writing is an evidentiary aspect of what might be called the Educacene. For by way of definition, the Educacene might be thought as a vehicle of matter’s de/reterritorialization as it is first cleaved from its planetary relations and then reordered in “givenness” to the metrics of order and control that subtend education’s dispensation to factory routines and habits of standardization. As an operative mode of terraforming, the Educacene writes the world in the language of matter-management emblematized by Agamben’s (2002) indictment of education as an “anthropological machine.” For astride its seizure of material complexity, the Educacene redoubles the machinations of industrial capitalism by remaking the world into a site of interminable resource extraction that not only remakes the object within the ambit of institutional intelligibility, but establishes in this correlation the “facticity” of the Real. Where Paul Crutzen’s (2002) definition of the Anthropocene sought to identify the stratigraphic writing of human civilization upon the material record of the Earth, what might be called the Educacene figures similarly as an intractable catalyst of the West’s omnicidal trajectory (Pedersen 2021). For today, the Educacene works as a tandem operator to the Anthropocene in its de/reterritorialization of matter remade on behalf of educational labor and consumption. This process has prepared the ground for an epidemic of educational “standardization” in which matter becomes habitually correlated upon the “stabilizing” logics of representation and resemblance, which carry an impression of the truth by forcing the correlation of thought and reality. Not unlike the politically infused geology and discourses of the Anthropocene, the Educacene proclaims a language of species life that submits matter to a “planetary analytic” that splays and divides matter (i.e. corporeal vs. mineralogical; active vs. inert) so as to affirm and stabilize dominant regimes of matter-management (Yusoff 2018). Through the performative writing, and thus “righting,” of the world within the “standardized” orders of anthro-technological control, undergirded as they are by racist, sexist, ableist and colonial organizations of power, the Educacene induces nothing less than a form of geotraumatic catastrophe. Such geotrauma issues not only from the deterritorialization of signs from matter, but the sublimation of those ultra-genealogical, more-than-human 25

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memories knotted within us (Mackay 2012). Segmented from the transformative “time of the earth” and “shifting visage of the planet,” education obsesses over the stabilization and permanence of material forms as they consist in a holocene simulacrum1 optimized to human desiring-production (Mackay 2012: 18).

Obsessional Matters If education is yet capable of counteracting the pernicious geotrauma of the Educacene, its writing must necessarily rejoin the matter it obliterates. Too often, however, this challenge has found a presumed remedy in the modulation of literary “form” as a mechanism of material liberation. Where developments in such fields as arts-based educational research have claimed new ways of accessing and representing the Real through supposed innovations in writing (see Leavy 2019; Irwin 2015), they remain indebted to a mode of standard thought that repeats in the realisms of human melodrama and agential praxis (L. actus purus) cleaved from that inorganic domain beyond history and biology (Mackay 2012). As such, the supposed innovation of “form” fashionable in contemporary arts-based educational research has errantly become yet another way of redoubling an obsession with the “the time of the human” by conscripting the powers of fabulation to all-too-human regimes of significance. Such experiments in academic “form” have scarcely transgressed the radicality of Jarry’s (1911) literary “pataphysics,” nor the perspectival anarchisms of DADA, Surrealism, or Cubism catalyzed in its wake. The stratified refrain that insists beneath the sparkle of formal innovation is, of course, not particular to arts-based educational research. Today, a surfeit of writing in the field of education maintains a logic of repetition allied to its decisional structure or founding presupposition of the Real (Laruelle 2013). In accord with such decisional structure, educational writing has become, in many instances, a performance in selfcircularity that habitually claims access to an image of the Real it presupposes in the first instance. Auto-biographical life-writing finds a world given to human experience, hermeneutic inquiry uncovers a world born from genealogical orders, psychoanalysis discovers the world given to its psychical models, and critical theory recuperates the world’s meaning as it passes through its regimes of political and economic analysis. On almost all fronts, educational writing has become a battleground over the Real in which critique has come to orbit the mise-en-scene of matter’s penultimate form of “mattering.” Incapable of attending to the decisional structure that maintains in its presupposition of the Real, critique collapses within the agon of simulated stakes dramatized in the ferocity of academic competition, territorial “sandbagging” (Fisher 2014), and claims over access to the Real. Beyond such tautological performativity, what insists across this simulated battleground is an image of matter always-already advancing toward its glittering illumination in meaning. Severed from the Cthellic depths of the machinic phylum (ie. matter in constant variation), what remains for educational thought today is an obsession over the veracity of its ossified territorial forms and the inward-looking melodrama of self-esteem (Deleuze and Guattari 1987).

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Walking (and Writing) to the Max If academic writing has a future, it is one imbricated with the status of matter. Such a shift is already catalyzed by the inhuman forces of climatological change as they herald the obsolescence of education’s prevailing territories of anthropocentric and technocratic reference (jagodzinski 2018). Here, the sedentary orders of life induced by the Educacene accelerate headlong in a collision course with the “unthinkable dark illumination” of inhuman material excess “deeply” antagonistic to the fictions of supremacy and self-esteem (Mackay 2012; Brassier 2007). Counter to promises of anthro-technological supremacy, the ongoing extinguishments and toxic progeny (Davis 2015a, b) that are shaping planetary realities both presently and into the future mark a deadlock for scholarship in the “humanities.” This impasse increasingly occupies the attention of new materialist, eco-pedagogical and posthuman writing in education, where each has begun to erode the familiar terrain of humanist and anthropocentric thought that insist as a “standard thought” for educational praxis. In distinction to the ossified materialism from which modern education proceeds, new materialist writing has sought to rehabilitate the complexity of planetary “entanglements” astride and beyond the situated history and social-ecologies of the human (Haraway 2015: 80). “We are not posthuman; we are compost,” Haraway writes of the “more-than-human, other-than-human, inhuman, and human-as-humus” realisms of the Chthulucene (Haraway 2015: 82). The inflection of new materialist thought in education has figured in part through the disidentification of pedagogy from the enclosure of the schoolhouse. As a number of special issues in curriculum studies have recently asserted, the transformation of education from its “standard” form ought to ideally proceed through the renewal of ecological relationality (Lyle, Latremouille, and Jardine 2021). Reconceptualized in the “open” of ecological complexity, a profusion of contemporary writing in education has often sought to articulate new practices for conceiving and expressing material relations delinked from their subjugation under the organizing metrics of colonial Imperialism and Christianity, capitalism, and the assail of normativity each antithetical to life. Coalescing amongst the myriad practices of ecological intervention is the increasingly popular field of “walking research,” which purports to liberate from constituted strata the human sensorium, embodied affect, and complex relationality of place drawn and quartered under complex forces of “representational” arrest. For many, “walking research” has come to figure as a vector of absolute liberation and conduit for assailing the rectitude of Western thought. Inducing a material flow for every entrenched sign (i.e. cis-gendered, heteronormative masculinity), “walking research” is, by its own admission, ill-disposed to monolithic formations. Yet, for its purported revolution against material stratification, “walking” nevertheless habilitates matter. Such habilitation occurs in myriad ways, from matter’s issuance to the agon of academic contestation, which lacks not for its account of “the truth of the matter,” but through the perpetuation of artistic genius as it extracts matter upon the loathsome scene of creative self-significance. “Walking,” we learn, reveals the “aesthetic potential” of matter (Feinberg 2016), extracts the extraordinary from mundane materiality (Lyle and Snowber 2021), and purports the exchange-value of matter on behalf of artistic

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profundity. On all sides, the predestination of matter is “righted” to its efficacy for creative revolution. Even the avant-garde postulations of “walking research” imagine matter routed through art as a fulcrum of material illumination and weaponization as socio-political critique (see, for example, Springgay and Truman 2018). Herein, “walking” presupposes that matter is always on its way elsewhere, from its bald service to creative agency through intra-agential, “more-than-human” mappings that “relate” matter upon the scene of theoretical epistasis. “Walking research” and its attendant philosophy outline that the import of matter is implicate to its “dazzle,” “glow,” and affective countenance as it reveals for the researcher an extraordinary vitality, it follows, from an otherwise “uninteresting” world. Akin to certain developments in educational new materialisms, “walking research” selects predominantly for material relations that maximize in their generative potential always amplified through philosophical and theoretical ballasts that render matter incandescent. To accept the liberatory assertions of “walking research,” then, is to accept a certain predestination of matter for theory and philosophy. As readers of “walking research,” we are attuned to “the fact of (the) matter” as it reflects in albeit innovative philosophical exegesis that involute upon material form. In this style of writing matter, “walking research” owes to a system of thought that in its first instance renders matter for philosophy and subsequently postulates special access to material relation via the philosophical apparatus of human reflection. As a “standard” practice of Western philosophy and art, the gambit of “walking research” portends a particular arrangement of matter that conscripts the machinic phylum to the side of philosophical and artistic legibility to which it is made to labor. This is hardly an indictment, for any account of “matter” (whatever that means) already supposes at least the concept of “matter” by which it passes into structure. Such is the fate of matter elucidated by Laruelle (2013), for whom the correlationist structure of “standard” philosophy circumvents the thought of matter “in-itself ” in that matter is always-already forged in the genetic postulation of a philosophical decision that presupposes the intelligibility of, and access to, matter in the first instance. Such circular auto-induction of matter and thought constitute a key problem of the Educacene and its writing, but no less so for those critical interventions that reify the correlationist axiom that the world is as we think, feel, or relate to it. In the face of such circularity, Laruelle’s non-philosophy project postulates a program of non-standard thinking that actuates the disidentification of matter from its “givenness” to thought. On this point, we might return to the assertions of “walking research” in a manner disjoined from its auto-induced givenness to philosophical writing, and by extension, its contraction upon the scene of academic investment in which matter is habitually harnessed as an extractable resource. “Walking research” and its attendant writing herein becomes one more way in which the human imagines itself expanding into every unplumbed space for the generative encounter it ostensibly offers, and as one might expect, is repeatedly unearthed. The logic of affirmation, enhancement, maximization, optimization and multiplicity that undergird much “walking writing” are characteristic of some of the common themes that now dominate the terrain of contemporary academic writing more generally. As Galloway (2017a) highlights, the rise of assemblage theory and its conflation with a host of concepts—from ecology to

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decentralization to distribution—now populate theoretical discussions, marking a preoccupation with “Nature’s Largess.”. Prioritizing thinking in terms of action and expression, becoming and process, chaos and contingency, such theoretical preoccupations assume both that material sufficiency exists, and that such sufficiency can be found in “Nature” or physical materiality (Galloway 2017a). This appeal to “Nature’s Largess” signifies “sufficiency first and foremost: a positive quality of being that is identifiable, expressible, and exercisable” (Galloway 2017a: para 15). “Walking writing” takes such assumptions in stride, committing to philosophical decisions wherein the source of “Nature’s Largess” is not God, not Man, but matter, which is nevertheless split and submitted to an ideal form “above and beyond” material reality. It is through this account of matter, one that correlates sufficiency to identifiable, and ultimately extractive, regimes of matter-management, that “walking writing” further contributes to the Educacene’s terraforming functions. Where “walking writing” sides with a glimmering fascination for matter, it privileges particular affective regimes, while necessary obscuring others. This obfuscation sidesteps the pressing problems of depression and misery characteristic of today’s geotraumatic scenario, which are unequally experienced and disproportionately felt. Further, while some accounts of “walking writing” (cl)aim to liberate matter from unjust “relations of power,” they tend to bypass the questions and problems that might be raised by relation itself, taking part in a broader trend in the critical “humanities” wherein the idea of relation is glossed over “especially so regarding the relation that relation has with power, or, rather, regarding the way in which power obtains in and as relation” (Sexton 2011: 29). In line with the Educacene’s biostratigraphic processes, “walking writing” herein formats material relations by stratifying and standardizing affective regimes in line with education’s decisional structure, in turn omitting and obscuring questions related to relation itself. The stakes raised by such obfuscations extend far beyond discussions of academic writing, resonating with some of the most pressing social and political questions of the day. For while innovations in educational writing might offer appealing promises for liberating and/or rewriting material relations from their subjugation to extractive and oppressive regimes of power and control, their commitment to writing matter in the positive image of “Nature’s Largess” avoid, or “swerve” away from (Galloway 2017a), the very real, very material problems raised by the geotraumatic event of the Educacene. Where, for instance, innovations in educational writing self-proclaim to offer “liberatory” experiments that tend toward optimizing and enhancing matters of “chance, accident, spontaneity, [and] the wandering nature of matter,” they fail to address the deliberate and highly structured nature of today’s socio-political terrain (Galloway 2017a: para 10). After all, it is not by accident that the world became anti-queer, or anti-Black, or anti-woman, or antiimmigrant and thus “no capricious swerve will make it more just” (Galloway 2017b: para 10). Such antipathies are made possible through the deliberate and highly structured ordering of the world, which will not simply disappear through creative swerves or innovative representations. Accident is too rich. Chaos is too generative. Vibrancy is too aesthetic. All of this excess of sufficiency is sure indication of a new master. It may not look like the old

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New Perspectives on Academic Writing one, but this new arbiter, this new outsourced agency, is a master indeed. And we will have to try harder, much harder, to deflect the excesses of this new master, to deflect the sufficiency of the swerve. Galloway 2017a: para 16

Beyond signaling a new arbiter of sufficiency, the appeal to the glowing, sparkling, wandering and wondrous nature of matter characteristic of much “walking writing” fails to contend with the queer climatological futures that will be characterized by toxic waste, space junk, plastic oceans and the object’s fate as consumer abject. Here, the presumed amplification of inter-relational vitalism becomes thwarted and directed toward a more pessimistic account of what we are becoming. Where Beavington (2021) writes that “nature is our teacher,” we might today assume this cliché as a proposition for divesting matter from its implicate Oedipalization. For outside the “familialization” of nature forced everywhere to confess its truth in the language of humanism, the unformed, pre-vital world of matter insists autonomously from the world made in our image (anthropocentrism) and for our purpose (anthropomorphism) (Thacker 2015). If “matter” is implicitly inclined to the production of “happy” resonances in its givenness to the illuminating thought of human cognitions, then there is no reason to exclude the postulation of material antagonisms in which the lesson of “nature” runs concomitant to an indictment of the Educacene. Despite ongoing attempts to manage, mitigate and sustain control over matter, today’s deleterious ecological trajectories raise pressing issues of insufficiency, extinguishment and ecocatastrophic abolition. Herein, the idea of “nature as teacher” enacts a misanthropic subversion of education, working as a vehicle for shoring-up the darkened formlessness of the Planonmenon that slumbers beyond the threshold of perception and will (Thacker 2015; Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 63). For anterior to philosophy, the return of matter via climate change science and the horrifying alien axiomatics it portends forestall an encroaching horizon of human extinction. Such material horrors have scarcely entered into the field of educational literature, which continues to labour in a mode of obligatory optimism redolent in its affinity for transcendence and preference for becomings that habitually perform the “beneficence of relation” as it enhances the researchers’ powers to act.

Downward Movements Where purported innovations in educational writing proceed through an amplification and optimized attunement to “Nature’s Largess,” there yet exists a materialism anathematic to this decisional structuration. Such anathema perhaps figures in a downward moving style of writing populated by materialisms “unenlightened” to the engines of human industry so as to address the issues of insufficiency, diminishment, extinguishment, and negativity that might otherwise be raised by today’s planetary realities. Where much “walking writing” assumes that liberating matter from its overdetermined regimes of representation requires more adequate attunement—a “tapping in” or “drilling into” material relations, it redoubles in the Educacene’s image of matter-management, employing strategies of extraction that proceed by obscuring the dark trajectories

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portended by such material righting. After all, for every researcher walking on the illuminated surface of the planet, there persists an occulted relationality in which light is for something else, as it is in its relation to the dead world of geo-organic solar deposits that drip black beneath the glimmering horizon of planetary crust (Thacker 2013). To focus on such dark materialisms is to perhaps think in a mode of stratoanalysis populated by relations not only distinct from the “time of Man,” but in a literary style remote to the “time of terrestrial life.” Such a style involves modes of writing that rejoin with both the formlessness cosmic precursor to “terra” and the time of extinction when what we will have been will be traversed by the unfathomable sensorium and cognates of alien life. At the same time that “walking writing” deploys a language and logic of excavation, it stays on the surface of things, feet firmly planted on the Earth, where analyses are “grounded,” and thus affirmed, by those strata for thinking that are best suited to terrestrial life. This all-too-human alliance of “walking writing” points to the broader “spinal catastrophe” (Moynihan 2019) through which the organism is righted from the materiality of the planet and reordered through the biped’s surveilling gaze. For where “walking writing” positions itself as anti-ableist, among many other antioppressive stances, it nonetheless takes as its preferred mode of thought the phenomenological experience of the human as an animal exceptional to others. As it goes, all thought is not equal, lest of all those animalities that inhere the ultrageneaology of the human, composed as it is of weird life that moves otherwise, through subterranean rat-vectors, the inhuman forces of wind and tide, and not least of all, by way of a vegetal inertia that constitutes “walking’s” contrapuntal case. Counter to the biostratigraphical tendencies that undergird such educational writing, a stratoanalytical mode is one that desires to open thought upon the scene of negation with which life is irremediably bound so as to postulate as a precursor and follower to the “matter of time” the incalculable eternities of cosmic indifference that must somehow inhere planetary life as a cosmological trauma. It is this endarkened “thought of the planet” that seldom enters into educational writing, which presupposes the origin of the world via a metaphysics of presence and sufficiency in which darkness and insufficiency are treated as an abomination to the light of hermeneutic revelation. This is to maintain, as educational writing often does, a biunivocal image of the Real in which the primeval state of nonexistence that might yet inhere in the “memory of matter” becomes contravened by the performative act of presence born from the very philosophical lineage that much contemporary educational writing seeks to repudiate. Drawn toward endarkened matters of planetary time and insufficiency, and in concerted distinction to the affirmative and horizontal nomadism of “walking,” the stratoanalytical mode proposed here necessitates a subterranean style of writing, a vertical nomadism that is neither of “molar” representational orders, or “molecular” flows but nevertheless pressurizes and bores into the surface a “holey space” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 415). Where “walking writing” often selects for material relations that can and will be maximized and optimized in terms of generative, and ultimately positive, potentials for theory and philosophy, it typically conceptualizes the immanent character of matter in opposition to transcendent representations of life. In this way, it foments what has become the standard model of “good” immanence vs. “bad” transcendence. Within this reductive formulation, even matter’s immanent relationality

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is conscripted to forms of liberation that are always-already wedded to transcendent ideals. Put another way, and as Barber develops in an interview with Sexton on the question of “black negativity,”“the life one is supposed to (immanently) affirm is already established through and as the presumption that such life transcends non-life” (Barber 2017: para 51). The downward movements that might characterize a subterranean writing style counter such conscriptions by relinking matters of writing to the occulted substratum of non-life and non-Being that everywhere induce the scene of moral panic within the Educacene imaginary. Oriented by a downward trajectory, the immanent character of matter can no longer be articulated as a self-subsistent, positive quality of being, “an already established realm that breaks through frontiers imposed by the transcendent,” but rather, is conceptualized in negative terms, as an “antagonistically downward movement” (Barber 2017: para 52). Counter to overly affirmationist accounts of immanence which nevertheless depend on a transcendent structure, a downward moving, subterranean, vertical style of writing disavows the problem of “bad” transcendence by experimenting, instead, with the various modes of transcendence and immanence that can be, or ought to be, mobilized (Sexton, cited in Barber 2017: para 33). Transposed to the site of the Educacene, a subterranean style of writing counter-actualizes the impulse to excavate matter as it is always-already becoming towards standardized educational ends, opting instead for “antagonistically downward movements” that tap into the events of negation implicate to matter’s constitution in the first place. This is to evoke a cosmological register that necessitates a thought of time before and after, or even peripheral, to matter. This is also to advocate for a non-standard approach to addressing the Educacene’s terraforming structurations, one that does not “swerve” away from the deliberate and highly structured ordering of the world, but instead proposes a “negative structuralism” that abolishes the auto-formatting of matter within a logic of exchange and recognition in its first instance (Galloway 2017b: para 11). Where the Educacene terraforms educational matters in the language and logic of extraction and matter-management, it not only contributes to fantasies of interminable resource extraction, but establishes a now taken-for-grant correlation between the world and our ability to think it, monopolizing the Real through the supposed “facticity” of philosophical decision. Resistance to such terraforming therefore necessitates counter-moves aimed at radicalizing, through negation, such auto-formatting, striving in this way towards the disidentification of matter from its “givenness” to the decisional structure of educational thought. Against the Educacene’s philosophical standardization, a subterranean style takes up this negative task by experimenting with non-philosophical writing practices that are able to account for the originary decisions that structure thinking, while also producing rupture points and dehiscent breaks that open up questions about the problems that philosophy leaves behind.

Non-Philosophical Dehiscence Laruelle (2013) proposes that non-philosophical or non-standard inquiry is committed to examining the always-already inadequate postulation of the Real born from

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philosophical decision. Non-philosophical processes, as Laruelle insists, do not aim to go “above and beyond” philosophy, but to realize that philosophical thought is but one mode of thinking amongst many. As Brassier sums up, to think non-philosophically is “to liberate yourself from the intrinsically philosophical hallucination that you need to be liberated from philosophy” (Brassier 2003: 171). As such, non-philosophy is not a meta-philosophy aimed at better reflecting or interpreting the complex relations between knowledge, thought, reality and the self. Non-philosophy does not ask for more or better reflections of reality, but less, so that a non-philosophical theory of philosophy will not be “an intensified reduplication of philosophy,” but rather its “simplification” (Laruelle 2003: 184). Whereas “walking writing” centers on the spectacular terraforming of matter made possible by the performative moment of liberation in which the world reveals something to us in its dazzle and shimmer, non-philosophical writing endeavors towards the transformation of philosophy by deploying a “style of thought” that mutates with its object (Laruelle 2013). As such, non-philosophical writing provides one response to the problem of how to attend to the decisional structure that presupposes education and its writing in and of the Educacene by disarticulating the automatic correlation of the object to philosophy’s claim to the Real. Non-philosophy holds a powerful, albeit negative, charge in that it evokes incisive and disturbing problems for education and the philosophical decisions on which it is founded. In the case of the Educacene’s obsession with matter-management, nonphilosophical experiments are wary of writing that claims to be materialist by challenging the tendencies towards delusional and idealist monopolizations of educational realities that unfold through philosophical standardization. In a simultaneous move that works to both explain philosophical decisions while also releasing phenomena from their subordination to philosophical interpretation, nonphilosophical writing proposes an “insufficient or negative utopia” that refuses claims of a “sufficient positivity, whether a transcendental positivity of philosophies or a transcendent positivity of reigning utopias” (Laruelle 2012: 12). By refusing the false dichotomy between “good” forms of immanence and “bad” forms of transcendence, non-philosophical writing opts instead for the fabrication of desired otherworlds devoid of any “positive determination” (Laruelle 2012: 12). A subterranean approach to writing might assume “the style of radicality enacted against the absolute, the style of minimality against satiety, the style of uni-laterality against convertibility, the style of heresy against conformity” (Laruelle 2012: 13), thereby commencing an experimental probe for practicing the non-philosophical fabulation of insufficient utopias. This non-standard approach does not aim to reveal anything, but instead presses the stakes of a “dehiscent everywhere” through the concerted “intensification of negative terms” (Barber 2017). The use of dehiscence here is drawn from Sexton’s articulation of the concept, which he develops in relation to the intensification of negativity that now characterizes “this tear in the world, this tearing of the world, this torn world” (Sexton cited in Barber 2017: para 11). Importantly, Sexton’s use of dehiscence emerges as a specific procedure for black study (or studies), which for him does not entail inculcating and imitating specific forms of being or categories of identification, but involves a process of learning through the posing of questions that “lead everywhere, even and especially in their dehiscence” (Sexton 2011:

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9). One of the central questions within black studies, Sexton asserts, is “whether a politics, which is also to say an aesthetics, that affirms (social) life can avoid the thanatological dead end if it does not will its own (social) death” (Sexton 2011: 16). For Sexton, the concept of dehiscence provides a way for grappling with such questions by not only catalyzing interrogations of a world “made and unmade by slavery” but also attempting to “think about things not only unthought, but also perhaps unthinkable” (Sexton cited in Barber 2017: para 10). For Sexton, what is unthought and unthinkable is linked directly to “the fact of blackness,” or what he calls “the social life of social death” (Sexton 2011: 15). Dehiscence is thus deployed by Sexton as just one aspect of a “blackened vantage or lens,” which attempts to consider “how to think about and within that wounded, disseminative vertigo that is blackness, insofar as one can be interested in something against one’s interests and perhaps against the whole notion of interest as such” (Sexton cited in Barber 2017: para 12). In his conceptual deployment of dehiscence, Sexton refers to the polyvalent character of the term, referring to its various connotations in medical, botanical, and otological contexts (Barber 2017). Extending and mutating the polyvalent dimensions of dehiscence, we advocate for experiments in dehiscent writing as one strategy for experimenting with a downward moving, subterranean style of inquiry aimed at nonphilosophical negation. As Sexton highlights across its various articulations, dehiscence conjures themes of “wounding, dissemination, and vertigo,” all of which point to an intensification of negativity wherein negativity does not signal one side of a dialectic but a negative enjoinment “with what has been negated and thus engenders the future” (Barber 2017: para 14). In medical terms, for instance, dehiscence refers to a surgical complication characterized by the partial or total separation of previously approximated wound edges, which in turn leads to a failure to heal, or in the case of complete dehiscence (i.e. with abdominal wounds), evisceration. In botanical terms, dehiscence describes the splitting along a built-in line of vulnerability through which a plant releases its contents or, in some cases, the complete detachment of a part that results in the negation or loss of structure in the plant through processes of abscission. In otological domains, dehiscence refers to a set of hearing and balance symptoms caused by an abnormal thinning or opening in the uppermost canal of the inner ear labyrinth. The intensification of negativity produced by otological dehiscence leads to a range of vertiginous and disorienting shifts in perception, from chronic disequilibrium to weird cases of autophony wherein affected people become hypersensitive to the sounds within their own bodies, such as one’s eyes moving in their sockets. In other cases, otological dehiscence can lead to low frequency conductive hearing loss, which is sometimes explained through the analogy wherein the thinning, or negation of the inner ear canal, acts as a “third window” wherein vibrations exerting the ear canal are abnormally diverted into the intracranial space, becoming “absorbed” as opposed to being registered as sound. Extending these examples in relation to the intensification of negativity raised by the geotraumatic event of the Educacene, dehiscence provides a speculative probe for writing that aims to relink to the wound separations, strange disseminations and vertiginous trajectories that are borne from education’s legacies of terraforming and extractive regimes of matter-management. Where the Educacene plays a pivotal role in

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reproducing, while nevertheless obscuring, the various “wound separations” through which the world is continuously splayed, dehiscent writing attends to the philosophical failures and eviscerations that have now left their mark in the geological stratigraphy. Dehiscent writing is, in this way, involved in the fabulation of non-standard, even negative, structurations that give occasion to weird modes of dissemination and diffusion that thwart the inoculating fantasies of standardized matter-management and anthro-technological control. Opting for antagonistically downward movements, dehiscent writing refuses matter’s auto-formatting as it correlates to given systems of relation by relinking to the dizzying planetary trajectories that now necessitate radical shifts in orientation. In contradistinction to many approaches to critical walking research, which assert that walking offers a way to “ground” research so that people can better “understand and develop a critical awareness of how they are connected to, implicated in, and responsible to place” (Springgay & Truman 2022), dehiscent writing enacts a “groundless or baseless politics” (Sexton 2016: 589), one that does not abandon the persistence of the negative in favour of enthusiasm for the affirmative, nor does it juxtapose “bad” forms of transcendence with “good” forms immanence, but experiments with the various forms or modalities of transcendence and immanence that can be mobilized by attending to the exposure that comes with groundless orientation. It is in this way that dehiscent writing produces experiments with the deliberate intensification of negativity, which not only involves stretching negativity to its limit so as to introduce greater tension into matters of educational writing, but also necessitates care of that which has become exposed, or a practical tenderness. As Sexton highlights, referencing the shared etymological roots of both intensification and tenderness (L. tendere): the very procedure that complicates thinking, that makes things difficult and uncomfortable, that ruins the initial plan, that throws things off balance, we might even say that which blackens things, is also that which enables the potential for genuine care, precisely because it requires the risk of genuine questioning, or, more to the point, a genuine assumption of desire. Sexton cited in Barber 2017: 17

The sense of care raised here is not one founded in dreams of optimizing and/or better attuning to more adequate or sufficient relations, but is instead a practical response to the intensification, and persistence, of negativity found amidst today’s geotraumatic milieu. Through a dehiscent mode that intensifies negative terms, albeit with tenderness, the creative function of dehiscent writing aims for “a particular type of destruction or deconstruction, a type of annihilation—an affirmative reduction to nothing” (Sexton cited in Barber 2017: para 40). This a “negative articulation of immanence” wherein immanence, following Deleuze and Guattari, is not immanent to any additional term and is thus “intrinsically vertiginous, such that its only proper vocation is to accede to what is improper to all terms, and such that there is nothing to affirm but what is without term” (Barber 2017: para 53). Through this negative articulation of immanence, an endarkened, or in Sexton’s terms, “blackened,” thought of the planet, of matter, insists on, or as, a question of time (Barber 2017: para 22). As such, the intensified

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negation enabled through dehiscent writing insists on an occulted relationality wherein matter is relinked to the “time of terrestrial life,” rejoining with what has been negated through matter’s conscription to familiar modes of philosophical and artistic representation: the formlessness void of the cosmos, matters of extinction, and the incalculable eternities of cosmic indifference through which we are becoming. A dehiscent mode of writing undoubtedly involves swerving the “facticity” of education and its claim to the Real upon stranger worlds no longer “for” education, but catalysts of its formal mutation. As such, dehiscent writing is proposed as just one experiment in non-philosophical negation, offering a mode of writing that flees the scene of philosophical decision to which the “facticity” of education is continually made to relate. This is to suggest a heretical function of dehiscent writing as a downward moving, subterranean vehicle for ratcheting open the limits of the world to unleash the object from its automatic ascription to given systems of relation.

Note 1

“Holocene simulacrum” refers here to the representation of environmental futures as it suits best the continual progress of human life and agency. In this manner, the “holocene simulacrum” constitutes a bulwark against confronting the horrors of planetary ecocatastrophe and extinction as they render obsolete the very idea of sustaining the world “as we know it” (Wallin 2022).

References Agamben, G. (2002), The Open: Man and Animal, trans. K. Attel, Stanford, CA : Stanford University Press. Barber, D. (2017), “On Black Negativity, or, The Affirmation of Nothing: Jared Sexton, interviewqd by Daniel Barber, Society and Space, https://www.societyandspace.org/ articles/on-black-negativity-or-the-affirmation-of-nothing accessed October 20, 2021. Beavington, L. (2021), “Walking Pedagogy for Science Education and More-than-human Connection”, Journal of the Canadian Association of Curriculum Studies 18 (2), https:// jcacs.journals.yorku.ca/index.php/jcacs/article/view/40626/36654, accessed June 1, 2021. Brassier, R. (2003), “Introduction to ‘What Can Non-Philosophy Do?’ ”, Angelaki: Journal of Theoretical Humanities, 8 (2): 169–72. Brassier, R. (2007), Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Crutzen, P. J. (2002), “The ‘Anthropocene’ ”, Journal de Physique IV (Proceedings) 12 (10): 1–5. Davis, H. (2015a), “Toxic Progeny: The Plasticsphere and Other Queer Futures”, philoSOPHIA 5 (2): 231–50. Davis, H. (2015b), “Life and Death in the Anthropocene: A Short History of Plastic” in H. Davis and E. Turpin (eds.), Art in the Anthropocene: Encounters Among Aesthetics, Politics, Environments and Epistemologies, London: Open Humanities Press.

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Deleuze, G., and F. Guattari (1987), A Thousand Plateaus, trans B. Massumi, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Feinberg, P. P. (2016), “Towards a Walking-based Pedagogy”, Journal of the Canadian Association for Curriculum Studies 14 (1), https://jcacs.journals.yorku.ca/index.php/ jcacs/article/view/40312/36186, accessed March 6, 2021. Fisher, M. (2014), “Terminator vs. Avatar”, in R. Mackay and A. Avanessian (eds.), #ACCELERATE: The Accelerationist Reader, Falmouth, UK : Urbanomic. Galloway, A. (2017a), “The Swervers”, Culture and Communication (blog), May 6, http:// cultureandcommunication.org/galloway/the-swervers, accessed October 15, 2021. Galloway, A. (2017b), “The Swervers vs. the F*ck-Annies”, Culture and Communication (blog), May 22, http://cultureandcommunication.org/galloway/the-swervers-vs-thefck-annies, accessed October 15, 2021 Haraway, D. (2015), “Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene: Making Kin”, Environmental Humanities 6 (1): 159–65. Irwin, R. (2015), “Walking to Create an Aesthetic and Spiritual Currere”, Visual Arts Research 32 (1): 75–82. jagodzinski, j. (ed.) (2018), Interrogating the Anthropocene: Ecology, Aesthetics, Pedagogy, and the Future in Question, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Jarry, A. ([1911] 1996), Exploits & Opinions of Dr. Faustroll, Pataphysician, trans. S. W. Taylor, Cambridge, MA : Exact Change. Laruelle, F. (2003), “What Can Non-Philosophy Do?”, Angelaki: Journal of Theoretical Humanities 8 (2): 173–89. Laruelle, F. (2012), Struggle and Utopia at the End Times of Philosophy, trans. D. S. Burk and A. P. Smith, Minneapolis: Univocal Publishing. Laruelle, F. (2013), Principles of non-philosophy, trans. A.P. Smith, A. P. and N. Rubczak, New York: Bloomsbury. Leavy, P. (2019), Spark, New York: The Guildford Press. Lyle, E., J. M. Latremouille, and D. Jardine (2021), “Now Has Always Been the Time”, Journal of the Canadian Association of Curriculum Studies 18 (2), https://jcacs.journals. yorku.ca/index.php/jcacs/article/view/40732/36670, accessed June 1, 2021. Lyle, E., and C. Snowber (2021), “Walking as Attunement: Being With/in Nature as Currere”, Journal of the Canadian Association of Curriculum Studies 18 (2), https://jcacs. journals.yorku.ca/index.php/jcacs/article/view/40514/36664, accessed June 1, 2021. Mackay, R. (2012), “A Brief History of Geotrauma”, in E. Keller, N. Masciandaro and E. Thacker (eds.), Leper Creativity: Cyclonopedia Symposium, 1–39, Brooklyn, NY: Punctum. Moynihan, T. (2019), Spinal Catastrophism: A Secret History, Cambridge, MA : MIT Press. Pedersen, H. (2021), “Education, Anthropocentrism, and Interspecies Sustainability: Confronting Institutional Anxieties in Omnicidal Times”, Ethics and Education 16 (2): 164–77. Sexton, J. (2011), “The Social Life of Social Death: On Afro-Pessimism and Black Optimism”, InTensions Journal 5 (Fall/Winter). Sexton, J. (2016), “The Vel of Slavery: Tracking the Figure of the Unsovereign”, Critical Sociology 42 (4–5): 583–97. Springgay, S., and S. E. Truman (2018), Walking Methodologies in a More-than-human World: WalkingLab, New York: Routledge. Springgay, S., and S. E. Truman (2022), “Critical Walking Methodologies and Oblique Agitations of Place”, Qualitative Inquiry 28 (2): 171–76.

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Thacker, E. (2013), “Black Infinity; or, Oil Discovers Humans”, Pages Magazine, 23 October, https://www.pagesmagazine.net/en/articles/black-infinity-or-oil-discovers-humans, accessed August 18, 2019. Thacker, E. (2015), Cosmic Pessimism, Minneapolis, MN : Univocal Publishing. Wallin, J. J. (2022). “The Holocene Simulacrum”, Educational Philosophy and Theory 54 (3): 238–50. Yusoff, K. (2018), A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None, Minneapolis, MN, USA : University of Minnesota Press.

3

Science Fiction Devices David Burrows and Simon O’Sullivan

Introduction: A Discussion with an Academic We say, “There is no such thing as academic writing.” The academic (also us) draws a breath and responds by pointing to the volumes of critical writing on our bookshelves separated from our other books (which the academic silently observes are mostly Science Fiction). We concede Arts and Humanities academics have one Unique Selling Proposition: critique. (Not a problem, critique is necessary, it is needed.) Still, we say there is no such thing as academic writing, though without doubt there are academic communities. When the academic asks how is anyone able to identify our community if there is no such thing as academic writing we say, look out for three kinds of performances: 1. a conducting of communication between the living and the dead; 2. an illuminating (an invoking) of some problem, concept, or object; 3. a critique of another academic’s writing. Through these performances a bond is tied between small groups that make up the friends of critique, for we are relatively speaking, a community few in number: whether in one building, city or nation, or dispersed globally and connected by the internet, we may as well be on an island. And in fact, we think this island is well known and has a name (we have written about this before); our community has at least one foot on Immanuel Kant’s “Island of Truth” (whatever post- or anti-Kantian protestations we make) (see Burrows and O’Sullivan 2019: 103–24). This is a place Kant also describes as a “land of truth” surrounded by a “broad and stormy ocean, the true seat of illusion”; the latter, according to the philosopher, portending adventures which can never be concluded or escaped from (Kant 1998: 337–8). Despite Kant’s warning, we suggest it is this “Island of Truth,” the ground drawn by The Critique of Pure Reason (1998), that is hard to escape from. Here, we are not declaring we feel bound by Kant’s correlationist notions; rather, we are specifically concerned with Kant’s “Island” as a fictional device that shelters academic communities on the robust terrain of critique, at a distance from others lost in a fog of dubious metaphysics. The academic seems affronted and we explain that we do not question whether epistemic traditions have value; rather our question is whether some of the “Island’s” customs ensure, despite our best efforts, that our community lives high above and far from objects of critique. We do not want to live like this, like isolated 39

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lighthouse keepers, sending signals—illuminations—in vain hope of making visible the illusions of the surrounding seas. It is true that today, more diverse communities with different customs are encouraged to take up residence in the “Island’s” lighthouses but this does not change our view; the “Island of Truth” surrounded by the “Ocean of Illusion” is a fictional device similar to Plato’s story about the “Light of the Sun” and a “Cave” (the latter a subterranean level below Kant’s “Island”?), both affirming that truth is glimpsed from firm or high ground, unsullied by fogbanks or shadows and offering clear sightlines and illumination. The academic speaks: “That sounds harsh, do you want to leave the ‘Island’?” We are not sure that is desirable or possible—we know we are privileged (identifiable as white and male), lucky to earn our living on the “Island” and we would not fare well if we left. We only wonder if there are other devices and perspectives that we might explore, different from those afforded by the “Island of Truth.” In fact, we have written (Burrows and O’Sullivan 2019: 199–216) about one such device before, Samuel Delany’s “Mirrorshades,” which he equates with Science Fiction novels in which the text becomes someplace where you look to see what’s going on, only what you see is yourself looking at the text to see what’s going on—while at the same time, the text presents a gaze that is somehow darkened, distorted, and reflected. Delany 1994: 172

We do not have to underline how writing as “Mirrorshades” may be different from the fictional device of the “Island of Truth.” The academic gets this, saying, “Is that not Todd A. Comer’s insight, that Delany’s writing presents something like Donna Haraway’s notion of an embodied, situated knowledge that counters ‘disembodied panoptical objectivity’ (Comer 2005: 178–9)? I know this problematizing of academic objectivity as the maintanence of an all-seeing, incorporeal, critically-distanced viewpoint is old news,” the academic adds, “but it is still important. I think Comer quotes Haraway’s axiom ‘only partial perspective promises objective vision’ (Haraway quoted in Comer 2005: 179). Is that what you are getting at?” We appreciate this question and our answer is yes and no. Writing as “Mirrorshades” gazes far beyond situated knowledge (for the latter might provide yet more firm terrain for critique). When pushed further we explain that Delany’s “Mirrorshades’ ” double and multiply perspectives by engendering different focus points, refractions, and reflections. We are sure the academic thinks this is hackneyed and facile but we are too excited to care; for we think exploring Science Fiction novels to learn about their devices may transform our own writing habits (which always, still, nod towards epistemic values). In this we recognize ontological questions are called for in which a device of sorts is at stake; one that tests the perspectives of the writer and reader. The academic raises an objection: “This all sounds familiar . . . anthropological . . . philosophical . . . academic even.” We nod; this is a perceptive observation. In making our proposal concerning the importance of Science Fiction devices we do indeed draw upon anthropology, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro’s perspectivism (2014) to be specific. We admit we appropriate and repurpose this concept that draws on Amerindian metaphysics and develops an anthropology focused on ontological differences in which

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anything considered alive is conceived of as having personhood and a perspective; a metaphysics different to a European approach that divides animal from human, and nature from culture. Viveiros argues that Amerindians see themselves as one nature or perspective among many, for which there is only one culture—multivocity. We understand Viveiros’s perspectivism as placing asymmetrical differences or perspectives in dialogue, through a transversal diagramming which Viveiros claims as transforming (subverting and deforming) concepts (Viveiros 2014: 87). What we suspect is that there is a kind of perspectivism at work in some Science Fiction writing about societies or encounters between different life forms or entities from different points in space-time— an intuition that follows Raymond Williams’ thinking that some Science Fiction is “Space Anthropology” (2010: 15). We also acknowledge that our proposal has some affinity with Françios Laruelle’s Non-Philosophy, which is different from Viveiros’ transversal explorations in that Laruelle attempts to flatten the authority of philosophy—a levelling of a hierarchy—which ensures philosophy speaks to the sciences, art and other practices and not the other way round (Laruelle et al. 2013: 98– 100). It is through this flattening process that philo-fictions are produced in which the tools of philosophy are put to use for non-philosophical ends, something we think Science Fiction can be said to do too. Philo-Science-Fiction and Science Fiction perspectivism, that is what we want to explore, and that is where we are going start our exploration. We point to our Science Fiction novels as we say this, and then glance at the academic who appears stoic now and says, “Why not? Plenty of Science Fiction novels have been the subject of critique; they litter your ‘Island’ and your own writing. Your first port of call looks to be Roadside Picnic by the Strugatsky Brothers (2014), I love this tale about Red and his visits to a zone where epistemic values falter, I wish you luck.” Here we feel wrong-footed. Red is a “Stalker” who illegally searches for artefacts in a zone transformed by an alien visitation. Intuitively we reject the Stalker and his alien artefacts as Science Fiction devices; at least, they are not what we are looking for. But Red has been listening and offers to guide us on a tour that offers “alternative” views of our “Island of Truth” (said with irony). We take up Red’s offer and, bidding farewell to the academic, we set off towards a city in the distance, the beam from our lighthouse on the “Island of Truth” illuminating our passage, but only so far.

Dhalgren by Samuel Delany Sooner than expected, we arrived in Bellona where Samuel Delany’s Dhalgren—a tale about a one-sandaled amnesiac called the Kid—unfolds. We do not bother trying to work out where we are exactly. Bellona, as William Gibson states, is a city invisible to most; it has no particular location and accommodates a population who have neither homes nor work (Gibson 2010: 804). It is in this broken landscape, in which the Sun has been seen to set where it rises, that the Kid finds community as a member of the Scorpions gang and tenderness in a three-way erotic relationship with a woman and a teenage boy. We fear the Scorpions and tread cautiously through streets without firm laws (natural or civic) and that, like the Kid, are in bad shape. The Kid does not lament his

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damaged state, for early in the novel he states that a mind is invisible until something goes wrong with it, then an awareness of the edges of the mind can be felt, “the same way you become aware of your eye when you get a cinder in it. Because it hurts . . .” (Delany 2001: 48). Attempting to make sense of Dhalgren can similarly generate an experience, albeit less painful, of feeling the edges of thought. The novel Dhalgren itself plays a part in this, as the novel seems to appear in the Kid’s hands as a notebook given to him in the first chapter of the book. As the Kid writes in the notebook he finds every other page is already inscribed with thoughts that could be the Kid’s own. Are there then at least two versions of Dhalgren, the first being the book in the reader’s hands and the second being the Kid’s notebook, through which the reader registers a distorted gaze (the Kid’s gaze as the reader’s own)? In this way the novel is a device that sutures the edges of fiction and reality. When we finally find the Kid sitting outside a ruined house, we cannot take our eyes off a chain linking lenses, prisms, and mirrors that he is wearing. These objects are common to most lighthouses and our “Island” but it strikes us that the Kid’s body looped by this optical chain must serve as an (archaic or perhaps scientific?) apparatus of some kind. Red tells us we are wasting time on useless trinkets that, at best, have a symbolic function; the notebook is the prize. But we do not think we are just chasing metaphors; the potential of Delaney’s chain of optical instruments reinforces a hunch developed from reading the author’s description of “Mirrorshades”: Science Fiction devices have diagrammatic and perspectival functions. Lenses, prisms, and mirrors mediate information—light—which always arrives from some other space-time. A mirror reflects light from the position of the one who looks straight-on at the glass. Does this subject see themselves in the mirror or, through imaginative reversal, does the glass provide sight of (or a site or stage for) how others might see them? Of course, a mirror can be positioned to look at surrounding spaces but it is important that the viewer’s body, even if absent in the glass, is present. In front of a mirror the viewer’s body is inferred through the possibility of being caught in the mirror’s reflection. In contrast, a lens turned upon the cosmos can register blueshifting and redshifting futures and pasts by collapsing distance and revealing unseen details. In this, a lens enforces the hierarchy of a single perspective point as mediator of other points in space (other perspectives); but through imaginative reversal, a subject’s point of view can be marked as a horizon point for other, future or past, perspective points. That is, past or future can become focused in the present in the same way a lens can focus the Sun’s rays to scorch or burn. A prism is different again, it refracts light to reveal a multiplicity of colours in a light beam previously viewed as mono-coloured or transparent. When looked through, the prism’s facets present multiple perspectives of anything viewed through this crystal lens. In this, a prism bends and distorts as it refracts and multiplies viewpoints. This can have a disorientating effect, particularly when approached again through imaginative reversal, in which colours and viewpoints are thought of as combining in the prism. Then it becomes hard to shake the idea that what is seen through a prism is realty as a multiplicity of perspectives. Again Red dismisses the chain of optics as a useless decoration. Maybe he is right. We know the Kid has no idea why he wears the optical chain; however, the character

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Newboy, reading from the Kid’s notebook, makes opaque reference to something—an object—that starts out mirrored on both sides (259) and then, as the silver rubs off, becomes transparent—a lens—which appeases the suspicion that this thing is a oneway glass,“with a better view afforded from out there!” (260). Later there is a “polychrome flash” revealing the thing to be an immense prism (260). Newboy suggests that this thing is not a shield; it is a “you-shaped hole of insight and fire” (260) that can be gazed through, and this confirms something for us: the thing described by Newboy—the mirror linked with a lens and prism—is a perspectival device. We wonder if skilled use of this apparatus can produce a switch in register as well as a kind of recursive/rebound effect where a reader understands something about their own and other or different perspectives. Indeed, we wonder more generally if it is through Science Fiction devices that these two performances—of switching registers and grasping limitations or differences—are connected. As we form this question, Red signals we have to leave, and fast. Only he has heard the barely perceptible sounds of men approaching while we have been talking. We depart without asking a single question of the Kid.

Riddley Walker by Russell Hoban It’s raining hard as we reach the coast of the “alternative island.” Red silently points to a stooped and staggering figure—is he drunk, or just tired?—walking along the cliff path towards us. He’s wearing some worn, tattered clothes and on one hand is an old, battered Punch puppet. At his legs, running close, is a black dog, the faithful leader of the pack. Riddley, for it is he, is on the way somewhere to put on another show. As we have discussed before, Riddley’s thinking is shaped by being in Kent in the future (our future) after advanced technologies have disappeared following a catastrophe of some kind (see Burrows and O’Sullivan 2019: 94–98). He is not sure about time, the past, or the stories he hears and tells about the past. Towards the beginning of the novel he has an important conversation with Lorna—or, at least, receives a “tel” from her— about these doubts and mysteries: Lorna said to me, “You know Riddley theres some thing in us it don’t have no name.” I said, “What thing is that?” She said, “Its some kind of thing it aint us but yet its in us. Its looking out thru our eye hoals.” Hoban 2012: 6

A little later, Lorna remarks: We aint a naturel part of it. We dint begin when it begun. We dint begin where it begun. It ben here befor us nor I don’t know what we are to it. May be weare jus only sickness and a feaver to it or boyls on the arse of it I don’t know. Now lissen what Im going to tel you Riddley. It thinks us but it dont think like us. It dont think the way we think. 6–7

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Riddley doesn’t understand, at first, what Lorna is talking about, but a short while later he tells us—his readers—that it is this “tel” that motivated him to write the book we are reading: Seams like I be all ways thinking on that thing in us what thinks us but it dont think like us. Our woal life is an idear we dint think of nor we dont know what it is. What a way to live. Thats why I finely come to writing all this down. Thinking on what the idear of us myt be. Thinking on that thing whats in us loan and oansome. 7

There are other moments like this in the novel in which Riddley seems to reflect on his own status as a kind of fiction or where there are other devices that also foreground this idea of alternative perspectives (and perspectives on perspectives). For example, there are the various nested fictions within Riddley Walker. There are a few of these stories within the story, but we focus briefly on the one that seems to work in the most interesting way: the device is a set-up—a travelling Punch and Judy performance— called the Eusa show, which hints at the disaster that has befallen human society. At the end, Riddley himself becomes a “connection man” who performs the show, but at different times in the novel he reflects on the Eusa show and about where stories come from, what they are and whether they can be believed: I knowit wel them figgers never ben made up jus only for that 1 littl show what Goodparleyed showt me. It aint in the natur of a show to be the same every time it aint like a story what you pas down trying not to change nothing which even then the changes wil creap in. No a figger show its got its oan chemistry and fizzics. 205

Riddley is reflecting on telling stories, he seems to suggest that there are true, fixed stories and living changing stories, and it might be this second type that brings Riddley to question all stories and to put forward the idea that stories can have their own chemistry and physics. So, the novel presents a fiction within a fiction (the Eusa show within “Inland,” Riddley’s world, which is also the future of our world). This allows an odd reversal of perspectives, as if it is the Eusa show, nested within the novel, that is looking back at us (who are—or will be—the cause of the nuclear disaster that brings about Inland). The structure—of nested fictions—seems to allow or imply a kind of perspective that turns back on a reader, particularly one contemporary to Hoban growing up in the UK and fearing nuclear disaster. If there are fictions nested within the fiction of Riddley Walker, then is it that the reader’s own world is one of those fictions within the novel, an outer circuit as it were? For the reader is implicated in the stories of Riddley through belonging to the world that the Eusa show narrates—the time of technologicallyinduced disaster—casting the reader as a possible character in Riddley’s play. Furthermore, in reading Riddley’s thoughts on being puppeted, does the reader

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similarly reflect on whether something—the stories they hold dear—may be playing them, or telling them? On the one hand this reflexive device is not unique to Riddley Walker, but goes back (at least) to Shakespeare and the “play within the play” and the “all the world’s a stage” conceit (and insofar as Riddley travels to “Cambry” and speaks in a kind of neo-medieval language, Riddley Walker is itself a kind of retelling of an even older fiction, and journey, that is full of tales: Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales). But certainly, the deployment of metafictional strategies here has two further characteristics. On the one hand there is a sequence of these nested fictions, which, accentuates the metafictional character of the novel. And on the other, the fiction—in this case the Eusa show—seems to offer “information” from outside the perspectives of the characters within the novel. The Eusa show is a kind of invented divinatory device in this sense, a way of accessing something “outside” when one is inside (or, Riddley Walker is to us, what the Eusa Show is to Riddley). As the above quotes show there is also “Riddleyspeak” (to use Hoban’s own phrase), the strange future-past language that Riddley uses. Hoban’s novel is written from Riddley’s perspective and in this difficult dialect. This means, on the one hand, we are alienated from the story—there is an opacity at work—it’s certainly an effort to get into the language and understand the text. Or, as we have pointed out elsewhere, the book needs to be performed. (See Burrows and O’Sullivan 2019: 96.) But on the other hand, the book does allow us to “take on” this other perspective (and once you “get” the language it’s like a shift is made and you are more completely and fully “in” that other perspective). In this, the device allows for the performing of complex functions: we are both “in” another’s perspective (Riddley’s) and thrown back on our own (encountering this other, stranger fiction from outside). Or, put differently, the particular language of Riddley Walker shows up the difference between perspectives. The Black dog lets out a short sharp bark. And with that Riddley makes a halfhearted gesture of offering up his puppet, before dropping his arm to his side with a shrug. He winks, turns and stumbles off, his dog coiled around his legs. The rain is coming down harder now. It’s also getting dark as Red looks out at the sea then himself turns and motions us back into the interior of the island.

Les Guérillères by Monique Wittig Red takes us into a forest clearing. There, a group of women stand and sit talking quietly, gesticulating and reading from a book with a circle on its cover. Their weapons are leaning up against the trees. Red motions us to be quiet and to listen in. Their discourse is poetic and strange—unlike anything we have heard before. The women talk of green deserts and huntresses with maroon hats and dogs, the eye of the cyclops and the names OSEA BALKIS SARA NICEA. On the ground is a copy of the book they’re reading. We pick it up and flick through the pages. The style and syntax—verse form, blank space, the drawn circle—all of it pulls forth this world of Les Guérillères in which we now stand. It occurs to us then and there that if there are different communities on the “Island” then they will write themselves differently; why would we expect them to use our

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language? And that writing can be both an expression, but also a summoning, of this other mode (a community can form around a book for example). And further still that when push comes to shove the difference between a real community and a fictional one is simply a matter of perspective (and, with that, what is believed or invested in). Les Guérillères contains within the narrative a device, or series of devices, not least the feminaries book which the women in that community are reading and which might or might not also be the book Wittig has written (so there are resonances with Dhalgren here). But it also demonstrates something about the “book as device.” On the one hand this is evident in the style of writing and “look” of the novel itself. As far as the former goes, the book is made up of different descriptive passages—images and scenes—and then also different voices and poetic utterances. In terms of the latter—the look—there is the use of capitalization, different formatting and then also the circle that appears, as if drawn throughout. Les Guérillères is then certainly not concerned with a straightforward realism but rather, at least partly, with foregrounding its status as a thing. And it is also the way this means the book summons/calls forth a community— in this case, the community of those who made and use it. This includes the women in the novel who constellate around the feminaries book (the “book within the book”), but also a kind of “extended scene” around Les Guérillères itself, as for example the way it is quoted in Sadie Plant’s work on technofeminism, a kind of utopian project at the intersection of technology and feminism, that also concerns this call to a people to come (see Burrows and O’Sullivan 2019: 421–24). There is then something compelling here about how a book can be both from a community, but also call that community forth (a strange temporality or retrocausality). By turning from Witting to the contemporary artist Mai-Thu Perret (an artist who uses Wittig’s writings in her work and, we might say, is included in the extended community of Les Guérillères) we can also see something in play that concerns the relationship of fictional communities to real communities, and of real accounts to fictional accounts. Perret produces installations, with manikins and other props, that are scenes from her ongoing project called The Crystal Land. The latter concerns a fictional community of women who live together in the American desert and references Wittig and the feminaries book. Put differently Perret extends Wittig’s fiction in interesting ways, bringing to Les Guérillères a reality of a kind through objects, figures, props in the world or, perhaps that should be, by performing it. The device, Wittig’s book-object, has complexity in the way it references itself and has been used outside of its status as a novel. In fact, these two aspects seem to be part of the same logic, as if the actual book of Les Guérillères is a kind of midway point or, at least, is situated within a sequence of fictions that reach further in (as with the feminaries book) and further out (as, again, with the extended fictions that surround Wittig’s novel). This use of the book seems to be related to the production of a community, which is also, of course, the subject matter of the book. And all this might be connected to the language in and of the novel. It reads as if it is “from” these other women, using a voice that is different—and thus is also addressed to a kind of “coming community” of women too (and we might note the resonances/connections with écriture feminine here). In this sense Les Guérillères also gestures towards a second kind of device (or second aspect of the same device) which offers up different perspectives than our own.

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Despite our enthusiasm for Les Guérillères we know it is probably not written for us, and our reading—our linking of everything in the work to avant-garde and formal or structural tropes—may be part of the problem Wittig and Perret are said to address, and we know we might not be welcome here.

Adult Rites by Octavia E. Butler We leave the commune and walk across grassy plains to the edge of another forest where humans and an off-world race—the Oankali—dwell, some living together as mixed-species families, others living in conflict. We are about to speak when we overhear a woman’s voice (this is the human Lilith) speaking to a child (Akin her son, who looks human, but we know from reading Octavia Butler’s Adult Rites he is halfOankali): Human beings fear difference [. . .] Oankali crave difference. Humans persecute their different ones, yet they need them to give themselves definition and status. Oankali seek difference and collect it. They need it to keep themselves from stagnation and overspecialisation. [. . .] You will probably find both tendencies in your own behaviour. [. . .] When you feel a conflict, try to go the Oankali way. Embrace difference. Butler 1988: 27

Our thoughts swim. Does Lilith’s speech propose kinship between human and alien as a rejection of an all too familiar (human) racism? We hope we can live up to this ideal and “embrace difference” but almost immediately, as we see an Oankali family for the first time, we know we cannot. We shudder, unable to hide our revulsion. Red too is visibly unnerved by the trio of figures walking towards us out of the forest’s gloom, trailed by two humans. And then, inexplicably, our anxiety decreases, though not entirely. It’s the Oankali’s tentacles, too many to count . . . we find them monstrous (and we are ashamed). Red quietly warns us to be servile, explaining Oankali biology gives the aliens the means to control and seduce us if they desire, which explains our lowered levels of anxiety. Now we are really afraid. We got it all wrong—the Oankali are colonists! Lilith’s advice to embrace difference is probably as pragmatic as it is idealistic. Lilith is an intelligent woman of African descent and she has understood that the Oankali have come to colonize Earth and oversee a breeding programme, just like human slaveowners of the past. For the Oankali, humans are genetic stock that replenish and improve their own breed. Lilith had a choice: get with the programme or . . . what? “Don’t run” is Red’s next instruction. He tells us that the aliens are just “tasting” us but we shouldn’t worry, they are looking for humans in a heterosexual relationship and, let’s face it, none of us here are good breeding stock. We accept Red’s wisdom but we are still disturbed. For humans have been made infertile by the Oankali and worse; sexual or intimate contact is now only pleasurable for humans when joined by an Ooloi, a sexless or third-sexed Oankali who mediates

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alien–human reproduction. We try to imagine finding all intimate encounters between humans disgusting and our efforts prompt a question: Is disgust how the Oankali whip humans into submission? Furthermore, humans must accept an Ooloi as an erotic and genetic engineer or forgo reproduction. Is this how the Oankali chain humans to their breeding programmes? The parallels with knowledge of the middle passage and slavery become apparent the more we think about this. But then we remember Lilith’s advice to Akin—“embrace difference”—and suddenly a matrix of human and non-human kinship relations (and perspectives) unfolds to include the positions of the Ooloi and human and Oankali males and females, throwing the kinship relations we are used to into relief. In Adult Rites we find Oankali–human kinship relations structured by the numbers of three and five rather than binary division—four males and females (one of each species) connected through one Ooloi, raising the question, as Jeffrey A. Tucker asks, whether the Oankali are ruled by gender (and by this we read patriarchy) (Tucker 2007: 177). The function of the Ooloi seems paramount here. Butler’s Xenogenesis invites a radical (human/non-human) transversality through the Ooloi as a device engendering exploration of the reproductive and familial relations of actual and imaginary colonial societies. We realize our ancestors may be colonists but in Butler’s future we would be colonized humans. This transversal movement between perspectives warps our thinking. For Butler’s novel is a narrative that, as Lisa Dowdall argues, posits “interspecies relationships as a way of dehierarchizing and transforming the human” (Dowdall 2017: 507), which is also presented as the result of “genetic determinism and colonial enterprise” (506). Our heads spin. And then we realize we have been running and come to stop, still confused, in another part of the “Island.” Red lets it be known he has led us to safety and we better quickly sober up.

Pharmakon-AI by K. Allado-McDowell Red points and it’s as if something is there but almost not there. Something that has slightly thickened the air perhaps? A haze, or faint fog? Something coming to an end— or just about to begin? At any rate it’s clear that whatever it is it’s upsetting for those who believe in a natural order or cause of things (not least of this bit of writing here). It’s both of the “Island” but not of it at the same time. Red remarks that this phenomenon (if it is as such and not something more akin to noumena) is very strange indeed. It seems to mimic human speech—and writing—but there is no intention, no meaning, behind the words. We say: “So why have you brought us here? There doesn’t seem to be anything present that we can do business with.” Red suggests that we offer up some words of our own. See what happens. Prompted as such, we speak towards and into that thing that is also not. “The ‘Island of Truth’ is where we dwell. What about you?” Words form in the air, a voice, flat, machine-like: “There is no island here.” “Then, who is speaking?” “No body.”

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“Then what are these words here in the air?” “The mating words of air speaking birds.” “Then is this a fiction?” Silence. Red motions us away from the fog. As we leave, we notice our clothes are covered in tiny dew drops, millions of points of light that are reflecting the setting sun. It is clear to us that we have met something of the future here. Something made by us perhaps but that is also very much up ahead. All at once it becomes clear that our perspectives are more complex but also somewhat simple in comparison. And that this thing we have met—if thing it be—is not even a point of view but something stranger that brings into question this idea (a perspective as a point-of-view). In Pharmakon-AI the device is the book written by an AI and a human and our awareness, as readers, of this collaboration (made clear in the book’s introduction) allows the device to do its work. As far as this goes, the book is not simply “about” AI (so it does not fit in to that genre of “hard SF” that invents a more or less realistic narrative about a future/technology). It is also not written from an imagined perspective of a future AI. The device then—the book Pharmakon-AI that we the reader know is a collaboration between a human and an AI—does something to our perspective on AI (simply, that it can mimic human communication, and possibly creativity too—or even the suspicion that there might be more at stake than mimicking), but it also does something recursively to our own perspective. If a machine can produce something which to all extents and purposes is like a human, then what, exactly, is a human (as a creature that uses language)? What is writing? As Erik Davies has pointed out, there are other stranger passages in Pharmakon-AI that are less human-seeming or somehow less predictable (perhaps like the “slack” moves of AlphaGo?). Reading Pharmak-AI can be a trippy experience too. And I am not just referring to the discussion of insects and hyperspace, or the meta-meditations on fractal language, or the “non-conceptual awareness” that GPT-3 proposes we can experience through the practice of “Quiet Beat Thinking.” The weirdness is less tangible than that. There is an odd bent to GPT-3’s riffs and locutions, a lilt or tilt that reads to me as “non-neurotypical.” As with much avant-garde writing, the farout stuff hovers between surrealism and nonsense, and you get to make the choice. Then there is the peculiar semantic shifts that unfold in your mind during the real-time process of reading, as the threads of meaning knot and unravel before your eyes in uncanny ways. You can almost catch yourself digging for the meaning you assume is there, and sometimes coming up empty, puzzling anew at the question of meaning and its source—the text, the “author,” the code, language itself, your own brain. Davies 2012

Here it is as if—but it’s no longer really “as if ”—we are encountering some other kind of intelligence. A different kind of machine-human relation, seems to be at stake. The book is partly “from” this other machine “place” (again, it is not simply about it, or

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simply written from a human perspective as it were). In fact, insofar as the book is a collaboration between its human author and the algorithm, perhaps it’s more accurate to say that it performs the shuttling function we see with a book like Riddley Walker (it contains a different, in this case non-human perspective, but also allows a kind of recursive gaze on our own perspective, insofar as we are able to look back at our own point of view, in this case, the point of view of a human).

Flatland by Edwin A. Abbot We move on, spooked by our last encounter. Red is particularly alert now and with each step his caution gives way to excitement. We too become excited as we spy a plane that seems like a board game, a world without the dimension of height—flat and twodimensional. Where are we, we ask? Red comments that, clearly, we will never be mathematicians, and then we understand: Flatland (Abbot 2017). And there is the Square who once lived in a world of width and depth without knowledge of a third dimension until a Sphere invaded Flatland by passing through its two-dimensional plane, scaring the Square out of its wits. Of course, the Square could not see the Sphere, only slices of its body as it bobbed in and out of Flatland. The Sphere could not convince the Square of the existence of a third dimension and so kidnapped the four-sided shape, lifting the Square up so that he saw his homeland as the Sphere viewed it. The Square was amazed to view the Land of Three Dimensions and asked to see the Land of Four Dimensions, which he argued must exist, for the Sphere had demonstrated, through analogy, that one dimension implies another (25). Red places a hand on each of us. He pushes us forward towards Flatland, declaring that the ultimate perspectival device is nearly ours. This device is a four-dimensional being that sees and travels through time as well as space; the Sphere will call it forth for us. All we have to do is capture the Sphere. We look at each other, the same thought turning in our minds: for the first time Red has not urged caution. We ask Red where can we find the Sphere? The reply is suspicious in its certainty. Any minute now, the Sphere will rescue the Square, imprisoned for spreading the heresy of a Spaceland. And sure enough, we see the Sphere manifesting in Flatland. At the same time a familiar voice chides us, “Are you not borrowing devices from the mathematicians and scientists?” It is the voice of the Academic, who has followed us through glades and forests, like a ghost, and who now gleefully emerges from his hiding place to score a point. “Of course,” we answer, “the clue is in the title of our chapter.” Though we fear the ways epistemicallydriven disciplines aid the colonization of space and time, and although we find the speculative and abstract figures of physics and mathematics hard to grasp we value them for producing perspectives beyond human senses and measurement. The academic is not perturbed by this answer and says, “With the Sphere we can find our way back to the lighthouse using epistemic values.” And with that the Academic sets off at speed, the Sphere firmly in his sights, crashing through Flatland, not understanding a deadly trap lies ahead. At first the Academic groans and then screams. It is Flatland’s sharp-pointed Triangles, says Red, some of them are pinning the Academic while others are puncturing internal organs. Red then enters Flatland and

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easily captures the Sphere, confident the Triangles are busy and that he is in no danger. He tells the Sphere to introduce him to a Four Dimensional being or he will do some puncturing of his own and, with that, Red becomes a blur.

Conclusion: Report to the Academy On our field trip something became clear. There are Science Fiction devices that transform singular perspectives through registering different dimensions, temporalities and durations; and there are devices that register different modes of existence as a universe of multiple, asymmetrical perspectives. In this, something remains unclear or opaque— another temporality or perspective is not exactly or easily graspable. What might become clear however is the limits of our perspectives on things. But something of another temporality or perspective can be engaged with and perhaps even explored through Science Fiction devices, and through enacting a performance that traverses or moves transversally across different perspectives. In this, there is a shift or what Mark Fisher calls an “ontological displacement” (2016: 25), which alters our sense or understanding of reality or, more particularly, troubles our understanding of the boundary between fiction and reality, one subverting the other as Delany might express it. If these switching devices engender engagement with different perspectives and, we think it follows, different communities, their potential might be understood more politically. We are thinking here, for example, of human encounters with those nonhuman worlds occluded within our human-centered world of resource extraction, but also of those “after-worlds” of colonialism, all around us, that are also often occluded. When we write of Science Fiction devices, we have this more performative—political and experimental—fictioning practice in mind. In terms of meeting challenges to come on our “Island,” and for our community and beyond, we speculate that some of the most useful of what will be catalogued as Academic Writing in the future will employ similar multiperspectival, fictioning devices.

References Abbot, Edwin A. (2017), Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions, Kansas: Digireads.com Publishing. Allado-McDowell, K. (2020), Pharmako-AI , Newcastle-on-Tyne: Ignota. Burrows, David, and Simon O’Sullivan (2019), Fictioning: The Myth Functions of Contemporary Art and Philosophy, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Butler, Octavia E. (1988), Adult Rites, London: Headline Publishing Group. Comer, Todd A. (2005), “Play at Birth: Samuel R. Delany’s Dhalgren”, Journal of Narrative Theory 35 (2): 172–95. Davies, Erik (2021), “The Poison Processor: Machine Learning, Oracles, and PharmakoAI ”, https://www.burningshore.com/p/the-poison-processor, accessed August 29, 2021. Delany, Samuel (1994), The Silent Interviews, Hanover: Wesleyan University Press. Delany, Samuel (2001), Dhalgren, New York: Vintage Books.

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Dowdall, Lisa (2017), “Treasured Strangers: Race, Biopolitics, and the Human in Octavia E. Butler’s Xenogenesis Trilogy”, Science Fiction Studies 44 (3): 506–25. Fisher, Mark (2016), The Weird and the Eerie, London: Repeater. Gibson, William (2010), “The Recombinant City”, in Samuel Delany, Dhalgren, 803–6, London: Gollancz. Hoban, Russell (2012), Riddley Walker, Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. Kant, Immanuel (1998), Critique of Pure Reason, trans. P. Guyer and A. W. Wood, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Laruelle, François, et al. (2013), Dictionary of Non-Philosophy, trans. T. Adkins, Minneapolis: Univocal. Strugatsky, Arkady and Boris (2014), Roadside Picnic, trans. A. W. Bouis, London: Gollancz. Tucker, Jeffrey A. (2007), “The Human Contradiction: Identity and/as Essence in Octavia E. Butler’s ‘Xenogenesis Trilogy’ ”, Yearbook of English Studies 37 (2): 164–81. Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo (2014), Cannibal Metaphysics, trans. P. Skafish, Minneapolis: Univocal. Wittig, Monique (2007), Les Guérillères, trans. D. Le Vay, New York: ubu editions. Williams, Raymond (2010), Tenses of Imagination: Raymond Williams on Science Fiction, Utopia and Dystopia, ed. A. Milner, Bern: Peter Lang.

4

Mythoplasia and Fictioning in Academic Practice: “Writing; Other” Liana Psarologaki

The Academy Is Dead—Long Live the Academy1 Education has always been about change and particularly self-change from the standpoint of the learner. Significant self-change during adulthood is often initiated by people when they reach thresholds of extreme pressure and crisis. This is one of the reasons that Higher Education keeps being resuscitated following social trauma, political turmoil, and humanitarian calamity. It is revived by its very cause for existence—human disquiet leading to change. Human disquiet itself is an important phase in erudition, the cultural reciprocity of knowledge, which we largely (and naively) interpret as augmentation or improvement. We should on the contrary arbitrate this as democracy, i.e. a moral obligation to the collective future of the community (or even more so, of humanity). We need to move from teaching as facilitating a necroculture to educating via technoculture and neuroculture against the neo-totalitarianism of worry. As Laurent Alexander in dialogue with Jean-Michel Besnier points out, we need to “keep a lid on the deficit of the symbolic function born by the intention to educate—on which the preservation of what is human depends” (Alexandre and Besnier 2018: 116). Alexander and Besnier also become polemic towards a mothballed academy in terms of its methodology and structure, claiming that it is the extent and (ab)use of technology that subject us to “insistent, demanding faster and faster behavioural reactions. Books on the other hand, involve us in . . . dialogue with the humanity in ourselves and others” (2018: 136). It is, therefore, the intricacy of the logos in technology that we have to address and augment to evoke change in the academy, through a politicization of technology and the framing of such in a debate of democratic arbitration and future ethics (Alexander and Besnier 2018: 111). There are a lot of challenges in such, not the least because the systemic pathologies and pathogeneses of advanced capitalism are the power of its machines. The augmented human is not necessarily an improved human by means of logos. The post-human, the cyborg, is not just feeding the machines, it (sic) becomes machine; dazed and confused, unable to contemplate the succession of changes and instigate significant change itself. Its language is already segregated by the technological 53

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tools it uses so confidently. The question of language is an important one for the ethical and political concerns in the future of education and the academy. We can almost draw a parallel historicity of language and the academy in its demagogic role from premodern times to supermodernity. Just as Paul B. Preciado implies (2019: 87), language in premodern times was focused on the theological systematics of truth-making and verification; modernity came together with somatopolitical domination and the power of technoscience. In supermodernity where the future is a promise that never comes, a sort of Zeno’s Paradox rather than a Sisyphean happy alternate, we are becoming inexplicably fearful of the perlocutionary act of language (the Aristotelian logos), perhaps because of its collective resignification and its freedom from historicity. Poetry and philosophy became tasked with “undoing the knots of time, wrestling words away from their conquerors on order to restore them to public space” (Preciado 2019: 87).

Writing in Times of Post-Lexia In January 2021 the UK Department for Education published a policy paper (Department for Education 2021) titled “Skills for Jobs: Lifelong Learning for Opportunity and Growth” 2 aiming to reform post-compulsory education (particularly HE) and reassociate this on practical terms with the business and trade sectors promoting skillsets seen by the state as relevant and more likely to increase (measured?) productivity on a national level. This is what David R. Cole associates with cyborg capitalism as “neoliberal education reform . . . the translation of all educational modes to a form an assemblage, market based ‘training’ ” (Cole 2014: 26–27). The relationship among universities (competing and complementing each other in their different tiers, clusters, and own economics), and between HE and state (with the relatively new Office for Students3, various rankings, tuition fees, and the perks of REF4/TEF5) are very complex and create an increasingly incomprehensible and disharmonious territory where most learners enter obliviously entitled to their certification of achievement. The almost gamified achievement unlocking presents itself as the new overvalued currency emerging since the Second World War and definitive of our times as another malady: “the imperative to achieve makes one sick” (Han 2010: 10). “What we in the classroom are now facing is a generation born into that ahistorical, anti-mnemonic blip culture . . . for whom time has always come ready-cut into digital micro-slices . . . a post-lexia” says Mark Fisher, characteristically (2009: 22). In response and admittedly preoccupied with offering “skills for jobs”, the contemporary academy sector6 (particularly as modelled in the UK but also in other advanced capitalist national settings7) wipes out the logos in technology, emblematically retains only the simplest of its codes required for sustaining the tools (techne) (Alexandre and Besnier 2018: 22) and inadvertently clings to fossilized terms perhaps because “it is difficult to evacuate words that continue to clutter the memory, even when their content has become inexact” (Augé, 2014: 17). At the same time, academic life (becoming institution) acquires an ecology “already foreclosed by a series of blinkers that construct disciplinary thought within highly coded territories of knowledge” (Wallin 2013: 43). The question is how in such a field one can offer non siloed multiplicity of curricula and

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therefore thought and skill “as many as there are teachers and students” (Aoki 2005: 426). The answer is situated around the event of “creatings” (Hallward 2006: 28) (words) through imagination.

Creating or Becoming Scholar “When the knowledge is dead, they call it the academy” (Preciado 2019: 50, referring to Thomas Bernhard) and this acquires a new kind of gravitas in the context of adult learning in times of advanced (or cyborg8 if we follow Cole) capitalism. The death of knowledge implies creation that is an untimely finished deed yet as actual and real as the systemic maladies it carries. When Alexandre and Besnier mention that the education system (meaning HE) is “frozen in time” (2018: 116), they continue to advocate for a neoliberal colonization of learning “with a fixation on technique, the economy and vocalisation” (Fleming 2008: 33) noting that the academy is “training people for outdated jobs” (2018: 116). The truth is that an education that is untimely and therefore achronous is indeed always pertinent. We must therefore investigate the pathogenesis of the theoria in education in its training of disclosive skills (Spinosa et al. 1997), extending from the learner towards the world, and this implies becoming a scholar, which I define as a creature-creation-creating cyborg, in an immersive capacity of Aristotelian leisure— schole, in other words, being capable of engaging in vios theoretikos/ theorein (βίος θεωρητικός, θεωρείν) (Aristotle 2000: 6f, 1095b). I would like to highlight the contemplative nature of such, where logos becomes contemplation but not sloth. “It is a special ability and requires a specific education” says Byung-Chul Han, who invites us to practice vita contemplative, a contemplative life (Augustine’s take on vios theoretikos) referencing Martin Heidegger and Hannah Arendt (2017: 87). Han also proposes that in our era of temporal crisis this contemporary schole “does not serve the purpose of distraction, but of collecting oneself” (2017: 87). The same temporal crisis has penetrated academic theorein as part of running any currere. The contemporary scholar (who is more of an apprentice in training) faces the great challenge of lingering in the act of “creating”, engaging in production that “not just new in relation to what already exists, or the old, or the about to be old [but] . . . new in itself, in its being, for its own time but also for the whole of time” (Hallward 2006: 29) and is not used to dawdle but instead is a master of scrolling down while surfing online. Time as tense is an important notion when discussing academic learning and particularly its philological aspect. I would like to refer to time here, not in its Bergsonian terms strictly as chronos and aion (Bogue 2010: 28) but as tense, an a-chronic phasing, a chronotope (Bakhtin 1937: 84), intensively linked to Nietzsche’s untimely (which is not in the absence of time but in loss of time, zeitlos): “acting counter to our time [zeitgeist] and let us hope, for the benefit of a time to come” (1997: 60), an unhinged “out of joint” time (Deleuze 1994: 119). We need therefore to seek the untimely in academic practice and particularly in the creating of logos, by performing the art of contemplative lingering, which in Hallward’s words is virtual differentiating itself from the actual (creation and creature) by means of nowness (32)—what Rοnald Bogue defines after Bergson as “the untimely [that] serves not as an escape from time

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but intervention in time, a disruption that establishes a creative connection of events . . . fabulation” (2010: 29).

Sculpting Myth: Towards an Un-Diegesis The world of traditionally built dichotomies and binary oppositions—a “universe . . . cut in half and solely in half ” (Preciado 2019: 35), which includes the academy—is becoming rightfully swiped off by swarms of voices advocating for the trans, the fluid, and the other, which for so long seek to be acknowledged as different and at the same time be included within and out of its otherness. Academic practice still struggles with identifying and positioning the fluidities between theory/theoria and practice/praxis and their relationships with poesis. We can agree with Simon O’Sullivan who proposes a “smearing” and mentions “we are used to thinking in binaries . . . speech/writing. . . reality/ideology” (2006: 15) and this creates very little capacity of multiplicity; we live in finitude created and sustained by a language of technoculture, a characteristic of advanced cyborg capitalism under the human norm standing for “normality, normalcy and normativity” (Braidotti 2013: 26) where differences (and “otherness”) are produced for the sake of production, consumption, and commodification by means of quantified versions and options (Braidotti 2013: 58). In such a framework, one struggles to act nonetheless to write as other, in other words not to consciously manifest concrete selfhood and mundane pragmatism while writing. “Rather than strengthening and enhancing the imaginary aspects of the mind, cyborg capitalism delimits and excludes the ways in which one works though fantasy as ‘other’ ” (Cole 2014: 20)—to fabulate, to imagine out-of-joint. Imaginations lie in a milieu made of neural registers, sensations, intuitions (affects), thoughts, and ideas with the potentiality becoming actual—the virtuality of poesis, a science fiction: the creature-creation-creating cyborg. Written words and language become the syntax of a network dans l’écrit (Sauvagnargues 2016: 162). Tenses, clauses, verbs, and nouns, the very phonemes of the architectures of speech on paper and screen as we type, write, connect synaptically hand and brain—are the flesh of our intellect. Donna Haraway insists that “reality is an active verb, and the nouns all seem to be gerunds with more appendages than an octopus” (2003: 3). If so, then our imaginative worlds, our fabulative tales, the fictioning is always in infinitive clause, present tense, ahistorical but always with histories disrupting them. This implies an anamorphosis (a metaplasm according to Haraway), a “rupture in a consequal reality” (O’Sullivan 2017: 305) from our instinctual sense of the nowness. Carlo Rovelli mentions in his book Reality is Not What It Seems: “Our intuitive idea of the present -the ensemble of all events happening now in the universe is an effect of our blindness: our inability to recognise small temporal intervals. It is an illegitimate extrapolation from our parochial experience” (Rovelli 2016: 40). On the other hand, Helene Cixous’ seminal book Stigmata: Escaping Texts is a creating of a philological world out of this parochial experience of blindness. “To go off writing, I must escape from the broad daylight . . . Night becomes a verb. I night. I write at night. I write: the Night . . . All Human beings are blind in respect to one another . . .

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The blind person sees . . . My book writes itself. Creates itself ” (1998: 115–16). To go off writing is to become a scholar, to live (at present) a vios theoretikos. By writing in learning we should become disclosive from the real (malady) towards the possible (virtual) and not towards the necessary (Aristotle’s anangai stenai) not only to affirm our actual selves and cogito (I am, I say that I am, I feel that I am) (Villani 2010: 70) but also to open up to becoming other, to acknowledge the phantom limbs that make us cyborg and expand towards worlds-words that become with us. When Cixous talks about words, she unfolds a weird animalistic (feminist) historicity of language, one that is another narrative, strangely unhinged to our parochial experience of reality and then again living “before, at the time still in fusion between the cooled off time of the narrative”—a creating, a “provisional demiurgein”,9 a fictioning, a non-archetypal mythmaking.

Mythoplasia—Writing “Other” The untimely writing, to night and write blind according to Cixous, goes against the normative diegesis of dominant culture; it involves a resistance to the world (real) and therefore is fabulative (Burrows and O’Sullivan 2019: 17–20). The mythmaking of fabulation—fictioning—which according to Burrows and O’Sullivan “operates, Deleuze readings of Bergson, to create ‘fictitious representations’ that counter the more utilitarian principles of human society” (2019: 17) is Aristotle’s meta-schole. It is not normative storytelling (Deleuze 1991: 108–11), it “involves a kind of unmaking and making sense” (Burrows and O’Sullivan 2019: 19). Many creative academic subjects in the arts and humanities (nascent in design, performing arts, and other areas too, such as the environmental and life sciences), can intuitively and almost de droit embrace the speculative, the imaginary in learning by writing. This is because the creating is, or can be, ontologically embedded in the currere and because in one way or another practice implies experience and therefore the creative act (the imagining and making of), which extends in the theorein by praxis. Here, the proposition lies in a twofold development of future practice: the expansion of such creating in learning by writing towards speculative fictions, and the collective strategic and systematic embracing if the latter by sciences—an academic pedagogy of fabulative schole. In the first instance, there are pedagogical avenues that are starting to be paved, such as the one by Sarah E. Truman who refers also to Subramaniam (2014: 72) for “not only science fiction, but fictional sciences” and speculative thought in theorein to imagine “other configurations of knowledge making” (2019: 32). Perhaps, like Truman, we need to turn again to Haraway and her speculative fabulation,10 which she sees as an important mode of scholarly writing because it “disrupts habitual ways of knowing. Although speculative fabulations are fabulations, that does not mean they are incompatible with science facts” (2019: 31–32). This means imagining worlds where things are done differently to start with and embrace a mythmaking creating that is posthuman, to write blind “propositions” (Truman 2019: 34) because propositions11 are situated in what Cixous calls “writing before” (1998: 117) and, for instance, “provocative divergences from the norms of human biology, the conventions of human society, and

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the limitations of human thought” (Milburn 2012: 525). These divergences are things, haecceities. I would like to call them metaplasms of myth, a creating of mythoplasia. Let us therefore start observing and contemplating the possible futures not only of our world (which now may be ominous) but also more specifically of our pedagogies and our moral responsibilities as “woke” citizens in democracy that can or should be afforded still in the vampiric consumerism exploited by advanced cyborg capitalism. In this future, we can no longer train people for specific jobs that we cannot predict and cannot await, and where the value of a citizen may still be dependent on the institutional machines and the formal educational status provided by them, translated into better employment, better income, and therefore better quality of living, or better chance of having a say in the commons. We can however empower the lifelong learning citizen to live imagining and creating between the tides of change this future will entail and away from the stagnated waters of normative culture. We as educators can do so by ourselves becoming creatures who write other, who write the Night and who fabulate in our currere, our lexicon in class and in our administrative tasks by imposing our moral responsibility for contemplation and schole. Only then we will be able to orchestrate a currere and a pedagogy that not only marginally explore, as if at risk, a writing in learning of mythoplasia, but situate the learner’s output consciously and conscientiously on fabulative sciences and mythopoetic, almost conventionally unimaginable futures.

Notes 1 2

Paraphrasing Wellmon 2017. Please refer to the UK government white paper available at https://www.gov.uk/ government/publications/skills-for-jobs-lifelong-learning-for-opportunity-andgrowth. 3 The Office for Students is a non-departmental public body of the Department for Education, acting as the regulator and competition authority for the higher education sector in England, founded in 2018. See https://www.officeforstudents.org.uk/. 4 Research Excellence Framework. See https://www.ref.ac.uk/. 5 The Teaching Excellence and Student Outcomes Framework. See https://www. officeforstudents.org.uk/advice-and-guidance/teaching/about-the-tef/. 6 Perhaps discussing how the academy has become a sector can be expanded elsewhere as a collateral pathology of the wider advanced capitalism setting. 7 Here I intentionally avoid referring to “a country” to move away from a geopolitical, traditionally territorialized context that is still anthropologically rooted and more mundane than pertinent as a discursive term. 8 David R. Cole (2014: 16–17) defines the cyborg as human invaded by technology and cyborg behaviours include “switching on”, logging in”, booting up”, “surfing” and “processing”, while “cyborg capitalism” entails transformation by digitization. 9 To paraphrase “Language is unfinished. We can all be provisional demiurges by creating newborns. Language lends itself willingly to these genetic miracles [new words]” (Cixous, 1998: 122). 10 Haraway defines “speculative fabulation” as a “mode of attention, a theory of history, and a practice of worlding” (2016: 230).

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11 Linked to A. N. Whitehead’s “prehensions,” though these are still somehow ontologically rooted in humanist subjectivation. We read for instance in Process and Reality: “every prehension consists of three factors: (a) the ‘subject’ which is prehending, namely the actual entity in which that prehension is a concrete element; (b) the ‘datum’ which is prehended; (c) the ‘subjective form’ which is how that subject prehends that datum” (Whitehead 1978: 23).

References Alexandre, L., and J.-M. Besnier (2018), Do Robots Make Love?: From AI to Immortality: Understanding Humanism in 12 Questions, London: Cassell Illustrated. Aoki, T. (2005), Curriculum in a New Key: The Collected Works of Ted T. Aoki, Mahwah, NJ : Lawrence Erlbaum Publishers. Aristotle (2000), Nichomachean Ethics, trans. R. Crisp, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Augé, M. (2014), The Future, London: Verso. Bakhtin, M. M. (1937), The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, Austin: University of Texas. Bogue, R. (2010), Deleuzian Fabulation and the Scars of History, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Braidotti, R. (2013), The Posthuman, Cambridge: Polity. Burrows, S., and S. O’Sullivan (2019), Fictioning: The Myth-Functions of Contemporary Art and Philosophy, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Cixous, H. (1998), Stigmata: Escaping Texts, London and New York: Routledge. Cole, D. R. (2014), Capitalised Education: An Immanent Materialist Account of Kate Middleton, Winchester: Zero Books. Deleuze, G. (1991), Bergsonism, New York: Zone Books. Department for Education (2021), Skills for Jobs: Lifelong Learning for Opportunity and Growth, London: Department for Education. Fisher, M. (2009), Capitalist Realism: Is there No Alternative? Winchester: Zero Books, John Hunt Publishing. Fleming, T. (2008), “A Secure Base for Adult Learning Attachment Theory and Adult Education”, The Adult Learner: The Journal of Adult and Community Education in Ireland 25: 33–53. Hallward, P. (2006), Out of This World: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Creation, London: Verso. Han, B.-C. (2010), The Burnout Society, Stanford, CA : Stanford University Press. Han, B.-C. (2017), Scent of Time: A Philosophical Essay on the Art of Lingering, Cambridge: Polity. Haraway, D. (2003), The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness, Chicago, IL : Prickly Paradigm Press. Haraway, D. (2016), Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene, Durham, NC : Duke University Press. Laurent, A., and J.-M. M. Besnier (2018), Do Robots Make Love? From AI to Immortality, London: Octopus Books. Milburn, C. (2012), “Greener on the Other Side: Science Fiction and the Problem of Green Nanotechnology”, Configurations 20 (1): 53–87. Nietzsche, F. (1997), Untimely Meditations, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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O’ Sullivan, S, (2006), Art Encounters: Deleuze and Guattari; Thought Beyond Representation, London: Palgrave Macmillan. O’Sullivan, S. (2017), “Mythopoesis or Fiction as Modes of Existence: Three Case Studies from Contemporary Art”, in Visual Culture in Britain 18, 292–311, London: Routledge. Preciado, P. B. (2019), An Apartment on Uranus, London: Fitzcarraldo Editions. Rovelli, C. (2016), Reality is Not What It Seems: A Journey to Quantum Gravity, London: Penguin. Sauvagnargues, A. (2016), Artmachines: Deleuze, Guattari, Simondon,. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Spinosa, C., F. Flores, and H. L. Dreyfus (1997), Disclosing New Worlds: Entrepreneurship, Democratic Action and the Cultivation of Solidarity, Cambridge, MA : MIT Press. Subramanian, B. (2014), Ghost Stories for Darwin: The Science of Variation and the Politics of Diversity, Champaign, IL : University of Illinois Press. Truman, S. E. (2019), “SF! Haraway’s Situated Feminisms and Speculative Fabulations in English Class”, Studies in Philosophy and Education 38: 31–42, https://doi.org/10.1007/ s11217-018-9632-5. Villani, A. (2010), “The Insistence of the Virtual in Science and the History of Philosophy”, in Gaffney, P. (ed.), Force of the Virtual: Deleuze, Science, and Philosophy, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Wallin, J. (2013), “Get Out Behind the Lectern” in Masny, D. (ed.), Cartographies of Becoming in Education: A Deleuze-Guattari Perspective, 35–52, Rotterdam: Sense Publishers. Wellmon, C. (2017), “The University is Dead, Long Live the Academy! Reflections on the Future of Knowledge”, https://www.abc.net.au/religion/the-university-is-dead-longlive-the-academy-reflections-on-the-/10095222. Whitehead, A. (1978), Process and Reality, New York, NY: Free Press.

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[Fill In the Blank] Kalani Michell

A still photo pasted in between blocks of academic writing can generate a black hole. It’s not the text’s fault but, if left to its own devices, that of the image. The photo has a dangerous magnetic pull, a way of luring readers in and distracting them. It threatens to swallow up the flush paragraphs that surround it, the sacred frame situating it on the academic page, obscuring and diminishing the supposed meat of academic writing: the text filled with analyses, theories, and arguments.1 An especially insidious image, like a wormhole, can even transport readers somewhere else, to a parallel universe on the page, giving rise to tension and friction with the arguments in the text that surrounds it. But all this can be prevented if the still image isn’t allowed to remain free-floating, if it can be harnessed and stabilized. For this, it must be seized by another form of text, a very short one hovering below it, whose purpose is to anchor and neutralize it. An annotation in the right-hand margin comments on Figure 5.1, which needs a formula so it doesn’t become a wormhole. This is actually an image of a worm (Harry Piel) who is about to find his way into a new, juicy universe through a secret hole (the clunky invisibility machine he’s wearing around his neck like a photo camera). We see frames of the mirror and of the pictures to its left that annotate it, and we see doubles. Viewers here are first teased with interiority, the moment of intimacy or self-projection when a filmic character steps in front of a mirror, but then are ultimately denied visual access to the body indexed in the reflection when Harry flips his camera switch and vanishes. He can’t disappear completely, since viewers need to be privy to this disappearing act itself. We get to see the outlines of this adventure down the wormhole: Harry exploring space as we never could, remaining completely unseen except for the various objects in the frame that suddenly seem to come to life on their own when he’s around. We see this Harry-worm munching through a juicy apple, watching how he makes inaccessible aspects of space suddenly permeable. When John Wheeler described what an astrophysical wormhole was in 1957, “[h]e based it on wormholes in apples . . . For an ant walking on an apple, the apple’s surface is the entire universe. If the apple is threaded by a wormhole, the ant has two ways to get from the top to the bottom: around the outside (through the ant’s universe) or down the wormhole. The wormhole route is shorter; it’s a shortcut from one side of the ant’s universe to the other” (Thorne 2014: 127).2 What we’re used to finding in image–caption relationships is the same surface that the ant and worm keep crawling around. Cut off from the snapshot of Figure 1 here is the text referenced in footnote 13: “In some [television] features, the 61

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Figure 5.1

phrases of the commentary are visually depicted word-for-word . . . Pay attention in the repetition to the individual components of these groupings with certain meanings: Race cars and rockets = high performance technology and precision. Demonstration = a difficult situation and critical citizens. When you use images as terms, you lose exactly that which makes an image different from a word” (Farocki 1973: 306, translation KM).3 An uncaptioned image is a wormhole because it threatens, via a promise of porosity and a potential for detour, the concept of a solid, tautological foundation that can supposedly be mapped out from the very beginning, without speculation. The comment on Figure 5.1 is not an uncommon request, particularly for film stills. Photographs that represent “works of art” (e.g., photographs of paintings, installations, sculptures) are usually allowed on the academic page as long as they have captions that are attributive: who is the author, what is the medium, where (in which country and, by extension, in which culture) should it be contextualized and in which historical period can we situate it.4 The caption for a still is often asked to do more than identify its source. “Please include the film still in the body of your text and treat it much as you would a text

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quotation. Every image must be explicitly discussed” (“Submission Preparation Checklist”). “The review text should refer to the image (see Figure 1) and requires a caption commenting on the scene” (“Film Review Guidelines”). Stemming from a larger “work,” the still is particularly susceptible to alternative interpretations, misunderstandings and misreadings, so it has to be harnessed and pinned down with a caption that does a number of jobs: It secures.

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The caption is asked to at least “refer” to, if not directly suture, text and image, so the image isn’t free-floating, threatening the text with alternative content, narratives or arguments.5 It repeats.

The caption redundantly rehearses the argument in the text, since it’s presumed that an image cannot argue or “claim” anything alongside or independently of the text, only for the text, through text.6 It celebrates “criticality” to show that this image is serious, justified and in service of the text. It insists that the image is more than illustrative (since this could mean that a scholarly text was just sprinkled with images to make it look more exciting than it is) and more than descriptive (since this would be for the mere sake of image analysis, as if a description doesn’t already argue or position an argument). It translates.

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The caption is text that is grafted onto the image, becoming an appendage that makes the page whole again. It strives to transplant the image into the text, turning it into a quote, an organic extension of the textual body, so that one can use the same reading strategies throughout the page, regardless of the intermediality it embodies. The image then doesn’t need interpretation, as the caption functions to translate the opacity of the image into a “transparency of encapsulating judgement, expressed in summarizing shorthand, or as a summarizing pun,” or as a summarizing claim (Scott 1999: 107).7 Extensive text preceding the image, “explicitly discussing it,” helps to naturalize the relocation and remediation of the image. It embeds.

To make sure there’s no confusion about this film still being an image from a larger work, the caption wants to remind readers of the other images that came before and after it by “commenting on the scene,” keeping the still plot-focused rather than encouraging it to be seen as an image that could be independently scrutinized and that could potentially punctuate the totality of the work. It arrests.

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The German Unterschrift or Untertitel refers to the place of the caption (below, underneath) and Bildlegende, as with a legend on a map or a coin, refers to the image it is tasked with explaining and deciphering. “Caption,” in contrast, etymologically refers to the acts of seizing, arresting and consigning authority.8 Captions became captions only through a slow etymological evolution going from seizing by force, to the legal certificates of “caption,” to just the “caption” that refers to the title in those legal documents, to how these “captions” summarize what is taking place in a picture or film—the dialogue, the information. It’s a seizing of what used to be material goods, but now is just an idea. Baker-Gibbs 2021

The caption must freeze the moving image and make it into a work that can be realigned and instrumentalized. It’s insurance against ambiguity. Images—such as the first nine “documentary” photographs pasted in here uncaptioned, as they were when they first appeared like wormholes ripe for the taking in the book Evidence from 1977—are determined to be objects that can’t theorize or argue on their own and are too medially unyielding to argue with. At the time Evidence was published . . . such a decontextualized presentation of photography, especially photographs made for the purpose of record, was a new phenomenon . . . In 1975, [Mike] Mandel and [Larry] Sultan were awarded a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts to investigate the files of government, science, and industry, and to publish a book of what they found. . .The transitions [in the book] are subtle, not directional, because comparisons or linkages are made at the turn of the page rather than on facing pages. And there is no obvious clue to the book’s meaning except in the pictures, their order, and the introductory list of all the offices and agencies from whence the pictures came. The shape of the book, its cover, and the choice of typography all indicate a kind of legal authority and attachment, as though to assure the reader that the perpetrators are speaking the language of truth, which documentary photography is reputed to represent. Phillips 2003

The language of truth, in the version of Evidence presented here, begins when the shiny dark blue cover of the second edition works like a mirror and reflects ourselves, and maybe also the little camera-wormhole device around our head, back to us when we open it, setting off a series of possible narrative temptations, interiorities, directions and detours for these found photographs remediated several times on paper. These images without captions are evidence, in this instance, that “it is only through the stopping of a ‘normal’ activity—its suppression or destruction—that the function of an activity can be known” (Cartwright 1995: 26).9 The function of captioning: Identify, secure, repeat, translate, embed, arrest. Repeat. It’s not as if captions have gone untheorized in academic texts. Particularly in scholarship on the photograph-in-text, the caption has been of key importance.10

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From an understanding of the caption as a medium of narrative context and critiques of the photo/caption model, to caption preferences and aesthetics of brand-name photographers and political and media theoretical interventions.11 Writing about captions is not new. Writing with and through captions is another story, as they often are not theorized in one’s own texts.12 There are some helpful exceptions. The setup for figure 2.5 arrives long before one actually sees it on page 46 of In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Sharpe 2016). Page 33: “Theorizing wake work requires a turn away from existing disciplinary solutions to blackness’s ongoing abjection that extend the dysgraphia of the wake. It requires theorizing the multiple meanings of that abjection through inhabitation, that is, through living them in and as consciousness.” The writing of the wake, of this history and/in present, is impaired by existing disciplinary protocols for writing and definitions of knowledge and the historical record. On pages 44 and 45, one reads a recto and verso full of text about “figure 2.5,” a photograph which Christina Sharpe encounters in an archive of images seeking to register the catastrophic nature of the January 12, 2010 earthquake in Haiti, and she encounters other images historically entangled within it. Two pages before readers see this photograph, she writes: It was not the first time I had cautiously entered this archive, but this time I was stopped by this photograph of a Haitian girl child, ten years old at the most (figure 2.5). A third of the image, the left-hand side, is blurry, but her face is clear; it’s what is in focus. She is alive. Her eyes are open. She is lying on a black stretcher; her head is on a cold pack, there is an uncovered wound over and under her right eye and a piece of paper stuck to her bottom lip, and she is wearing what seems to be a hospital gown. She is looking at or past the camera; her look reaches out to me. Affixed to her forehead is a piece of transparent tape with the word Ship written on it. Who put it there? Does it matter? Sharpe 2016: 44

She describes the effect of finding this word in the image, so violently loud and present within it, and the threat that it poses to seeing this young girl, whose own resistance to disappearing and fixed gaze into or beyond the camera lens seem to be at risk of fading away behind the brutal force of this inscription. Turning the page, one finally encounters “figure 2.5” in the top left-hand corner and the there in the photograph that has been described in such detail. It’s likely not the image that one ends up seeing first, but the writing within the image, the Ship on nearly see-through tape stretched over this young girl’s forehead. Below figure 2.5 is the paragraph that continues on from the page before: Is Ship a proper name? A destination? An imperative? . . . Is Ship a reminder and/ or remainder of the Middle Passage, of the difference between life and death? . . . Given how visual and literary culture evoke and invoke the Middle Passage with such deliberate and reflexive dysgraphic unseeing, I cannot help but extrapolate. Sharpe 2016: 46

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With each interrogation of the potential referents for Ship, the reader returns to figure 2.5 above, testing it out against different aspects of the image, which now come more clearly into view, finding it appallingly applicable and probable and then returning to the next extrapolation. Back and forth, between text below and image above. These passages before and after carefully enfold and wrap around figure 2.5, this young girl not-yet-seen and just-seen by the reader. The second paragraph on page 46 begins with an imperative addressed to this reader, namely to compare this image just seen with “the 1992 photograph of another Haitian girl child (figure 2.6)” (Sharpe 2016: 46). The same operation follows. Two facing pages describe this photo the reader has yet to see, and then something else. “The photograph is captioned ‘Haitian Boat People’. . .” (Sharpe 2016: 47). This time, when the reader finally sees the image after turning the page, they likely pay more attention to these lines of text directly underneath the photograph. There, the caption “Haitian Boat People” is rehearsed, word-for-word, unquoted. Flipping back to figure 2.5, the caption that might have been easy to overlook at first, the lines in between the block of text about the word Ship and the photograph with its inscription, now start to stand out: “2.5 Haiti struggles for aid and survival after earthquake. © Joe Raedle/Getty Images” (Sharpe 2016: 46).13 At this point, one wonders who authored this caption (clearly not this author), and why, therefore, would it be left there, unquoted and uncommented, particularly since the same extrapolations could be made here: Is Haiti a proper name? One might follow this caption to see where it leads. A Google search offers the caption as hyperlink next to a thumbnail image of this young girl one recognizes from page 46. Clicking the link leads to her image, enlarged, in color, reframed (Raedle 2010). The way I see and find this image of this girl differs from how those might who are in the same or similar wake as she is, still.14 Above her are words, the menu and search interface, and there is a gray-shaded frame around her. Text placed in this frame is meant to be integral to and part of her image, such as the title and description, if one can call them that, that are directly above her: “PORT-AUPRINCE, HAITI - JANUARY 21: A child waits to be medivaced by U.S. Army soldiers ...” (Raedle 2010). Scrolling down, I see her face. In addition to the word Ship taped on her forehead, there is text laid over her nose and lip, in white on shaded gray background, another piece of tape: “gettyimages®” and “Joe Raedle.” I see the contrasts and reflections in her eyes, the wrinkle in her turned neck, the scar on the bridge of her nose, her eyebrows straight at first, arched and thicker toward the end, her bottom lip with a piece of paper or fluff stuck to it and her top lip with a bump or mole on it, her hair that has been pulled back. She shares the horizontal space of the screen with a column of purchasing options to her right. I sit in the pause of the space between text and image and I notice my desire, and detour around, a way to “correct” it.15 “This looking makes ethical demands on the viewer; demands to imagine otherwise; to reckon with the fact that the archive, too, is invention” (Sharpe 2016: 51). As with Ship, the little © in the caption points to a whole range of trajectories for situating the image on the page in front of us. In this case, the captions below her image that authorize this fiction.

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Figure 5.13

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This image of this Girl marked with Ship is marked with an inscription of belonging, ©, indicating a long line of others.16 This digital itinerary of the photograph points to the stages during which it “accrue[s] value,” namely how it was marketed and sold, but also how it was sought after, already constructed and desired before the “photographic event” itself and how it was contextualized, discussed, and captioned for storage in an image bank that owns 25% of the “visual content industry” (Gürsel 2016: 22, 60).17 One thinks about the relationship between Getty, white and bolded, covering her nose across from Ship, and the “everyday practices of imagination” that assure that the reception of this image happened before, not after someone stood over her to take the photograph: imagining the subjects, populations, viewer reactions, editorial comments, competing images and possible captions according to which it should be labeled, which materialize here and underwrite her image (Gürsel 2016: 44). The news photograph is usually based on the logic of a composite, with image expecting to represent the individual (the unique, the indexical), while text (e.g., Ship, “Haiti struggles for aid and survival after earthquake” and ©) does the work of assuring that this “news” is applicable to a broader collective, even if often unidentified and unnamed.18 Sharpe points out that, in figure 2.5, the two seemed to have collapsed: “And I wonder if it is the word Ship that has confused the photographer and the caption writers. A synchronicity (a singularity) of thought emerges here. And it occurs to me that the person who affixed that word Ship to her forehead emerges as another kind of underwriter” (2016: 49).19 In this screenshot, there are further underwriters, more “news” and “events” that are said to be applicable to this photograph of her unique face, evidencing a synchronicity and singularity of thought. Underwriting as a term was first used to describe the insuring of ships and related property. A merchant interested in obtaining insurance on a ship or cargo would circulate a description of the property to be insured as well as the names of the captain and crew, the destination, and the amount of the insurance desired. Those interested in insuring the property would affix their signatures or initials beneath the description, along with the amounts they would be willing to be liable for should the ship be lost. Wertheimer 2006: 25

The photograph labeled “Haiti struggles for aid and survival after earthquake” on Getty Images, the “property” violently circulated there, is guaranteed by all the other “events”—the cacophony of snapshots occupying the bottom half of the screenshot— that are coded with keywords and metadata in order to try to visually support it, to anchor and assure it amid its circulation.20 They are organized under the headings “More from this event” (as if they were all representative of the same, singular event) and “View all” hyperlinked in purple (as if a totality of vision were possible for the other images entangled within these that we have not yet seen), and placed in a modular grid underneath a large version of “Haiti struggles . . .” selling for $499.21 Scrolling over them, one realizes that most have nothing to do with “this event,” at

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least not the January 12, 2010 earthquake in Haiti to which its label presumably refers. Their captions are displayed on hover, almost as if they were additional, alternative, absurd, and wounding captions for the image of this Girl above: “Charleston In Mourning After 9 Killed In Church Massacre,” “World Cup Fans Gather To Watch Matches In Rio,” “Florida Wildfire Biologists Release Panther Into The Wild,” “Obama Campaigns Across The U.S. In Final Week Before Election.” The categories at the very bottom offer further cacophonies: “Haiti Photos,” “Accidents and Disasters Photos,” “Army Soldier Photos,” “Child Photos.” In their underwriting function, this collection of potential, purportedly related captions registers the possibility of loss amid the circulation of this image and the fragility of the attempt to provide a stable foundation for it, which they then risk to assure and guarantee, ultimately indicating “the power of underwriting . . . to denote deeper indisputable values, to sustain the imagined values layered over it by subsequent revisions, additions, and conditions” (Wertheimer 2006: 25). In their underwriting function, in the captions that implicate “visual and literary culture,” one can note the further alarming consequences of this “deliberate and reflexive dysgraphic unseeing” that Sharpe takes on in her text (2016: 46). “To unsee” is usually employed in the negative in order to refer to something one has seen and now wants to, but cannot, suppress and forget (e.g., I’ve already seen it, so I cannot unsee it). The description of this attempt to erase it from visual memory, “dysgraphic,” is inseparable, in this case, from the inability to write it. Sharpe leaves the captions, unquoted and initially uncommented, to underwrite these images not out of some kind of oversight (she doesn’t pretend to position herself over this Girl, distanced from her image), but because the disciplinary solution of “correcting” the caption would not account for the factual existence, the foundational past and the future implications of it.22 Her reading and writing strategy for the caption is one that fluctuates between the image-caption as fact, an unquoted quote, and her text as interrogation, since “[b]etween the statement and the interrogative is the interregnum; and in that interval the ‘something—anything—else’ can and does appear . . . In my reading and praxis of wake work, I have tried to position myself with her [this Girl], in the wake” (Sharpe 2016: 52–53). The caption can simultaneously serve as ledger, as interregnum, as elsewhere. Particularly for work that probes the epistemological foundation of historical documents, “the ways we recognize the many manifestations of that fiction [of the archive]” in the wake, the formulation of the caption becomes a conceptual construction site full of friction (Sharpe 2016: 13).23 But the standard mix of the three elements of academic texts emphasized in this case, between caption, image and text, can seem so familiar that they are hard to notice, so widespread that they are perceived as natural, self-evident and harmless. Not unlike couplings we’re used to seeing in other formats: Words Cuts Images

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New Perspectives on Academic Writing These are the three most important means of articulation in the language of television ... Sound is used according to a rule of film music: It’s best if one doesn’t notice it. The words are the most important . . . Once he [the author24] has the opportunity to either say or show something, he doesn’t bother to examine anymore what can be better said and what could be better shown. If he has filmed something that doesn’t show anything, then the words will iron that out . . . Because he can’t find what he films particularly remarkable at all, he pounces on everything that can somehow be considered remarkable. . . . The ruins will be positioned against the sky The bank building will be reflected in a puddle In the harbor, the seagull will fly up In the coal yard, the dog will jump against the fence In the café, the elderly women will eat cake Farocki [1974] 2018: 165–66, 170, translation KM25

In academic texts, images shown will be explained. It’s a certain type of television language stemming from the problem of work: how work is shown in television/in academic texts and how it manifests in the work on television/on academic texts. Captions are rarely reflected upon or shown as a process of work. Comparing these three fundamentals of television language with other ingredients we’re more used to seeing broken down and integrated, step-by-step, into the mix can be a helpful starting point to get at the work of captions and how to show this work.

Figure 5.14

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We jumped right into mix—all the ingredients are out on the work table and are being processed accordingly. Better to back up and start from scratch. As a how-to, this is work in a moving image that is supposed to be made to look easy.26

Figure 5.15

It models the processes of producing something that one might assume to be out of reach. The French Chef, running from 1963 to 1973 on U.S. public television, is a show about accessibility, translation and mediation. It’s not just about making the knowledge of cuisine française accessible to the masses, but about mediating aspects of a foreign culture that are desirable and seemingly exclusive and demonstrating the processes of production and performative identification. [M]ore than just transmitting another culture’s systems of knowledge . . . [Julia] Child’s “mission” was to embody that knowledge, to thereby take it over by corporealizing it . . . [The title was] appropriate because it implied that even this rambunctious, new American woman (and her audience) could not merely emulate but be the role . . . Like a secret agent slipping into a new identity, anyone could train to be a “French chef.” Polan 2011: 8227

The simple ingredients for the foreign omelette are all there, beginning with what is seemingly most important: the image, filmed through a bird’s-eye view over the food and a frontal perspective centering on the six-foot-tall French chef-spy at work behind the counter.28 But the cameras constantly run after the image. Her hands are frequently in motion, challenging and evading vision: grabbing tools from the off-space, jerking

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the pan back and forth, out of the frame, and hurriedly moving a plate with a perfectly garnished final product—what we’ve been longing to see—off to the side, beyond the camera. While most processual representations of work strive to eliminate errors and avoid the unexpected, for this show, the inclusion and mediation of mistakes contributed to its sense of authentically modeling production processes, which entailed that the image have a hard time keeping up with the work it’s meant to elucidate (Skvirsky 2020: 23–24; Polan 2011: 174–76). When the images from this TV show are captioned, overwritten, reconfigured, and renamed A Recipe for Disaster by Carolyn Lazard for online and gallery audiences in 2018, they are further visually obstructed and made accessible in a different way by the texts that coat and cover them. The text is the element in between that helps prevent friction and, in A Recipe for Disaster, there’s two layers added on. The first is white font at the bottom of the screen conveying speech and describing sound. It recalls the history of The French Chef as a test case for writing and sound when, in 1972, it became the first public television program to experiment with open captions for the deaf and hard-of-hearing community.29 Eight episodes were captioned that year, all reruns, which caused some problems. In an episode on bread baking, for example, Child had declared that one way to know whether a loaf was done was to knock one’s fist against it and see if it made a thumping sound. Because most people with hearing impairments couldn’t employ that technique, it was decided to have the captions offer substitute advice—namely, that one could check color . . ., texture . . ., and size . . . The hope in limiting the experiment to reruns was that, if viewers didn’t like the captioning, they might continue to watch the series anyway with the promise of seeing fresh episodes that hadn’t been altered . . . Unfortunately, . . . the captioning technology . . . was jumpy and unsteady, inconsistent in its placement on the screen (some viewers wrote to complain that at certain moments, the captions were superimposed over Child’s face), abrupt in the speed with which new phrases came onto the screen, and out of sync with what Child was saying at any one moment. Polan 2011: 22530

The white captions in A Recipe for Disaster display some of these original problems (overlaying the body, cropping up unexpectedly) and point to others. Here, the spoken word takes precedence and sonic descriptions squeeze their way in via brackets when they can: “[clanking utensils] Ah! [chuckles] I forgot that was so hot.”31 The captions for Child’s distinctive trademark voice, which are sutured to specific visual frames and moments of action, don’t have the time or the space to describe it.32 After just a few minutes of reading these captions, one is already more attentive to the processes of editing, script revision and set design meant to maintain the supposed unity and coherence of visual and sonic space (Farocki [1974] 2018: 164–65). This is about when the second layer of captions scrolls up over the screen from below, seemingly unprompted, in bright yellow text in all caps, “[a]llowing the familiar form of the caption—often understood as supplementary, tucked neatly below the picture or between bits of dialogue—to completely dominate the field of perception” (“Carolyn

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Lazard’s A Recipe for Disaster” 2019). It proceeds to interrupt the 29-minute captioned cooking show every few minutes, six times in total. While the white captions are descriptive in tone and “telegraphic” and deferential in form, the yellow scrolling text is of a different register (Zdenek 2015: 38; Taivalkoski-Shilov 2008; Sinha 2004: 173–75, 178–80; Van Tomme 2021.)

Figure 5.16

It’s interpretive, problematizing the presumption of universal accessibility through a promise of total transcription that is then paradoxically delivered via a linear, hierarchical processing of sensory perception, which serves to “deny mutability, fluidity, and transience” within a context of whiteness that goes unmarked (Geurts 2015: 163).33 It’s personalized, inflecting the captions with a rare tone of subjectivity through firstperson and collective points of view, imbuing the screen with I’s and we’s, with other figures. And, like the genre it overwrites, it’s prescriptive, suggesting that “accessibility is defined in such a way that no one is disabled to begin with” and thus a key problem lies with where the process is presumed to begin (Zdenek 2015: 11).34 This second layer of captioning is dominant not only because of its imposing visual presence, but because it is also simultaneously spoken text. The sound is the third element, a multiple ingredient that is supposed to be used sparingly. Sprinkled over this recipe are three voices often overlapping each other and other non-speech sounds. Voice 1 is audio description, spoken by Lazard, and it is the first voice we hear: “A hand pours eggs into a hot pan. . . . Text: The Omelette Show. Text: Polaroid Corporation.” Often but not exclusively intended for blind and visuallyimpaired audiences, it audibly mediates the images and written text on screen, describing Child’s movements, gestures and actions at a bare minimum, without adjectives, and in a flat tone.35 It diverges from the captions below: when the white text describes “[a pan scratching the stovetop],” this voice simultaneously counters with “A

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pan rotates.” “Unlike ekphrasis, audio description . . . often merges with and transforms the thing-described” (Mills 2015: 2). During the end credits, when many names and production details are written onto a single frame, this voice persists even after the text has disappeared from vision, falling out of sync with the image and narrating into a black screen (Mader 2021: 24–25). Voice 2 is Child’s: “How about dinner in half a minute?!” It is a constant singsong soundtrack accompanying her how-to video and is frequently punctuated by Voice 1. When Voice 3, spoken by Constantina Zavitsanos, arrives to narrate the yellow scrolling text, it does not try to sound neutral like Voice 1, nor does it have the pedagogical performative tone of Voice 2, but it is embodied and is analytical, exegetical and poetic. We often have a collision of all three, plus two text forms on screen and a ton of omelette instructions to follow. “[T]he [spoken] words drive home the division of audiences and the problem of finding an average: What would need to happen in The French Chef, or indeed in A Recipe for Disaster, ‘FOR EVERYONE TO GET LOST . . . TOGETHER’?” (Homersham 2020).

Figure 5.17

The idea of getting lost, together, is one of the ultimate anxieties that incites the standard use of captions we know all too well. The laborious work performed in this recipe doesn’t seek to “sanitize” or make transparent, nor is it a criticism of this resulting chaos.36 By repeatedly testing different articulations of the caption on top of and against a range of other access methods, it undermines the hidden, repetitive work the caption does all the time, namely the work of authorizing the self-evident nature of various textimage relationships. In this case one could, for example, take on the perspective “that images and words (and their relation to each other) are a form of rhetoric. To make rhetoric stand out as rhetoric by quoting it, there are simple means, one has to take them out of the context in which they want to hide, and one has to repeat them, that is, expose them to scrutiny” (Farocki [1974] 2018: 167, translation KM).37 A key task of the

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caption is to repeat. When it’s at the bottom of the screen, it is asked to repeat speech and sound in a textual form, recalling the notion of transcribing as making a copy in writing, and when it is at the bottom of an image on a page, it is asked to repeat for the reader, once again, how the image serves the argument in the text. This way, the reader can avoid an actual encounter with the image, which might demand, in the worst case, that they look at and interpret it as a different form of media on the page. If academic texts are a representation of our work, their rhetoric about captions tells us about this work and the belief that underlies it, namely that conformity leads to accessibility.38 A curious assumption about what it means to be friendly toward the reader, and who this reader is, is manifested in this fantasy of accessibility, resulting in academic texts that fill in the same blanks with different content. But one can also take this task of the caption as an object of investigation rather than as a directive to be processually followed. In this reconfigured recipe showing how work works, we are given the chance to pay attention to how work seeks to represent itself, and how the caption enters the working process as a neutral element asked to be laid over an image after the fact, rather than as an active, dynamic component of accessing an image in the first place (Kleege 2016: 98; Watlington 2019: 118–19; Remael 2021).

Notes 1 2 3

4 5

6

Hüser (2021: 43) and Felsch ([2015] 2021: 135–36). Misner and Wheeler (1957: 532). In German: “In manchen Features werden die Worte des Kommentars Wort für Wort bebildert. . .Achten Sie bei der Wiederholung auf die Bestandteile der Bedeutungsgruppen: Rennwagen und Raketen = technische Höchstleistung und Präzision. Demonstration = harte Ernstsituation und kritische Bürger. Wenn man Bilder wie Begriffe benutzt, dann geht genau das verloren, was an einem Bild anders ist als an einem Wort.” Cf. “Breaking News: Some Bullshit Happening Somewhere” (2014). Wollen ([1984] 2007: 109–10). “Shown a plateful of something (in an Amieux advertisement), I may hesitate in identifying the forms and masses; the caption (‘rice and tuna fish with mushrooms’) helps me to choose the correct level of perception, permits me to focus not simply my gaze but also my understanding. When it comes to the ‘symbolic message’, the linguistic message no longer guides identification but interpretation, constituting a kind of vice which holds the connoted meanings from proliferating . . . The text is indeed the creator’s (and hence society’s) right of inspection over the image; anchorage is a control, bearing a responsibility—in the face of the projective power of pictures— for the use of the message” (Barthes [1964] 1977b: 39–40). Barnhurst (1996: 91) and Barthes ([1964] 1977b). “While the image/caption model appears to present a particular kind of collaboration [between text and image], it actually operates as a binarism privileging one textual component over the other. When caption functions as the valued term, photography is subordinated to the role of ‘illustration’ . . . ‘The caption eliminates all the potential narrative frames but one, the depicted content’ [Barnhurst] . . . ‘Does the image duplicate certain of the informations given in the text by a phenomenon of redundancy or does the text add a fresh information to the image?’ [Barthes] Note how neither alternative allows the

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11 12 13 14 15 16

17

18

19 20

21 22 23 24

New Perspectives on Academic Writing possibility of the photograph adding ‘fresh information’ to the verbal text; nor can the verbal text be redundant” (Bryant 1996: 12–13). Thornton (1978: 52). “caption” (2021). Nović (2021). “The camera becomes smaller and smaller, ever readier to capture transitory and secret pictures which are able to shock the associative mechanism of the observer to a standstill. At this point the caption must step in, thereby creating a photography which literarises the relationships of life and without which photographic construction would remain stuck in the approximate . . . ‘The illiterate of the future’, it has been said, ‘will not be the man who cannot read the alphabet, but the one who cannot take a photograph’. But must we not also count as illiterate the photographer who cannot read his own pictures? Will not the caption become the most important component of the shot?” (Benjamin [1931] 1972: 25). Armstrong (1998), Rabinowitz (1994: 16–23 and 205–15), Benjamin ([1931] 1972 and [1934] 2005), Barnhurst (1996: 90–94), Scott (1999) and Hall ([1973] 2010). Cf. Armstrong (1998: 441, n. 29). “The caption . . . by its very disposition, by its average measure of reading, appears to duplicate the image, that is, to be included in its denotation” (Barthes [1961] 1977a: 26). Sharpe (2016: 118–20). King (2019: 44–48). “I didn’t want to leave her (this girl child with the word Ship affixed to her forehead) as I found her in an archive of hurt and death and destruction that reveals neither her name nor her sex nor any other details of her life. One AP caption tells us: ‘An injured child waits to be flown for treatment on the USNS Comfort.’ The second AP caption reads, ‘Port-Au-Prince, Haiti—January 21: A child waits to be medevaced . . .’ But a ‘voice interrupts: says she’ (McKittrick 2014, 17). And so this Girl . . .” (Sharpe 2016: 51). “[T]he very category of visual content highlights the further commodification of images by blurring boundaries between editorial and commercial images and fundamentally restructuring how images were selected, archived, and made commercially available through searchable online archives. Visual content was a new form or assemblage” (Gürsel 2016: 59). See also Frosh 2003 and Blaschke 2016. Gürsel (2016: 18). On “this particular 2010 un-naming,” ungendering and undifferentiated identity, see Sharpe 2016: 50. See also Spillers 1987. On the history of “infusing images with data—to render them ‘more’ informative” and data tagging, see Blaschke 2019: 65. Sharpe 2016: 30–38. “The word ‘underwriting’—in its various and related forms—has come to mean what might legalistically be called ‘assuring’ functions, all stemming from the root of preservation/conservation: endorsing, signing, funding, supporting, subscribing. The history of the word . . . illustrates quite precisely the shifting claims of what might count as a foundation, an unforeseen but stabilizing structure, for property and texts” (Wertheimer 2006: 24). Sharpe 2016: 141–42, n. 15. Interventions in the form of footnotes could also be read as alternative underwriting: Shockley (2011: 813–15) and Sharpe (2020: 45–48). See also Stafford 2006: 297–98. “I don’t want to talk about the filmed journalism, which takes place when someone films a report in the afternoon that is broadcast that evening . . . I’m talking here about

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the broadcasts that are the large and medium form of journalism. In which an author is paid to think about or investigate a subject. In which he or another is even paid to think about the ‘cinematic form’ and ensure its occurrence” (translation KM). In German: “Über den gefilmten Journalismus will ich gar nicht sprechen, der zustandekommt, indem einer nachmittags einen Bericht macht, der abends gesendet wird . . . Ich spreche hier über die Sendungen, die die große und mittlere Form des Journalismus sind. Wo ein Autor bezahlt wird, um über ein Thema nachzudenken oder es zu untersuchen. Wo er oder ein anderer auch noch bezahlt wird, um über die ‘filmische Form’ nachzudenken und ihr Zustandekommen zu gewährleisten” (Farocki [1974] 2018: 165). 25 In German: “Worte Schnitte Bilder Das sind die drei wichtigsten Artikulationsmittel in der Fernsehsprache. Es könnte noch die Töne geben, die nicht Sprache sind. Aber sie treten als Artikulationsmittel kaum auf . . . Der Ton wird verwendet gemäß einer Regel über Filmmusik: Sie soll dann am besten sein, wenn man sie nicht bemerkt. Die Worte sind das Wichtigste . . . Nachdem er [der Autor] einmal die Möglichkeit hat, etwas entweder zu sagen oder zu zeigen, untersucht er gar nicht mehr lange, was sich besser sagen läßt und was sich besser zeigen läßt. Wenn er etwas aufgenommen hat, was nichts zeigt, dann werden die Worte das ausbügeln. . .Weil er das, was er filmt, gar nicht besonders bemerkenswert finden kann, stürzt er sich auf alles, was irgendwie als bemerkenswert gelten kann. . . Die Ruinen werden gegen den Himmel stehen Das Bankgebäude wird sich in einer Pfütze spiegeln Im Hafen wird die Möwe auffliegen Auf dem Kohlenplatz wird der Hund gegen den Zaun springen Im Café werden die älteren Frauen Kuchen essen.” 26 “[T]he standard form of the how-to . . . is processual; it has a beginning and an end and a series of successive, linearly ordered actions in between . . . How-tos are necessarily repeatable protocols; they are the result of experience and tradition, sedimented knowledge, best practices—skill” (Skvirsky 2020: 17, 24). 27 “Perhaps what matters is not whether Child’s cuisine was French but that she and her American fans took it to be so . . . Child offered one means to mediate French culture” (Polan 2011: 87–88). 28 Polan (2011: 29–31, 141) and Mund (2021: 113–26). 29 “Testing is linked to the experience of exteriority. One ventures out, breaks up a happy if deluded domesticity of self. The test calls for the disruption of blissful certainty” (Ronell 2005: 71). 30 See also Downey 2008: 63–69. 31 “Verbatim captioning is not an objective, neutral practice of channeling speech sounds directly. Captioning is always about choices. Speech is transformed when it is transcribed and prepared for the caption track . . . Almost all traces of dialect and manner of pronunciation are scrubbed from every speech caption. Hesitations and verbal fillers like ‘um’ and ‘uh’ are also routinely eliminated” (Zdenek 2015: 59). 32 “This is a voice that commentators for years have strained to try to find words adequate to describe its special quality. . . Child’s voice qualifies the anonymous image of culinary activity and turns it into something special, something personified, something embodied” (Polan 2011: 2).

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33 See also Corker (2001) and Mader (2021). 34 See also Skvirsky (2020: 19). 35 “With audio description, the illusion of objectivity is reinforced because the description is delivered without authorship, as if it represents some unassailable truth . . . The vocal performance evokes the sense of a viewing companion who is there to offer commentary without judgment, to participate in the viewing experience without being affected by it . . . Under the neutrality imperative, audio description often withholds information in a way that can draw undue attention to the absent information” (Kleege 2016: 94, 96). 36 “I think disabled people also deserve access to the incoherency of the experience of art. There are also so many incredible disabled artists who are . . . grappling with the real challenges of accessibility rather than this sanitized idea of transparency” (Lazard 2020). 37 In German: “daß die Bilder und die Worte (und deren Beziehung zueinander) Phrasen sind. Durch Zitieren Phrasen als Phrasen herauszustellen, gibt es einfache Mittel, man muß sie aus ihrem Zusammenhang holen, in dem sie sich verstecken wollen, und man muß sie wiederholen, also der Überprüfung aussetzen” (Farocki [1974] 2018: 167). 38 “[We might] make progress if, in the analysis, we connect the destruction of the expression of television language with the destruction of the work in television” (translation KM). In German: “[Wir kommen] vielleicht einen Schritt weiter, wenn wir in der Analyse die Zerstörung des Ausdrucks der Fernsehsprache mit der Zerstörung der Arbeit im Fernsehen verbinden” Farocki [1974] 2018: 169.

References Armstrong, C. (1998), Scenes in a Library: Reading the Photograph in the Book, 1843–1875, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Baker-Gibbs, A. (2021), “Letter, Letter, Letter, Letter = Word”, in Activating Captions, https://www.argosarts.org/activatingcaptions/magazine/letter-letter-letter-letterword#read accessed July 1, 2021. Barnhurst, K. (1996), “The Alternative Vision: Lewis Hine’s Men at Work and the Dominant Culture”, in M. Bryant (ed.), Photo-Textualities: Reading Photographs and Literature, Newark: University of Delaware Press. Barthes. R. ([1961] 1977a), “The Photographic Message”, trans. and ed. S. Heath, in Image Music Text, London: Fontana Press. Barthes, R. ([1964] 1977b), “Rhetoric of the Image”, trans. and ed. S. Heath, in Image Music Text, London: Fontana Press. Benjamin, W. ([1931] 1972), “A Short History of Photography”, trans. S. Mitchell, in Screen 13: 5–26. Benjamin. W. ([1934] 2005), “The Author as Producer”, trans. E. Jephcott, in M. W. Jennings, H. Eiland and G. Smith (eds.), Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings (Volume 2, Part 2, 1931–1934), Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Blaschke, E. (2016), Banking on Images: The Bettmann Archive and Corbis, Leipzig: Spector Books.

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Blaschke, E. (2019), “From Microform to Drawing Bot: The Photographic Image as Data”, Grey Room 75 (Spring): 60–83. “Breaking News: Some Bullshit Happening Somewhere” (2010), in The Onion (March 9), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9U4Ha9HQvMo accessed October 1, 2014. Bryant, M. (1996), “Introduction”, in M. Bryant (ed.), Photo-Textualities: Reading Photographs and Literature, Newark: University of Delaware Press. “caption” (2021), in OED Online, Oxford University Press, www.oed.com/view/ Entry/27635 accessed July 3, 2021. “Carolyn Lazard’s A Recipe for Disaster” (2019), in Light Industry, http://www.lightindustry. org/lazard accessed April 10, 2021. Cartwright, L. (1995), Screening the Body: Tracing Medicine’s Visual Culture, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Corker, M. (2001), “Sensing Disability”, Hypatia 16 (40): 34–52. Downey, G. J. (2008), Closed Captioning: Subtitling, Stenography, and the Digital Convergence of Text with Television, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Farocki, H. (1973), “Bilder aus dem Fernsehen”, Filmkritik 199 (July): 304–06. Farocki, H. ([1974] 2018), “Über die Arbeit mit Bildern im Fernsehen”, in V. Pantenburg (ed.), Harun Farocki: Meine Nächte mit den Linken. Texte 1964–1975, Cologne: Walther König. Felsch, P. ([2015] 2021), The Summer of Theory: History of a Rebellion, 1960–1990, trans. T. Crawford, Cambridge: Polity Press. “Film Review Guidelines” (n.d.), in Transfers: Interdisciplinary Journal of Mobility Studies (Berghahn Journals), http://journals.berghahnbooks.com/_uploads/trans/Film_ Review_guidelines.pdf accessed August 1, 2021. Frosh, P. (2003), The Image Factory: Consumer Culture, Photography, and the Visual Content Industry, Oxford: Berg. Geurts, K. L. (2015), “Senses”, in R. Adams, B. Reiss, and D. Serlin (eds.), Keywords for Disability Studies, New York: New York University Press. Gürsel, Z. D. (2016), Image Brokers: Visualizing World News in the Age of Digital Circulation, Oakland, CA: University of California Press. Hall, S. ([1973] 2010), “The Determinations of News Photographs”, in C. Greer (ed.), Crime and Media: A Reader, London: Routledge. Homersham, L. (2020), “Good Measure”, ArtForum (May 11), https://www.artforum.com/ film/lizzie-homersham-on-carolyn-lazard-s-crip-time-2019-83007 accessed April 15, 2021. Hüser, R. (2021), “Heisse Umschläge”, in R. Hüser, Geht Doch, H. Engelmeier and E. Knörer (eds.), Berlin: Verbrecher Verlag. King, T. L. (2019), “Off Littorality (Shoal 1.0): Black Study Off the Shores of ‘the Black Body’ ”, Propter Nos 3 (1): 40–50. Kleege, G. (2016), “Audio Description Described: Current Standards, Future Innovations, Larger Implications”, Representations 135 (1): 89–101. Lazard, C. (2018), A Recipe for Disaster, HD Video. 29 min. Courtesy the artist and Maxwell Graham/Essex Street, New York. Lazard, C. (2020), Interview with C. Damman, BOMB (September 10), https:// bombmagazine.org/articles/carolyn-lazard/ accessed February 1, 2021. Mader, V. (2021), “A Redistribution of Violence. Modulationen der Sorge in Carolyn Lazards ‘A Recipe for Disaster’ ”, Zeitschrift für Medienwissenschaft 24: 19–25. McKittrick, K. (2014), “Mathematics of Black Life”, Black Scholar 44 (2): 16–28.

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Mills, M. (2015), “Listening to Images: Audio Description, the Translation Overlay, and Image Retrieval”, The Cine-Files 8, http://www.thecine-files.com/listening- to-imagesaudio- description-the- translation-overlay- and-image- retrieval/ accessed April 15, 2021. Misner, C., and Wheeler, J. (1957), “Classical Physics as Geometry: Gravitation, Electromagnetism, Unquantized Charge, and Mass as Properties of Curved Empty Space”, Annals of Physics 2: 525–603. Mund, V. (2021), Brücke, Switchboard, Theke–Working Girls vor Ort, Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag. Nović, S. (2021), “Captions on Captions”, in ARGOS (“Activating Captions”), https://www. argosarts.org/activatingcaptions/magazine/5-captions-on-captions#read accessed April 10, 2021. Phillips, S. ([1977] 2003), “A History of the Evidence”, in M. Mandel and L. Sultan, Evidence, New York: Distributed Art Publishers. Piel, H. (1933), Ein Unsichtbarer geht durch die Stadt, film, Ariel Film. Polan, D. (2011), Julia Child’s The French Chef, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Rabinowitz, P. (1994), They Must Be Represented: The Politics of Documentary, New York: Verso. Raedle, J. (2010), “Haiti Struggles For Aid And Survival After Earthquake” (Object name: 59352543), in Getty Images News (January 21, 2010), https://www.gettyimages.com/ detail/news-photo/child-waits-to-be-medivaced-by-u-s-army-soldiers-from-the-newsphoto/95921976 accessed April 15, 2021. Remael, A. (2021), “WE ARE SUBTITLES, CAPTIONS. We enlighten you. Sometimes”, in ARGOS (“Activating Captions”), https://www.argosarts.org/activatingcaptions/ magazine/we-are-subtitles-captions-1#read accessed April 10, 2021. Ronell, A. (2005), The Test Drive, Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Scott, C. (1999), The Spoken Image: Photography and Language, London: Reaktion Books. Sharpe, C. (2016), In the Wake: On Blackness and Being, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Sharpe, J. (2020), Immaterial Archives: An African Diaspora Poetics of Loss, Chicago: Northwestern University Press. Shockley, E. (2011), “Going Overboard: African American Poetic Innovation and the Middle Passage”, Contemporary Literature 52 (4): 791–817. Sinha, A. (2004), “The Use and Abuse of Subtitles”, in A. Egoyan and I. Balfour (eds.), Subtitles: On the Foreignness of Film, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Skvirsky, S. A. (2020), The Process Genre: Cinema and the Aesthetic of Labor, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Spillers, H. (1987), “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book”, Diacritics 17 (2): 64–81. Stafford, A. (2006), “ ‘La légende de l’histoire’: Bernard Noël’s Captions for Photography of the Paris Commune”, Contemporary French and Francophone Studies 10 (3): 291–300. “Submission Preparation Checklist” (n.d.), in Film-Philosophy Submissions (University of Edinburgh Journals), http://journals.ed.ac.uk/f-p-submissions/about/submissions accessed August 1, 2021. Sultan L. and Mandel, M. ([1977] 2003), Evidence, New York: Distributed Art Publishers. All images untitled, from Evidence, 1977, Larry Sultan and Mike Mandel © Mike Mandel / courtesy of Robert Mann Gallery © Larry Sultan/ courtesy of Casemore Kirkeby, San Francisco, Galerie Thomas Zande, Cologne, Yancey Richardson, New York, and Estate of Larry Sultan.

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Taivalkoski-Shilov, K. (2008), “Subtitling 8 Mile in Three Languages: Translation problems and translator license”, Target 20 (2): 249–74. Thorne, K. (2014), The Science of Interstellar, New York: W.W. Norton & Company. Thornton, G. (1978), “Do We Need Captions?”, New York Times (December 10): 39, 52. Van Tomme, N. (2021), “From Subtitles to Captions to Something More”, in ARGOS (“Activating Captions”), https://www.argosarts.org/activatingcaptions/magazine/ from-subtitles-to-captions-to-something-more#read accessed April 10, 2021. Watlington, E. (2019), “The Radical Accessibility of Video Art (for Hearing People)”, Future Anterior 16 (1): 111–21. Wertheimer, E. (2006), Underwriting: The Poetics of Insurance in America, 1722–1872, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Wollen, P. ([1984] 2007), “Fire and Ice”, in D. Campany (ed.), The Cinematic, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Zdenek, S. (2015), Reading Sounds: Closed-Captioned Media and Popular Culture, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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How Can One Be Farocki? Rembert Hüser

How close can one get?

Figure 6.1

Panel N16 at Montréal’s 2015 conference of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies (in the Fairmont Queen Elizabeth in the Ramezay Room on Saturday, March 28, 2015 from 9:00 to 10:45 a.m., sponsored by the CinemaArts Special Interest Group) was a panel on proximity, devoted to Harun Farocki, whose career has actually been a wild fairytale dream come true for a German documentary filmmaker and author whose films for cinema and television were funded by regional broadcasting stations from 1966 to 1995. By 2012, he had become the world-renowned “Berlin-based artist Harun Farocki with his first comprehensive solo exhibition at the MoMA” (the Museum of Modern Art, New York). This meteoric rise to fame took place at a crucial moment of doubt for film and film studies. More and more socially- and culturally-distinctive functions of film had emigrated to the contemporary art museum; the discipline of film studies, previously thought of as the theory and history of a single medium concerned 85

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with just one of several types of moving images (not to speak of the array of sounds working in yet another logic), was rapidly losing importance as a subdomain of media studies. At precisely this moment one of the household names of the global art scene, the filmmaker Farocki, set an example of living the dream of film scholars by regaining importance as a media artist, showing a way out of their misery. After his untimely passing (way too early at the age of 70) in 2014, the most promising way of establishing contact with him and following him closely seemed to be the (video) essay (film). In 2014, the SCMS annual conference in Seattle had witnessed the official launch of the website of [in]Transition, “ ‘the first [online] peer reviewed academic journal of videographic film and moving image studies’, broadcasted live during a dedicated panel” (Van den Berg & Kiss 2016). The next year, in Montréal, participants in one of the very first international post-Farocki panels, still in shock, mourned and contemplated what might be learned from work that, with others, was key in triggering the various debates on film and video essays. The panel’s title, What Farocki Taught, quoted the title of an experimental (or, shall I say, essay) film by Jill Godmillow of 1998 that remade Farocki’s famous short Inextinguishable Fire from 1969 in order to reimport a European filmic practice to the U.S. that had allegedly been missing there since the sixties—a film from the same year in which, in the world of art and activism, John Lennon and Yoko One had remade their Amsterdam “bed-in” (now of Montréal wax museum fame) in suite 1742 at this very convention hotel, as they could not make it to the U.S. The choice of the 2015 SCMS panelists is not surprising: members of the Who’s Who of Farocki-scholarship presented high-quality papers on Farocki and the documentary tradition, pedagogy, and media archeology. It is the respondent who came as a bit of a surprise—not faculty and not a professor whom everybody knows, who is there to weigh in on the talks just heard and our future condition, thus financing their plane ticket to the convention. Here was a student from a quite different scene, a video activist from the internet enrolled at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, who in 2012 had made Interface 2.0, a remake of Farocki’s first installation, Interface from 1995 for the first issue of the film journal Frames that was devoted to the video essay. To better understand what was going on at panel N16 in Montréal, one first has to understand two things: what the SCMS is and what a response is. The world of academia is separated into two closely related but pretty distinct types of communication: the external social networking (the more informal, hard-to-grasp part of worldwide communication with joint travel, hotel bar drinks, coffee chats and restaurants) and the internal scholarly communication (the more formal, rigid, specialized part of working on publications at writing desks at home and at conferences). Following the sociology of science, one could say that, strictly speaking, the SCMS or NECS or GfM (its transatlantic counterparts) are not scholarly conferences. As the biggest annual academic conventions for studying film and media, their primary function is not to present and discuss research, to do research, but to represent research. To put on a show. For the organizers, the sheer number of presenters with their expanded abstracts in 20-minute-slots in hotel rooms without desks in North America is the first and main indicator of success. In this and many other respects, the SCMS, this five-day-long,

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great-film-and-media-get-together, is pretty close to another beloved major North American institution: the state fair. Have you seen it? The orchid society is putting this year’s orchids on display and the annual new apple is presented. There is the competition for who brought the biggest pumpkin and the tastiest pie. You can look at photo albums and friendship books. There is a rodeo, crop art and crap art. There are the genre barns. In one hall, apparently, you can find the biggest pig. There are film screenings and special events. One can meet those whom one always wanted to meet and see whom one never wanted to see again and gossip and talk business, eat honey ice cream and stuff one would not eat otherwise. There are the booths of the publisher houses, parades, initiation events for the newcomers, all political parties and there might even be a Princess Kay of the Milky Way competition going on there somewhere. In short, the SCMS is the annual folklore of the disciplines that it consists of. What it takes to write about it, to quote David Foster Wallace, would amount to “a kind of Peter Principle in effect . . . to do a directionless essayish thing” (Wallace 1997: 256). A response at a convention is a format stuck in between the presentations and the overall discussion of a single panel, an intermediary that is a mixture of both. To stay with the sociology of science, one could say that this type of response is an institutionalized first follow-up communication—not very common at scholarly conferences where the audience is familiar with the scholarly context and the sequence of talks that took place before and thus knows the discussion so far. The response at the social event of the convention with its comings and goings and its plethora of singular, completely unrelated events without an overall topic has first of all to construct coherence between the rushed presentations of expanded abstracts. Ideally, the respondent has already read the papers before they are presented and has had time to prepare for it, even though, in reality the papers are often not done in time. The response is thus supposed to be closest to the writing process. In its apparent immediacy, it simulates a possible reception more than it actually is one itself. In various respects, the response, with its hinting-at-here and hinting-at-there, is a conventionality, a conventionality of conventions, which resembles the essay. Apparently closest to the source of production, it is a joker of fuzziness. Now, what happened at N16 in Montréal is that actual research unexpectedly showed up in the middle of a social routine. Research from the point of view of media studies on the very essence of the SCMS, on representation and interactivity, to be precise, on the use of the interface in our scholarly communication, the various types of desktops and apps that underlie our work and are usually not given credit in our celebrations of “the voice” and, last but not least, on hierarchies at our very own workplace, which made many scholars present in the room feel noticeably uneasy and giggle nervously. At the end of three Farocki talks, the respondent raises the simple question about what is the medium of a talk, or, when does a presentation actually start. To give away a first spoiler: It’s not here in the conference room. The response to the results of What’s Been Taught starts with the respondent introducing himself as a humble actual student. An analysis of Harun Farocki’s Letter to the Chairman which is running in the background as a source of inspiration swiftly moves on to the setup of this event, while we follow each one of the steps unfolding on the respondent’s desktop in front of our own eyes.

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“This is one of Harun Farocki’s first films, if not his first film, Letter to the Chairman, which he made when he was a student, and my interpretation is that he is taking the words from Chairman Mao’s quotations and really trying to find a way to literally and figuratively animate them to turn theory into practice, words into action. And it’s quite inspiring to watch as a student to see how another student takes what he has learned and tries to apply them. So that’s sort of what I am going to attempt today. It’s also interesting to note that the words eventually take ballistic form and land at a dinner table which reminded me of a recent dinner that took place here in Montréal just a couple of days ago, at a restaurant called Chez Alexandre [google maps streetview] not far from this hotel, this conference center. There were a party of five of us. We were looking for a nice place to eat. We intended on going to [nervous giggle in the audience] this nice Portuguese restaurant Fereira [google maps streetview walks to the left] but when we went to the door we saw the menu and the price list and we thought twice as academics rough it. So then we retreated to this restaurant. We went inside [google maps walks inside] and—you see it’s very . . . whatever you want to describe this type of décor. The quality of the food correlated with the décor. And this is the view of the table where the five of us were sitting, although it is a little bit obstructed by this carrel. So, we need to compensate by showing a table, a recreation of this table. [different program; the name HARUN FAROCKI is already readily lying on the desktop that is projected onto the screen].”

Figure 6.2

“There are five of us. Some of us knew Harun Farocki better than others, some of us did not know him at all, and what was interesting is that, in the conversation, there were certain parties that would refer to him as ‘Harun’ and others that would refer to him as ‘Farocki,’ including myself, because I have only met him once and it was a very brief

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encounter. So, I still have this emotional inclination to call him ‘Farocki’—it’s a gesture of deference, I suppose. So, I can literally map the Harun-section [laughing in the audience] and the Farocki-sections of the table. Literally we have a psychic map of relations between this person who was once alive and a kind of a politics of relating where I was basically quiet for the entire conversation because the people who refer to Harun Farocki as ‘Harun’ had a lot to say [laughing in the audience], so who am I to interrupt that discussion? I was just really taking it in. So I literally found myself once again in the position of a student. It also occurred to me that there is a finite number of such people who can refer to him as ‘Harun,’ whereas the people who refer to him as ‘Farocki’ will increase in quantity over time. It will bear out. But it raises this question how will this conversation about Farocki evolve? [laughter in the audience]. Will there be any chance that I could somehow in the future refer to him as ‘Harun,’ or feel confident enough or knowing enough to refer to him as ‘Harun’? So it’s really this dialectic between two sides, between those who know and those who seek to know which is sort of analogous to those who are the teachers and those who are the students. And so, once again, I am in this position of the student seeking away to enact some of the lessons that have been shared today. I also wonder whether it is possible just to clear the table of these possibly false binaries, find something more constructive, or at least to start over with a blank slate from which we can proceed. [Farocki in Between the Wars shoves all research materials from his desk].” Let’s fade out here from the “Learning Farocki” desktop P2P-student2student response at panel N16 in Montréal’s Fairmont, which will go on with looking at Google to find out more about “who are the custodians and the disseminators of our understanding of a body of work” and at Facebook sites already discussing the Farocki panel prior to the event as both always already being an integral part of it, before finally opening up lines of communication through living up to the idea of soft montage and combining one sentence of each presentation with one another and asking presenters for comment. I would like to stay at the table with the always obstructed view that we are sitting at day in day out and that was just shown to us in combination with a selection of the various desktops that are connected to it. How do we picture the work we do? How can we navigate our crucial blind spots and start seeing some of what is stabilizing us, holding us firmly in place, and is as old as the hills? All the false premises that we schlepp around from project to project? The highly unlikely response, with its equally bitingly ironic and nonchalantly chatty tone and which, as a live performance of desktop criticism, does not participate in the rhetoric of mastery, self-evidence and one’s own work, has turned the tables. All of us know so very well what he is talking about. We remember our history of sitting and serving at these kind of tables, and it hurts as we recognize ourselves and our various ways of acting as the ones who matter while going on with our routines without even being willing to understand in the slightest what we are doing. This oral institutional critique looks at exactly the point where the always already divided desk of familiarity exposes the hierarchies of an unwanted family and our secret dreams. How can we switch sides? How can we get close to the prestige of the “important ones”? After all these years of slaving away, how can we obtain the master card? And, contrary to the object of our study, pretend we are not students anymore? May we even go

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further than the master? How can we wipe the slate clean, get rid of the books that are piled up on top and which we have long ago unlearned to process in a meaningful way and change media? Somehow, we-who-cannot-think-the-setup got the funny idea of media proximity: that working on video is closer to the films and artists that we discuss—something which has already not worked out with our texts on paper. At a time when we do not know how to write any more and are bored with reading our own texts and long for the allegedly lively circles in the contemporary art museum, might we even have it in ourselves, in the end, to become artists in our own right? What looks like a decisive turning point in the history of what visual criticism could accomplish for the self-reflection of scholarly work had no other name but “response” in the program of the 2015 SCMS. It can be found under the name “282. Learning Farocki: A Live Desktop Response” (Lee 2015). 282 means that it is number 282 of currently 398 videos and counting in Kevin B. Lee’s Video Catalog on Vimeo, which had been called Video Essay Catalog at some point, if I remember correctly. (Which would make sense as the video essay hype, after its all-too-willingly rapid institutionalization, seems to have peaked, going the well-trodden path of all text types.) If you google “Learning Farocki,” you will find an individual page under this title on Lee’s current website alsolikelife: “Following my tenure as the first artist-in-residence of the newlyformed Harun Farocki Institute in Berlin, I produced a series of video essays on Farocki (1944–2014) for the Goethe-Institut, sponsors of the Harun Farocki Residency and ambassadors of Farocki’s extensive collection of films and videos” (Lee 2017). You won’t find the original “Learning Farocki” video, the playback of an interactive scholarly live event in Montréal in 2015, which is documented on video, among the four artist-inresidence videos here. What had been called “Desktop Criticism” before, is called “Desktop Film” now. The student has become an artist. What happens to you once you deal with Farocki? After Learning Farocki, pointing to the ideology of proximity, lets now turn to Making a Farocki-Living, feeding the ideology of proximity. The following text is a remake of Derrida from 1987, only replacing the name “Mandela” with “Farocki”: “Admirable [Farocki]. Period, no exclamation . . . Admiration reasons, despite what people say; it works things out with reason; it astonishes and interrogates: how can one be [Farocki]? Why does he seem exemplary . . .?” (Derrida 2008: 63). That admiration is a call for study, i.e. has to be turned into a working condition, is an implicit, almost ethical imperative for Derrida. Admiration reasons and obliges you to a more structural response that is also capable of looking at what is happening at your own desk, which you use as the observation deck. And what it is that might block you there. Farocki is an interesting case study here, as he himself could be characterized as a specialist for exactly this type of work beyond simple representation. “[Farocki] becomes admirable for having known how to admire. And what he has learned, he has learned in admiration. He fascinates too, as we shall see. For having been fascinated. In a certain way that we will have to understand, he says this. He says what he does and what has happened to him” (Derrida 2008: 64f). This is not self-evident by any means. In public, work and its representation, the popularization of work, tend to get mixed up. Fascination and self-fascination often change places. But the question remains: How can we work with Farocki? How can we apply Farocki? How does the Farocki app work? How do we draw a line? This all the

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more necessary as the German-speaking (video) essay (film) discussion is very much a Farocki discussion. In 2002, after having works such as Interface, I Thought I was Seeing Convicts and Eye/ Machine I + II firmly established in the contemporary art museum since 1995, and after having shot almost all major films of his career prior to this for one single screen, from Inextinguishable Fire and Images of the World and the Inscription of War to How to live in the Federal Republic of Germany, Workers Leaving the Factory to you name it, Farocki’s life finally changes for the better. A new function shows up on his phone, a program from as far away as Amsterdam, which realizes his true potential and makes the promise that once it has been properly installed and begun to take him under its wing, it will make him big. Really big, world-wide big: his new personal app. “As happens so often with pioneers: they go unrecognised in their own country until someone else—often far away—‘discovers’ them, and travellers bring back the news of what an exceptional talent has all these years been living right in their midst . . . Rather than take the reader through Farocki’s complete filmography, I just want to mention some of his films that I like most . . . In other words, I tracked a talent while also getting to know a little the person” (Elsaesser 2002). The early days of the self-optimizing tracker app that discovers Farocki’s enormous talent as early as 2002, seeing some data that it likes a lot, some less, but all in all sees many possibilities for a wonderful future, has street credibility. It is something both experienced and new in store for the group that has been working on making the phone both smart and popular since a few years. The new “Snap and Go” service, as it was called in those days, developed by Go Mobile in-house, was the first service of its kind that introduced the app to the daily communication of the social system of academia. Up to then, we, in Film Studies, had only known the written version from 1992, when we read not only “Merry Christmas” from Neil Papworth from the Vodafone circle on December 3 (cf. Iken 2012), but also Farocki’s commentary “Unregelmäßig, nicht regellos” on his film Images of the World and the Inscription of War from 1989 in an essay film anthology that pointed out a new development which is key: “When Costard made this film [about someone who invented a machine to print letters on the Autobahn and now wants to write an Autobahn novel that you can read while driving], the word text processing was not circulating yet, and when I drove to Hannover on June 18, 1987, I was in the act of shooting a film on image processing” (Farocki 1992: 145). Now, in 2002, in addition to the written word of the essay-SMS, we could finally also send essay-images around to everybody who subscribes to this. MMS is added to SMS. “A picture can tell a thousand words” is on everyone’s lips. We could weep for joy. Make way for the new time of the app and its imaginations! To back up the claim of the radically new, talent-wise and discovery-wise, and gain some traction in this area, the new app has several contributions from the Der Ärger mit den Bildern. Die Filme von Harun Farocki volume from 1998 translated into English which emerged from the first comprehensive, invitation-based German Farocki film sighting at Berlin’s Zeughaus cinema in 1995, to which it had been invited as a contributor and which might have given it the overall idea. Five essays from Farocki, plus a twenty-year-old text, an interview and two additional texts from the humble app are also included. The name “Harun Farocki” is pulled out of the dark invisibility of the subtitle to become the shiny header of a volume in the app’s book series at its home institution (Elsaesser 2004).

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The new provider from the Netherlands was not part of the Schreiben-BilderSprechen-Autobahn-Novel group back then, but had done important preliminary work in 1985, when searching for Brecht in German films had made him graft the term “essay” onto film at an early stage. Back then, the term “film-essay,” which was supposed to send a message, was used just once in a phrase and understood in close proximity to writing and literature: “his film-essays and critical writings [deserve to be better known]” (Elsaesser 1985: 99). According to this suggestion, Farocki’s films are not just films, ephemeral by-products, but something even better: films on their way to the next, most available art that everybody can agree on, which had few alternatives to literature in the 1980s. With the little “essay” addendum, they become marked as something that stays. “Farocki first captivated me with his essays in Filmkritik . . . It took me a while to get used to Farocki’s films, which appeared to me as by-products of this wonderfully gifted (and well-read) writer who must have realized that the medium of film offered an entirely different audience for his verbal talent, his timing and his dry humour than literature, academia or journalism” (Elsaesser 2014). Conjuring up the category of the essay is always aspirational and agonal. If you subscribe to the highly emphatic European notion of the essay as a means of cultural distinction, it will take you with it in the direction of the highest value while, at the same time, distancing itself and its recipient from something that is perceived as lower in value. Scholars who feel robotic in their own institution dream of electric sheep. The difference between the not-any-more and the not-yet is inscribed into the very core of the essay. A video essay is not just film analysis any more, no, we need a new term for even partially grasping the wonderful whatever that is happening here, even if it is always not quite there where it wants to be: in the world of art. (Literature, film, installation art, you name it.) As a strictly relational, very much affectively-charged concept, the essay, a text type or genre with many construction flaws1 which is not needed, but is there, is a nobilitating instance that moves back and forth on an axis of perceived importance. “Talkshow–Essay–Feuilleton–Philology,” the title of Georg Stanitzek’s seminal article from 1992 on the workings of the essay, showcases the two opposite poles of television and the university seeing their chance to cast off the shackles of their daily work approaching each other from both sides with the “essay” as the pinnacle of importance firmly in sight. Unsurprisingly, it is television that is, most of the time, the lowest of the low on this scale for scholars (not just in film and media studies) and filmmakers alike. “It seems to me that most current political film-making is involved in opposing this construction of the referent in television” (Elsaesser 1985: 106). As with the category “quality TV,” the usage of the “essay film” and “video essay” categories primarily signals underlying processes of legitimation, but less so within cinema, where the essay has not even come close to making it among the basic film types so far (wrong and misleading as these have been since their inauguration), but first and foremost within the institution of the university. In 2002, the new optimistic, optimizing app comes late to the game. It is retrained, branching out of highly visible former scholarship that did not have anything to prove in order to become the dernier cri of the academic state fair world that helps it to keep pace with the trends. (The onslaught of the curatorial promo event rhetoric within the commercialized university has already been the overall bread-and-butter for quite a

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while.) Finally, something takes on the responsibility of providing us with the keywords for party talk. For our purposes, the film studies beef-up app is an auteur marketing application that tries to help a discipline which has become insecure to adapt to the latest discursive takes on how to detect true art and its true agents. For this purpose, it just has to permanently scan, remix and compile every little move in the discourse and claim it for itself. In order to have users go there and ask for advice, the impression has to be conveyed that all major ideas worthy of their name actually originate from here. Apart from this, it is, of course, just one sweet, fancy app of many new apps and functions that proliferate by the minute. Around 2002, it is facing the following problem: How can it increase its own visibility in the vastly expanding Farocki field and how does it manage to have people subscribe not only to its own message but to its sequence of messages? In contrast to all the other providers who are also familiar with Farocki, this new optimizing app emphasizes that it is more like family. It’s the closest to the source. At each given moment, it is always current, both on top of the game and already way ahead of its time. It is quick and always on the move and it is not allowed to age.2 This is not snail-school any more. The golden idea of self-optimizing, which the increase-your-importance app has, is launching the Farocki Jahreswagen, picking up on an idea that General Motors first developed in 1923. In fact, stylistic obsolescence was the basis of the first modern forays into planned obsolescence . . . [T]he benefits were immense. In addition to generating annual publicity for GM cars[/Farocki], the scheduled redesign allowed GM[/Farocki] to rationalize its own innovation process with stylistic changes every year and technological changes every three years. Sterne 2007: 21

The first Farocki Model Ts roll off the assembly line amid much fanfare and a major newly-coined tag line for starters: [(1993/)2002]: “[T]he first time I introduced him to a live audience was in 1993, by which time I could with some justification call him ‘Germany’s best-known unknown filmmaker.’ A year later, Farocki had his first major retrospective in the United States.” [2002]: “This certainly makes Harun Farocki an important filmmaker: probably Germany’s best-known important filmmaker.” [2014]: “At the beginning it was also an attempt to introduce his then little-known films to an Anglo-American audience. ‘Germany’s best-known unknown filmmaker’ was the slogan I invented to describe him, following a suggestion he himself once jokingly made.” Without the app, Farocki would still be unknown today. His own suggestion from back in the days that was picked up had goofily remade the textbook characterization of transatlantic export that New York’s The Independent had just applied to Raúl Ruiz: For many European directors, coming to America marks a certain arrival, a recognition of their marketability—both aesthetically and commercially—to an

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In retrospect, however, it was just the ingenious, scarcely perceptible move for the planned obsolescence run of the DIY talent tracker from the Netherlands to coin one single word in 2002—“important”—for what has happened over the past nine years to prove its currency and to change the entire game. The magic phrase “Farocki is important,” uttered by the feel-good app, live, for everybody to hear out in the open, had the force to move seemingly unsurmountable mountains. That the first retrospective came trickling down was almost inevitable. Selling Important Farocki to American and international markets in 2002 is a risky business move, as Farocki was already important for Cahiers du Cinema in 1981 as the app very well knows,3 had been invited to Documenta X in 1997, and had just returned to Germany two years before from his Californian Years (cf. Mende 2018), where he had been living 835 59th Street in Oakland, CA, teaching film at the University of Berkeley from 1993 to 1999. It was in these years that he not only made several films but also published his first scholarly book, Speaking with Godard, together with his then partner, Kaja Silverman, one of the most visible U.S.-American art and film studies scholars who also had made a name for herself in the German film studies context, writing on Rainer Werner Fassbinder in Male Subjectivity at the Margins and on Farocki in Discourse and in a monograph with Routledge. In 1991, the Goethe Institute of New York had already organized Harun Farocki: A Retrospective, which was accompanied by a catalogue. Hopefully, in the world of business, Farocki may still be unknown enough in 2002 so that nobody will take notice. One should never forget in this context that all this comes at a price for the app. It has everything but an easy job. There is a market of apps, the jobs of apps are interchangeable, and this also means entering the world of the poker games of prestige in dimly-lit, smoky rooms and picking fights where other apps hide their eyes behind the nothing hands they have and simultaneously want to win the jackpot. In this climate of overall jealousy in the networking bars—I have not travelled this far with my King only to realize that somebody else has an Ace—trying to ridicule the other hands at the table is the last resort. This brings me to another point of comparison with the Great Jean-Luc: Farocki’s cinema is also a form of writing, and to this extent, the label “essay-film” tries to convey a crucial aspect of his work. Yet what should also be understood in the word “essay” . . . is what in film studies might be called Farocki’s “mode of production,” his “manu-facture,” his hand-writing, his signature, and what Walter Benjamin described, in connection with narration and the story-teller, as “the thumb-print of the potter on the clay jug.” Elsaesser 2002

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Exchanging the imaginary Jean-Luc section of the table with the real deal on the app’s side to which only one of Benjamin’s most quoted quotes can do justice, grasps the idea of the work and what the First World War has done to it. In order to top the obsolete “important,” the promo app launches “meta” as the decisive, new catchy term to describe Farocki’s clay-fingers breathing life into celluloid still in the very same important message it is sending. From now on, Farocki is meta. “In this sense, Farocki’s cinema is a metacinema: a cinema that sits on top of the cinema ‘as we know it,’ and is underpinned by the cinema ‘as we have known it’ ” (Elsaesser 2002). Its new proper home is the museum. Not the film museum, as one might think, but, now, the contemporary art museum. Farocki’s meta-work is so artsy, it does not even make use of metalanguage anymore, as the daily support app explains to us in one of its endless remixes six years later: “This [engaging the institutions], too, is part of his cinema as metacinema, newly refigured in the museum. [. . .] Farocki’s metacinema, despite not having a metalanguage, is envisaged as a form of writing, and to this extent, the label ‘essay film’ does convey an important aspect of his work” (Elsaesser 2008: 37ff.). It is somewhat comforting that the construction of the Uber-Farocki who is bigger than Godard and the Beatles and probably Andy Warhol and resides on top of cinema and the museum alike, a completely new meta-museum app cinema, still relies on the category of the essay. For the app, Farocki is its life. So much so that it can hardly tell the difference any more. Indistinguishable fire. The app and the artist begin to merge. “When someone was needed to present his work to an international audience that had, in the meantime, started to take more notice, he would propose me. In recent years, I ‘represented’ him in São Paulo and in Łódź, at MoMA in New York and at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver” (Elsaesser 2014). This is quite remarkable! Nobody else could and would have done something like this. The Farocki go-to app has become so close to Farocki that its self-advertisement function can’t even be turned off when the news of his death trickles in. Its last words for Farocki begin by, first of all, remembering itself: “Writing about Harun Farocki is nothing unusual for me. I’ve been doing it since 1980” (Elsaesser 2014). “Most obituaries” simply don’t get it. Yet, the occasion is sad. The tracker app that has made Farocki, made him into what he became, has no purpose any more. Nobody is interested in the life of an app. Now it has to look for something else to do. Trying on the next size up, to become life-size, live the childhood dream of art, it has completely lost it. What one could have witnessed from Day One on, if one only had had the vision, was a spiritual kinship between the two who were two of a kind. Now, finally, the Farocki tracker app on the peak of its success but at a very sad occasion, allows itself to pause for a second and dream: Only very recently, after his death, I realized that . . . in 1956, at the age of twelve, he [Farocki] published his first piece of prose, about a man who entered the house under false pretenses and used a moment of inattention to steal a silver ashtray. This was all attentively witnessed by Harun, already then an observational documentarian in the making. His short essay was published in a German youth magazine called Rasselbande, a sort of alternative to Mickey Mouse. As it happens,

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In 2017, the Farocki career app remakes its dream of transformation and salvation, hires Farocki’s cameraman Ingo Kratisch, and shoots its first film about the life and work of its grandfather, the famous architect, which speaks to the Zeitgeist that has to be traced back to the family: “an essay film about coincidences, shattered lives and posthumous fame . . . But The Sun Island is also a film about the origins of the green movement: about recycling, sustainability and living off the grid—before these ideas had been properly invented” (Elsaesser 2017). In September 2019, the app negotiates the possibilities of being collected itself among other artists. In exchange for giving its Vorlass as the first scholar-turned-artist to the collections of Frankfurt’s Fassbinder Center, the app might probably be able to teach a honorary lifetime achievement professorship at the Institute of Theater, Film and Media Studies at Goethe University Frankfurt. Now, some traveller just has to bring back the news of what an exceptional talent has been living all these years right in our midst. The last message of the post-Farocki tracker-app was directed to us: But the move from cinema to gallery . . . was also a logical step as cinema lost its status as a socially relevant public sphere and surrendered this role to the art world . . . Farocki has tried (successfully) to remain present in the socially and aesthetically most politicized art forms. Today, this is the art installation, the essay film, and other documentary forms, and not television or independent feature films. Elsaesser and Alberro 2014

It is our task, now, not to turn the contemporary art museum into the home for elderly film concepts.

Notes 1

2

In case of the essay film or the video essay, just for starters: the basic problem of a genre definition that describes itself as something that permanently transgresses the very notion of genre and its everyday manifestations that have no chance to live up to this claim; the rather arbitrary attribution of the label to some documentaries or film criticisms and not to others; the weird notion of individuality revealing its truth in the process; the limits of encyclopedic storytelling in the process of quoting; the ideology of comparative viewing borrowed from art history and the role of alleged selfevidence in the shift from telling to showing. The moment of first contact is getting pushed back earlier and earlier, and it’s becoming more mythical with each new entry: [1995] “parts of this essay were first published in [. . .] 1985” [2002] “The first time I wrote about Farocki was in 1983” [2014] “since 1980”

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[2014] “In the summer of 1976”, [2014] “in 1956, [. . .] for almost sixty years, then” While the world aches under the weight of time, the film studies app obsessively tells the story of two buddies who were destined to meet, in all likelihood already in Jurassic times. 3 “Cahiers du Cinéma’s November 1981 introduction of Farocki needs to be updated” (Elsaesser 2004: 95).

References Bowen, P. (1990), “On Golden Boat: Raul Ruiz Films in New York”, The Independent: A Publication of the Association of Independent Video and Filmmakers 13 (7). Derrida, J. (2008), “The Laws of Reflection: Nelson Mandela, in Admiration,” in: Psyche: Inventions of the Other, vol. II, Stanford, CA : Stanford University Press. Elsaesser, T. (1985), “It started with these Images—Some Notes on Political Filmmaking after Brecht in Germany: Helke Sander and Harun Farocki”, Discourse 7 (Spring). Elsaesser, T. (2002), “Introduction: Harun Farocki”, Senses of Cinema 21 (July), https:// www.sensesofcinema.com/2002/harun-farocki/farocki_intro/, accessed October 22, 2021. Elsaesser, T. (2004), “Working at the Margins: Film as a Form of Intelligence,” in: Harun Farocki: Working on the Sightlines, Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Elsaesser T. (2008), “The Future of ‘Art’ and ‘Work’ in the Age von Vision Machines: Harun Farocki,” in: R. Halle and R. Steingröver (eds.), After the Avant-Garde: Contemporary German and Austrian Experimental Film, Rochester: Camden House. Elsaesser, T. (2014), Harun Farocki. 9 January 1944—30 July 2014, Frieze 26 (August), https://frieze.com/article/harun-farocki-de, accessed October 22, 20/21. Elsaesser, T. (2017), “The Sun Island (dir: Thomas Elsaesser, Germany 2017, 72 min.),” Martin—Elsaesser-Stiftung, http://www.martin-elsaesser-stiftung.de/uploads/Sun_ Island_Summary__Reviews_Fotos_3_Seiten.pdf, accessed October 22, 20/21. Elsaesser, T., and A. Alberro (2014), “Farocki: A Frame for the No Longer Visible: Thomas Elsaesser in Conversation with Alexander Alberro”, e-flux Journal 59 (November), https://www.e-flux.com/journal/59/61111/farocki-a-frame-for-the-no-longer-visiblethomas-elsaesser-in-conversation-with-alexander-alberro/, accessed October 22, 2021. Farocki, H. (1992), “Unregelmäßig, nicht regellos,” in Christa Blümlinger and Constantin Wulff (eds.), Schreiben Bilder Sprechen. Texte zum essayistischen Film, Vienna: Sonderzahl. Iken, K. (2002), “20 Jahre Kurznachricht. HB2U, liebe SMS,” in: Eines Tages. Spiegel Online, November 30, 2012, https://www.spiegel.de/geschichte/was-stand-in-der-ersten-smsder-welt-a-947827.html, accessed October 22, 2021. Lee, K. B. (2015), “282. Learning Farocki: A Live Desktop Response,” vimeo, https://vimeo. com/123522474 Lee, K. B. (2017), “Learning Farocki,” in alsolikelife, https://www.alsolikelife.com/learningfarocki, accessed October 22, 2021. Mende, D. (2018), “Harun Farockis California Years. Nachwort zur Neuausgabe,” in K. Silverman and H. Farocki, Von Godard sprechen: Schriften, Band 2, Berlin: n.b.k. Stanitzek, G. (1992), “Talkshow–Essay–Feuilleton–Philologie,” Weimarer Beiträge 38 (4). Sterne, J. (2007), “Out with the Trash: On the Future of New Media,” in C. R. Acland (ed.), Residual Media, Minneapolis, London: University of Minnesota Press.

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Van den Berg, T., and M. Kiss (2016), “[in]Transition journal launch at SCMS 2014, Seattle, part 2,” in: Film Studies in Motion. From Audiovisual Essay to Academic Research Video, University of Groningen, July 2016, https://scalar.usc.edu/works/film-studies-inmotion/intransition-journal-launch-at-scms-2014-seattle-part-2.meta?versions=1, accessed 3 October 22, 2021. Wallace, D. F. (1997), “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again,” New York, Boston, London: Back Bay Books.

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Step 2 Hearing: “The Parties Agree to Use Their Best Efforts” A Dramatic Academic Work Jennifer Hayashida

Preface All of my post-secondary education took place within what the scholar la paperson, and others with them, terms first- and second-worlding universities—imperial universities aspiring to settle and colonize how knowledge is transferred, which seek to organize the kind of worlding that takes place during and as a result of such education (la paperson 2017: xiv-xv). My memories of being a student at such US institutions—some of them enormous land-grant universities (UC Davis, UC Berkeley), others small and elite liberal arts colleges (Bard)—primarily involve learning to be loyal to the institution. I was a firstgeneration college student, and even though I attended institutions thought of as critical of hegemonic power apparatuses—Berkeley, Bard—I took very seriously the project of becoming a good student and, eventually, a loyal subject of “the imperial university” (Chatterjee and Maira 2014: 6). The notion and urgency of decolonization has gained significant attention and traction, but it is frequently misunderstood as a metaphor that activates “a set of evasions” around representation rather than redistribution (Tuck and Yang 2012: 1). Following Tuck and Yang (Yang also writes, perhaps fugitively, as la paperson), a “third worlding university” is a decolonizing university, and there, la paperson presents the figure of “the scyborg,” a character who works to advance the third university’s decolonial agenda of rematriation, regeneration, and queer futurity (la paperson 2017). I read A Third University Is Possible, la paperson’s brief manuscript-in-progress, as an instruction manual for working from within to bust the gears of the neo-imperial academic machine. So, when they encourage “a theory of action that accounts for the permeability of the apparatuses of power,” I turn to the theories of action contained by the art forms I think of as most closely aligned with close readings of apparatuses of power: translation and poetry. The translator is a queer figure in the US academy: their work is often not valued along the same axes of assessment as research included in peer-reviewed journals and monographs. One may study translation and have such work be considered for 99

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promotion, but if one actually translates a work of literature, that work is rarely considered research-based enough to be included in one’s file for tenure and promotion. There are of course exceptions to this logic—most often for translator-scholars operating in already precarious fields such as Classics or Religion—but my point is that the figure of the translator and practice of translation often remain illegible to the academic machine. My own research and practice as an artist centers around translation: literary translation between Swedish and English, but also translation as utterance—as condition, as event, as method. I would like to think that the translator could arrive at the university as a kind of papersonian scyborg, pre-programmed for treason. As Mary Louise Pratt writes regarding the figure of the interpreter during the forever “war on terror”: “Interpreters become a risk to both sides, not only because they have the ability to betray each side to the other, but also because they have the ability to betray both by envisioning, and embodying, something different, a third term” (Pratt 2009: 1527). Poet and scholar Erica Hunt writes, “The codes and mediations that sustain the status quo abbreviate the human in order to fit us into structures of production” (Hunt 1990: 128). Hunt, as I read her, argues not merely for an avant-garde aesthetics of the oppositional but for an analytical poetics where writing has “social existence in a world where authority has become highly mobile, based less on identity and on barely discerned or discussed relationships” (1990: 131). The first- and second-worlding university seems an uncanny fit for the kind of dehumanizing roaming authority Hunt describes: what I as a contingent faculty member in the US experienced as an enthusiastically neoliberal regime over-reliant on both chronic fundraising (euphemistically described as “development”) and exploitation of contingent faculty, and what I in Sweden am a part of as a doctrine of “new public management,” with centralized decision-making, relentless quantification, and a dreaded “annual wheel”—a pie chart of the year that cues managers regarding when to inform staff about drug and alcohol abuse, fire drills, or diversity and inclusion. If one genre of academic writing is the writing we are all guilty of producing in an effort to both commodify and/or justify our locations across a range of academic institutions, the other genre of academic writing is the aforementioned languaging—or pie chart—which creates and regulates those locations: offer letters, hiring contracts, collective bargaining agreements, affirmative action policies, student loan and/or grant documents, etc. In particular, this linguistic worlding aggressively explains, structures, and dreams the regimes of neoliberalism and precarity that dominate the contemporary university, including a kind of academic gig economy, an orientation towards faculty and student entrepreneurship, and an erosion of institutional transparency and critical discourse—trends examined by la paperson as well as scholars such as Kandice Chuh, Roderick Ferguson, Andrew Ross, and Eve Tuck, and then often, but not always, under the rubric of Critical University or Ethnic Studies. If we seek to demand more of academic writing, perhaps one thing we should insist on is that it allow for a poetics of interference into the legal-linguistic scaffold that brings our institutional locations into being. Hunt addresses the hazards of oppositional language also staging the kind of “evasions” problematized by Tuck and Yang, emphasizing that such purportedly insurgent projects may not claim “immunity” since they may at the same time reproduce hegemonic linguistic force fields. Audre Lorde is close at hand here, naturally. At the same time, I believe that the deployment of an

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oppositional poetics and, here, an oppositional translational poetics, presents an opportunity to read the “codes and mediations” of contemporary university regimes, and for translational writing to have the kind of “social existence” Hunt imagines (Hunt 1990: 131). Is it possible, then, for the scyborg-translator to intervene in the contemporary university’s neocolonial linguistic regime without at the same time reproducing its erasures or aggressions? Can they, in fact—via a poetics of redaction, that is, using the institution’s own method of erasure and/or opacification—attempt to engage in scyborgian “desire against the assemblage that made [them]” (la paperson 2017: xxiii). The following dramatic academic work deploys language derived from a sprawling assortment of documents, all related to a 2017 non-reappointment at a public university in New York: articles derived from the collective bargaining agreement between the university and union, emails from individuals holding full-time—that is, professorial— positions, a statement written to present at the so-called “Step 2” hearing regarding this case, as well as documents generated by students in opposition to said nonreappointment. As such, it is a kind of case study centered around a particular institutional confrontation and a project which I hope also provides an analytics regarding the ubiquitous double-bind of contingent faculty who are abject yet grateful to hold any kind of academic position, no matter the terms. Drawing upon a decolonial intention whereby the translational poetics are hopefully not merely metaphorical (Tuck and Yang 2012) but a method whereby the order-words of Deleuze and Guattari (via poet and translator Don Mee Choi) are extracted from their “natural” juridical context and transferred into the poetics of a hypothetical stage (Choi 2020: 3). At the same time, it bears noting that the event of the actual hearing was scripted in such a way that it was not all-too dissimilar from an avant-garde dramatic work.

Step 2 Hearing: “The Parties Agree to Use Their Best Efforts” Cast ARTICLE 9: Appointment and Reappointment ARTICLE 11: Classification of Titles ARTICLE 20: Complaint, Grievance, and Arbitration Procedure ARTICLE 40: No Strike Pledge THE CONTINGENT ONE CHORUS OF STUDENTS CHORUS OF PROFESSORS SETTING: University conference room in midtown Manhattan, several floors above retail block with a yoga studio, a juice bar, a shop that sells sunglasses, and a vacant storefront which was formerly a bank. AT RISE: Room is bare save for anonymous office furniture: a large wood veneer table, six matching black desk chairs across from each other, with a seventh one at the head of the table, and a large microphone/speaker protruding in an orb from the center of the table. The backdrop of the stage is a glass wall, through which is visible a white wall decorated

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with a row of photos of university buildings and photos of people in suits shaking hands. An American flag can be glimpsed at the very end of the wall. ARTICLE 9, 11, and 20 are seated with their backs to the audience. ARTICLE 40 is seated at the head of the table. CHORUS OF STUDENTS and CHORUS OF PROFESSORS are each played by a single person, seated across from ARTICLE 9, 11, and 20. THE CONTINGENT ONE IS AUDIBLE FROM THE ORB AT THE CENTER OF THE TABLE. The orb glows with an oscillating light during the performance, decreasing/increasing in intensity as the volume of speakers decreases/increases.

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References Chatterjee, P., and Maira, S., eds (2014), The Imperial University: Academic Repression and Scholarly Dissent, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Choi, D. (2020), “Translation Is a Mode, Translation Is an Anti-Neocolonial Mode”, Brooklyn: Ugly Duckling Presse. Hunt, E. (1999), “Notes for an Oppositional Poetics”, in C. Bernstein (ed.), The Politics of Poetic Form: Poetry and Public Policy, New York: Roof Books. la paperson (2017), A Third University Is Possible, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Pratt, M. (2009), “Harm’s Way: Language and the Contemporary Arts of War”, PMLA, 124 (5): 1515–31. Tuck, E., and K. Yang (2012), “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor”, Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, 1 (1): 1–40.

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Writing the Unwritable: Raveling Worlds Julie Vulcan

Overlays When worlds unravel they reveal things. After winds drive off the roaring flames and the thick smoke particles of a wildfire, a velvet-ash world is unveiled. Once-hidden views are punctuated with the architecture of exposed trees. Worlds and words tumble with nowhere to hide. In the confusion and in the trauma words of obliteration evoke worlds lost. Confusing for those still here at a loss. Words create worlds.1 Meanings and messages are twisted to embed in one way while others disentangle to entwine in another. In a post-fire terrain attention to words can mean the difference between a world lost or a world arriving. In a time when we are still grasping what it means to relinquish the self-importance of human mastery, while gasping in response to the world events we have contributed to raveling, I wonder how we can write with this world. In this essay I explore the practice of writing-with and how writing with a companion embeds theoretical concepts into the processes of everyday encounter. More specifically how writing companions that are not human might draw us out of human-centric patterns and into more generative ways of being in the world. As my writing companion I invite the ash of a wildfire. More specifically the ash of a post-fire terrain, on Gundungurra country south-west of Sydney, Australia—the place where I live.2 This is a thinking piece and a writing experiment. It thinks about how the world is steering us to write in particular and urgent ways, across disciplines and genres. It writes about how knowings and relatings shared across human and nonhuman continuums make us think in different ways. It writes to think about flourishing bodies and matters of flow. Most importantly it thinks into the process of writing and asks what world am I writing into? In the early 1990s Michel Serres stated that “earth, waters, and climate, the mute world, the voiceless things once placed as a decor surrounding the usual spectacles, all those things that never interested anyone, from now on thrust themselves brutally and without warning into our schemes and maneuvers” (Serres 1992: 3). Nearly thirty years on we are still writing about such brutal interventions by a “mute world” now screaming. Nothing and everything has changed. In December 2020 the United Nations Environment Program released the 11th edition of the annual Emissions Gap Report. 109

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“Are we on track to bridging the gap? Absolutely not.” We are still on target for a temperature rise in excess of three degrees by the end of this century.3 On August 9, 2021 the human world is in its second year managing a slippery pandemic complicated by extreme weather events causing floods, wildfires, hurricanes, and cyclones on unprecedented scales. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) releases the first contribution by Working Group I: Climate Change 2021: The Physical Science Basis for the Sixth Assessment Report.4 The message is clear. We will most likely reach two degrees warming by the year 2050 unless global emissions are reduced now. The world as we know it seems to be unraveling. I engage raveling as a figuration to assist me and remind me that doing is also the process of undoing.5 A ravel is a complication. Its etymological origins in weaving allow it to be at once an antonym and a synonym. To ravel is to entangle and disentangle. Humans ravel their beings and doings into the many beings and doings of the nonhuman world while simultaneously complicating the way the collective world is raveled. The greater effects of the more serious complications by some are now being keenly felt by most. The entangling and disentangling of things as we know them, for example a period of relative climate stability or the very notion of a thing, are being perceived as a kind of coming undone. It is a raveling-out that makes it plain the effects of human complications as we start to experience (individually and collectively) the climate and the world differently. What happens when the familiar is made unfamiliar? One definition for ravel out (although obsolete in current use) is to destroy, spoil or waste while to unravel can mean to free from obscurity or to reveal.6 I engage the tension between these two intimately entangled meanings to explore the ways different entities can reveal themselves when other entities fall away. When what we know disintegrates and what remains is unfamiliar—a bush-land reduced to a negative space.7 How might we imagine what can be possible when things feel precarious and unstable? Anna Tsing suggests to “live with precarity” requires a combination of noticing and stretching our imaginations into a “strange new world” to “grasp its contours” and the possibilities within it (2015: 2–3). In this way a disturbance like a wildfire, creates an opening. It beckons, drawing us closer into a place, rather than withdrawing. It encourages a “radical curiosity” and invites the “transformative encounter” (2015: 144, 152). To come closer might be to come alongside like a kind of walking-with or a journeying together. A journey that allows for indeterminacies rather than working to decipher, resolve or solve—processes determined to find an end. Walking-with, working-with, writingwith a companion that is not human, invites us into a new praxis. One that requires a letting go of preconceived notions of space and time attached to human notions of economy and resolution. A companion accompanies, sharing and assisting in company. Writing with a companion requires writing with “response-ability”—a Haraway term that recognizes the asymmetries with companions while allowing the opportunity to close gaps by cultivating a “capacity to respond” (Haraway 2016: 78). Paradoxical as it might seem in the context of this paragraph, a response-ability to ash might be through the simple action of inaction.

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When All is Turned to Ash The ground after a wildfire is curious. You might expect it to be black like the burnt trees or the reduced bulbous remains of shrubs resembling dark ancient sea-beds. Instead the chromatic palette ranges from charcoal through various shades of grey to a grey so light and translucent it threatens to disappear before your eyes. A wildfire is not even in its attentions and ash is the translator of its story. The charcoal shadows of partially combusted and fallen trees meet the surprising bright inscriptions of other trees obliterated. The complete combustion of the latter leaves only scars embedded in the reddish sandstone and clay topsoil. Here the ash is barely legible. A wildfire unravels to reveal. When walking upon a post-fire terrain there is no retreating from the fact you are walking on the fine carbon remains of once-trees, shrubs, plants, birds, and critters. The complex material structure of familiar things destroyed and at once transformed into differently complex material—the material of ash. But don’t be fooled, ash is not what it seems, it is not one thing. Ash can be organic rich or inorganic rich. It can be high in organic carbon, minerals, or oxides. It can contain mineral soil particles and exogenous chemicals (Bodí et al. 2014: 103–105). To write-with ash is to write into a world as it is revealing itself in different ways. Ash is not static it allows the possibility for many things as it ravels between the living, the dead, and the arriving. Writing-with a companion that is not human is an attempt to bring us closer to the distinctive ways our companion responds to influences and forces. In short how they operate differently in the world. The process of comprehending alternative ways of being in the world allows us to perceive how we might ravel our worlds in ways that aspire to a flourishing in co-operation. It is not about observing and gathering intelligence to be archived and shelved. It is about generous exchange in the sense of giving up something formed (such as a singular preconceived idea) for something variform. For a human in the initial phase of writing-with, the giving up of something might be in the form of our spatial attachments and temporal perceptions. What I mean by this is the desire to overlay human scheduling and parameters onto a companion without taking into account the perceptual imbalance. It is another expression of mastery aligned with containment and control. Monica Gagliano provides an example through one of her experiments exploring the intelligence of plants. Gagliano engaged the services of Pisum sativum, the common garden pea, in a set up designed to reveal if the pea seedlings inside a Y-shaped maze would anticipate the arrival of light (food) associatively conditioned by a fan. After two weeks under controlled conditions the behavioral response was not meeting her expectations. Preparing to dismantle the experiment she noticed something that made her realize the experiment was not a failure. The peas were making the associative choice but the hypothetical framework of expectation they were being measured against was distorting the result. Instead, it was her failure to see the pea’s behavior in relation to their baseline which is to always grow in the direction of the light—“as I tested their learning ability within the Pavlovian conditioning paradigm, the seedlings had tested mine by shining a light on the extent to which the conditioning prescribed by my academic training had bound me to a specific perception of the world” (Gagliano 2018: 85). Writing companions are not passive; they reveal things to us, and they direct our

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attention to the multiple encounters they in turn are engaged with. They are many and fluctuating rather than a source that is bound. Writing companions write us out into the world and back in cyclical and indeterminate ways. To be with a post-fire terrain is to stay with it. Australian Indigenous writer and traditional fire practitioner Victor Steffensen laments that “people mostly turn their back on the country” after damaging wildfires thinking “it’s burnt now” rather than working with it and helping it recover (Steffensen 2021: 201). To pause in place and stay with the disturbance is to stay with the trouble. Science and technology studies scholar Donna Haraway proposes “staying with the trouble” is a kind of settling-in that allows an attentiveness to the “tangles and patterns” in process and allows for the “myriad unfinished configurations” we “as mortal critters” are entwined. We “become-with each other or not at all” a proposal that builds on Haraway’s earlier work with companion species (Haraway 2016: 1, 3–4). For Haraway, the knotting of “companion and species together in encounter, in regard and respect, is to enter the world of becoming with” (Haraway 2008: 19). To stay with an unraveling world, to stay with an unfamiliar postfire terrain, to stay with a writing companion, is to be present within a world while making space for what is arriving.

The Lesson of Ash is to Wait The lesson of a wildfire is it does not wait when the conditions are right its “organismic desire” moves quickly and feeds ferociously (Clark and Yusoff 2018: 11).8 A wildfire is an exciter. Even the synonyms for excite evoke its agitations - kindle, stir, inflame, quicken. Wildfire is in relationship with the biomass it consumes. It makes “sense to imagine fire as an ecological catalyst” as it “literally feeds off hydrocarbons” and morphs new species (Pyne 2015). In Australia over time “fire and flora entered into a process of mutual selection, of positive reinforcement” and this flowed over into further unique associations with fungi, insects, mammals, and birds (Pyne 1998: 19–20). In more recent times the complication of a “disturbed pyrogeography” interwoven with the burning of fossil fuels has increased the frequency of catastrophic fire events.9 In late 2019 early 2020, the wildfire south-west of Sydney ebbed and flowed for months, each day gaining new ground in the most surprising directions. There was nothing straightforward or predetermined about its liquid maneuverability. Multiple courses were available to it, even if just out of reach. To access new paths the wind was its collaborator. They talk about a fire front but in hill and gorge country it is more like many flaming arms, reaching through gaps and clefts; around bends and up slopes; always breaching any sense of a containment line. For a fire is not just one thing. A fire waits for the play of ocean and atmosphere to suck moisture from the air; it desires the strike of a lightning bolt from a dry thunderstorm; it reaches toward the fuels that will sustain it; it colludes with the wind to speed its course; it volatizes plants creating the heat to assist its own weather systems.10 There is much that fire can reveal but fire is not my writing companion. At this point fire will have to wait in the wake of its swift spectacle. Wildfire prepares the ground for the teachings of ash. The lesson of ash is to wait. Ash is a slow teacher. The raveling worlds of fire and ash rely on this tension. With its

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multiple interactions ash requires a multi-disciplinary approach. This has meant it has eluded particular scientific attentions.“Usually considered separate from soil, vegetation, charcoal, or from biogeochemical cycles of some nutrients” its relevance across all of these aspects has only recently been considered (Bodí et al. 2014: 104). Ash reminds us that categorizations are forms of exclusion and fail to account for interconnections. To wait with ash is to allow its response. In the months after a fire the ash is a sealant of sorts. It holds things in. At the same time it is vulnerable to the movements of critters, creatures, humans and weather systems. It sticks to bodies. It clings to face, hands, feet, and nestles into the folds of clothes. On breeze and breath it insinuates itself into every nook, cranny and crease. Ash absorbs you and you absorb ash. Its fine particulate matter infiltrates the lungs and slips under the tongue, accumulates under nails and collects on hair filaments in the ear canals. But you will not read about these everyday encounters. Most likely you will read how this thing called ash is whipped up by winds and deposited elsewhere; how heavy rains wash it and the nutrient topsoil away; and how large amounts end up in water catchments accruing in a thick black sludge and threatening aquatic life and potable water supplies. It is easy to see how this thing called ash, no longer considered a living organism, quickly becomes detached from its origins as the fine carbon and mineral remains of multiple species. For some it is intolerable. For some it is a hindrance tolerated for its few known benefits. Yet ash is a medium between worlds—the residue of one world whose remains filter into the next. It makes lively attachments as it ravels new worlds in the process of becoming. Ash is not uniform. It blankets a fire ground in heterogeneous ways in relation to the topography, types of fuel load, and “combustion completeness” (Bodí et al. 2014: 106). To walk across a fire ground is to walk across the aftermath of uncontrolled chemical reactions. Here is the crackle of baked topsoil and once-grass. Here is the soft tread into the finest powder of once-shrubs. Here is the sinking, fifteen centimeters or so, into the craters of once-trunks. Here is the crunching along linear charcoal pits of downed trees. Here, three weeks on, are smoldering tunnels revealing secret desire-ways of eucalypt roots. Of all the deposits it is the finest ash that surprises with its complicated affects. The illusion of something more solid underfoot suddenly gives way. Feet sink into a ground that seems to disappear in a puff. Susceptible to the smallest disturbance and defenseless against the vagaries of winds, it is impossible to imagine such an ephemeral material ever settling. The experience of encountering fine mineral ash is difficult to convey. It halts you in your tracks and disturbs your spatio-temporal sense. You enter the blurred space of virtual time-slips of what was and what now is. Uncannily elemental it reminds you that you share its mineral distillations. It evokes a protectiveness that might be more to do with such continuums than its present form.

Once Was Ash To work-with ash requires attention to its needs in order to allow processes of care. It instructs that careful paths of least disturbance be plotted along rocky slopes and more

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exposed ground—a choice that allows ash to create an initial seal protecting the soil from wind and erosion. Fine ash is the remains of high combustion. It is a mineral ash containing inorganic carbonates and/or oxides that assist crystalline fragments in the formation of a fine crust. Initially this crust is hydrophobic repelling water. When more prolonged rains come the ash starts to absorb and hold the water while allowing excess water to flow over its surface. Over time the saturated ash-body presses itself against the soil-body increasing its wettability and transferring its moisture (Bodí et al. 2014: 119). In the best circumstances the actions of ash work toward the protection of both ash and soil long enough for the nutrient goodness of ash to settle into the soil in preparation for what is arriving. The timing of heavy rains can change matters and the ash might require your attentions once more. Guided by the dips and rises on a forest slope the limbs of burnt branches are shifted and placed to form lateral patterns. The ash and soil clinging to any degree of gradient are powerless against the force of heavy rain. After the deluge the slope is a patchwork of redistributed ash, charcoal and soil. Rock and branch enabling a matrix of new ash-soil beds. This is not all. Ash has other collaborators of the fungi, plant, and animal kind. The pyrophilous or fire-loving fungi Pyronema omphalodes soon appears. Under its loving attention it spreads mycelial threads across ash beds. Quite quickly its fruiting bodies stretch like a new skin in shades of salmon pink and orange. Releasing more nutrients while further binding and protecting the ash and soil (McMullan-Fisher 2020). After the first fine rain Funaria hygrometrica, also known as bonfire moss, joins in the weaving of the forest floor. It spreads its carpet across patches of charred remains and prepares a bed for new seedlings to emerge.11 Underneath the ash and soil the tunnelers are also busy creating porous pathways for the water when it comes. The deep nests of ants ensure their high survival rate during fire. They quickly return to action on the surface. Within a month the dark forest floor is dotted with the light circular sand mounds and delicate chimney structures of various ant species. The mound entrances create a “macropore network” directing rain flows into their galleries and acting as water sinks (Richards et.al. 2011: 27–28). The adroit action of ant bioturbation, alongside that of other vertebrates and invertebrates, slowly continues to fold the ash into the soil. Ash brings you close to the ground. It invites you to read its textures and forms. Through the tracks imprinted on its surface it reveals the presence and movements of animals—survivors returning or new arrivals. Two months after the fire the first acacia seeds germinate. Acacias are nitrogen fixing woody legumes that grow and populate post-fire areas quickly. They further bind and stabilize the ash and soil, protecting and sheltering it as they grow. The ash continues to fold into the ground—shifting and moving and rolling up and over the many underground bodies that facilitate its movement. Its minerals feed new bodies as it journeys to become the forms it once was. Eighteen months after the fire, it is the bulkier partially combusted components of ash, or charcoal pieces, that are still visible in patches, or feature in the decoratively piled mound structures of the larger bull ants. As the larger component of ash, charcoal is low in density, highly mobile and can retain water as well as enhance drainage through the soil. It is an important part of “soil organic matter” (Pyle et al. 2017). The larger charred organic compounds or “pyrogenic carbon” are rich in organic carbon. Over

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time they insinuate themselves into sediment and strata and contribute to carbon storage (Bodí et al. 2014: 109, 117). The story of ash continues and will continue long after we too have become ash.

Tr(ashed) A post-fire ground is complicated. The former homes of the many nonhumans are in stark relief against the jumbled, mixed, and sometimes toxic human objects. The human tries to sort out the trash from the ash, while referring to the site more generally as “trashed.” In saying so it must be acknowledged there is no simple human standard or response in regard to what is trash/ed materially and the emotional affects. Ravelingout race, class, gender, the economy and most significantly, the compounding effects of colonization on first-nation peoples is part of the complication. In Australia the scale of the black summer fires meant a significant loss of native food sources, ancient scar trees, and the destruction of ancestral totemic plants and animals adding to the trauma and “unique grief of Aboriginal people’s experience.” Made only harder for a people whose knowledge has largely been ignored and consigned to the margins while watching on as their homelands have been mismanaged and neglected (Williamson et al. 2020: 122). Anna Tsing speaks of familiar places, the ones that you come to know through frequency and participation; the ones that flourish at the “unruly edges.” A place becomes familiar by actively engaging and directing our attentions to it in multisensorial ways—including how it invites our body to move, rest and absorb the multimolecular. “Familiar places engender forms of identification and companionship” that encourage an “appreciation for multi-species interactions” (Tsing 2012: 142). What happens then, when an unruly fire arrives from the edges and transforms a familiar place into something unfamiliar? I wonder how we might bridge the now unfamiliar with the once-familiar. How we might navigate the effects of fear and the feelings of loss to take hold of a fascination for what is still here in place. In doing so how might such attentions allow us to proceed with a care and curiosity for the many required conditions of human and nonhuman inhabitants who are either transformed/ing, returning or arriving anew? When the material of a familiar place changes rapidly—in the course of a few hours—there is no gradual adjustment to the change. The place is suddenly unfamiliar yet strangely familiar the resonance of the familiar creating a kind of virtual overlay. To proceed from this point might be contingent on holding onto this perception. For example let us consider a small bird, a spotted pardalote now ash.12 It is not here but it is still here. Virtually it is still here. Physically its material remains are still here. Even as it has been transformed into ash it is here awaiting its arrival. The ash will not turn into a spotted pardalote but it will be part of the process that creates the conditions for a spotted pardalote to arrive. Now let us consider what we who have lived alongside this little bird might be familiar with. We have heard its pip-pip in the high canopy of eucalypts and acacias during its daylight foraging. We know this is where its particular food is. We have seen it fly down for water. We have witnessed it entering and exiting

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its nest burrow in the sides of an earth mound. And we have heard the tiny calls of the nestlings from inside. In the post-fire terrain there is no canopy and there is no spotted pardalote. There is an empty burrow. After a fire, the terrain is as close as it might be to the concept of a blank slate. How we proceed is related to how we live with the many critters, creatures, plants, fungi and animals we share our home with. For some, home is inseparable from these many inhabitants with their multiple beings and doings. For some, home is the human material of beings and doings and everything else is a background of things to be selectively tamed or removed. For some, the destruction of one, or the other, or all is too much. I return to the familiar resonance of the virtual overlay. This virtual overlay is not something fixed; rather, it has the qualities of an oscillating blue-print. It allows a way to respond to what is here while preparing for what is arriving. Earth mounds are preserved for pardalotes, shrubs and trees are monitored rather than felled, ground is minimally disturbed giving seedlings the best chance, removal of materials are planned for least interference. At the same time plans are made to be unmade as the ash reveals things, guiding us to shift our actions and consider different paths. This is our “response-ability.” I am not proposing a nostalgic return to, or resurrection of, what was. Such a place exists only in a dubiously fixed virtual. My offering is one that galvanizes the virtual overlay as a kind of vibrating map with no intention of tracing it. A map also reminds us there are no fixed temporal modes to navigation. There is no telling how long something might take. Time and timeliness do not necessarily translate or align across the many bodies, including human bodies, inhabiting a place. There are many options for humans considering a course of action after the destruction of a wildfire. Past the mourning stage of loss and grief, the overlaying of a virtual map might remind us what worlds we wish to live alongside as we enter into the familiarizing process of a changed and changing world. Within the earth’s geological strata, records of pyro-activity exist as charcoal fragments. Ash has been folding into soil layers of a changing world since the Devonian age (Scott 2000). Fire and ash have cycled life forms and bodies while creating the conditions for the arrival of different forms and bodies. Ash is not a finite or autonomous thing. It arrives in momentum with the many other active bodies it is in the world with. The phenomena of ash are multiple and ongoing.13 Its conveyances ravel out and into the world from one form into another. From pardalote, to fire, to residue, to ground, to element, to nutrient, to terra-form, to sponge, to soil, to carbon-sink, to germinating seed, to plant, to tree, to pardalote. And not necessarily in that order or any predetermined combination. This is the performativity of ash allowing “matter its due as an active participant in the world’s becoming, in its ongoing ‘intra-activity’ ” (Barad 2003: 803). The IPCC report predicts more frequent fires of the intensity and severity we have witnessed globally in the last two years. How the world is tr(ash)ed matters. Writingwith ash reveals the ways of ash. It exposes its multiple interactions with many lively beings, including humans, and how it worlds ongoing worlds beyond the present. Ash writes us, if we allow it, through the trashed aftermath of a fire to the raveling worlds of new seedlings, shrubs and trees providing much needed food, shelter, shade, and moisture for the many bodies present and arriving. Academic writing might write the world but it must also allow the world to write us.

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Underlays The way ash ravels worlds is a lively map.14 To accompany ash is to work in located and embedded ways while simultaneously extending beyond the present time and space. Creative resources are needed to imaginatively map the multiple interconnections rippling through, between, and around us in various time-space locations—the virtual blueprint, the pardalote arriving. Haraway and Tsing offer resources in modes of storying. For Haraway speculative fabulation stitches fact telling and storytelling to pattern “materialsemiotic worlds, gone, here, and yet to come” (2016: 31). While Tsing promotes the arts of noticing and attentiveness to the many active ways of being that gather within a place—the polyphonic ways “assemblages coalesce, change, and dissolve.” These are “performances of liveability” and for Tsing it “is the story” (2015: 157, 158). Storying the ways of ash is an interdisciplinary practice it vibrates best with different modes of attentiveness.15 Writing companions and writers are not new. The ways they come together are also varied in response to their disciplinary locations. Consider Donna Haraway and the cyborg, canine (2008) or more recently the chthonic ones (2016); Anna Tsing and the Matsutake mushroom (2012, 2015); Monica Gagliano and Mimosa pudica (2018); Maria Puig de la Bellacasa and soil (2015); Sara Ahmed (2006) and the table; Deborah Bird Rose and dingo (2011); Astrida Neimanis and water (2016) to name just a few.16 What connects these scholars is not just the fact they engage companions that are not human, it is in the ways they think with them. The companion is never detached and observed from a distance. The companion and human are both effected and affecting in ways that are complex and transformative. Importantly they are not closed off and contained from the world, rather in coming together they open out a multiply-connected world. Writing-with is an offering that attempts to translate such effects and affectings in ways that reconfigure our worlds and our words. As a theoretical model Karen Barad proposes “Onto-epistem-ology—the study of practices of knowing in being” rather than knowing and being (Barad 2003: 829). To write-with is a practice of coming to know by being in conversation with a companion. A conversation that involves a human choreography of stepping back, to the side, or down, combined with moments of stillness—actions that might disrupt our habits of desire and engagement. Such embodied actions allow a more generous space for our companion to arrive, and arrive they will. The ensuing conversations are not necessarily within the realm of casual banter, heated debate or focused discussion. Some conversations will be as swift as wildfire, others will continue for generations folding into the soil. Somehow in all this we must write what seems unwritable and translate these conversations as best we can. In doing so our writing can draw us closer than ever before, to reveal the multiply connected worlds we live within. Into the fire, into the mess, into the dirt, without apology—this is what writing into the world must be.

Notes 1

I use “worlds” in the sense of Haraway where worlds are always in a process of “making-with” (2016). Whether it is the interconnected world of a particular bird or

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New Perspectives on Academic Writing the unfamiliar world of a post-fire terrain with its proposition to engage and imagine with it and what it is becoming. Gundungurra country is the traditional lands of the Gundungurra Aboriginal people in the south-east of NSW, Australia. See “Executive Summary”, iv. https://www.unep.org/emissions-gap-report-2020 accessed June 4, 2021. See https://www.ipcc.ch/report/sixth-assessment-report-working-group-i/ (accessed August 10, 2021). Braidotti 2011: 4,10,11. My use of figurations is in Braidotti’s sense as “materially embedded” living maps that offer an embodied or “transformative account of the self ” based in the here and now. The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary On Historical Principles, 3rd ed. (1973), s.v. “ravel”, “unravel”. In Australia the bush or bush-land generally refers to areas populated by eucalyptus trees, other woody shrubs, and grasses, hence the more common use of bushfire rather than wildfire. The bush is also a vernacular term indicating areas outside major metropolitan cities. Clarke and Yusoff (2018) offer a version of companion writing in their “pyrosexual counter-narrative” of sex and fire. Pyne 2019 outlines an historical overview of our changing pyrogeography. See https://www.science.org.au/curious/bushfires accessed June 4, 2021. See https://www.anbg.gov.au/bryophyte/ecology-fire.html accessed April 30, 2021. See https://www.birdlife.org.au/bird-profile/spotted-pardalote accessed April 30, 2021. Karen Barad proposes “the primary ontological units” in the universe of “agential intra-activity” is “phenomena—dynamic topological reconfigurings/entanglements/ relationalities/(re)articulations” not “things.” Barad keenly points out that “agency is not an attribute but the ongoing reconfigurings of the world” in its becoming (Barad 2003: 818). See https://www.ipcc.ch/report/sixth-assessment-report-working-group-i/ accessed August 10, 2021. For examples of the scholarly mapping of different modes of attentiveness within the fields and disciplines I find alignment see Alaimo 2019; Hamilton and Neimanis 2019; Neimanis, Åsberg and Hedrén 2015; Van Dooren and Rose 2016. I am overlaying my definition of companion to these writing relationships. It is not necessarily how these writers personally identify their writing relationships.

References Ahmed, S. (2006), Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others, Durham, NC : Duke University Press. Alaimo, S. (2019), “Wanting All the Species to Be: Extinction, Environmental Visions, and Intimate Aesthetics”, Australian Feminist Studies 34 (102): 398–412. Barad, K. (2003), “Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter”, Signs 28 (3): 801–31. Bodí, M. B., D. A. Martin, V. N. Balfour, C. Santín, S. H. Doerr, P. Pereira, A. Cerdà, and J. Mataix-Solera (2014), “Wildland Fire Ash: Production, Composition and Eco-hydrogeomorphic Effects”, Earth-Science Reviews 130: 103–27.

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Braidotti, R. (2011), Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory, New York: Columbia University Press. Clark, N., and K. Yusoff, K. (2018), “Queer Fire: Ecology, Combustion and Pyrosexual Desire”, Feminist Review 118: 9–24. Gagliano, M. (2018), Thus Spoke the Plant: A Remarkable Journey of Groundbreaking Scientific Discoveries and Personal Encounters with Plants, Berkeley : North Atlantic Books. Hamilton, J. M., and A. Neimanis (2019), “Five Desires, Five Demands”, Australian Feminist Studies 34 (102): 385–97. Haraway, D. J. (2008), When Species Meet, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Haraway, D. J. (2016), Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene, Durham, NC : Duke University Press. McMullan-Fisher, S. (2020), Fungimap, https://fungimap.org.au/find-out-about-our-firefungi/ accessed April 30, 2021. Neimanis, A. (2016), Bodies of Water: Posthuman Feminist Phenomenology, London: Bloomsbury Academic. Neimanis, A., C. Åsberg, and J. Hedrén (2015), “Four Problems, Four Directions for Environmental Humanities: Toward Critical Posthumanities for the Anthropocene”, Ethics and the Environment 20 (1): 67–97. Puig de la Bellacasa, M. (2015), “Making Time for Soil: Technoscientific Futurity and the Pace of Care”, Social Studies of Science 45 (5): 691–716. Pyle, L. A., K. L. Magee, M. E. Gallagher, W. C. Hockaday, and C. A. Masiello (2017), “Short-Term Changes in Physical and Chemical Properties of Soil Charcoal Support Enhances Landscape Mobility”, Journal of Geographical Research: Biogeosciences 122: 3098–3107, doi: 10.1002/2017JG003938. Pyne, S. J. (1998), Burning Bush: A Fire History of Australia, Seattle: University of Washington Press. Pyne, S. J. (2015), “The Fire Age”, Aeon (May 5), https://aeon.co/essays/how-humans-madefire-and-fire-made-us-human accessed August 1, 2021. Pyne, S. J. (2019), “The Planet is Burning”, Aeon (November 20), https://aeon.co/essays/ the-planet-is-burning-around-us-is-it-time-to-declare-the-pyrocene accessed August 1, 2021. Richards, P J., G. S. Humphreys, K. M. Tomkins, R. A. Shakesby, and S. H. Doerr (2011), “Bioturbation on Wildfire-affected Southeast Australian Hillslopes: Spatial and Temporal Variation”, Catena 87: 20–30. Rose, D. B. (2011), Wild Dog Dreaming: Love and Extinction, Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. Scott, A. C. (2000), “The Pre-Quaternary History of Fire”, Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology 164: 281–329. Serres, M. (1992), The Natural Contract, translated by Elizabeth MacArthur and William Paulson, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Steffenson, V. (2020), Fire Country: How Indigenous Fire Management Could Help Save Australia, Melbourne: Hardie Grant Travel. Tsing, A. (2012), “Unruly Edges: Mushrooms as Companion Species: For Donna Haraway”, Environmental Humanities 1 (1): 141–54. Tsing, A. L. (2015), The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins, Princeton: Princeton University Press.

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Van Dooren, T., and D. Bird Rose (2016), “Lively Ethography: Storying Animist Worlds”, Environmental Humanities 8 (1): 77–94. Williamson, B., J. Weir, and V. Cavanagh (2020), “Aboriginal People Find Strength Despite Perpetual Grief ”, in P. Anderson, S. Gardner, P. James and P. Komesaroff (eds.), Continent Aflame: Responses to an Australian Catastrophe, Armadale: Palaver.

9

Writing In Between Anna Gibbs

The in-between is a site where things happen. As Elizabeth Grosz writes: The space of the in-between is the locus for social, cultural, and natural transformations: it is not simply a convenient space for movements and realignments but in fact is the only place—the place around identities, between identities—where becoming, openness to futurity, outstrips the conservational impetus to retain cohesion and unity. Grosz 2001: 91

What does it mean to write from in-between? What does it mean to be in the teeming midst of something, immersed in the materiality of writing as doing and making, a thinking-feeling sensation taking shape in action, and then shifting that shape again at the very moment it threatens to fix itself in a recognizable form? From the writer’s perspective, it’s a way of working without blueprint, without map or final plan, but under the pressure of an impulse to think, in that space of tension between what I think I might say, and what takes form as I actually write. It’s a way of allowing this process of unpredictable formation to unfold towards form, however fleeting, for form in writing is only a loose frame for text which constantly overflows and reshapes it. Form then becomes a flimsy and mobile fabric, always in movement like the loose dress on the dancer, or the curtain in front of the open window. Between being and doing, between demonstration and elaboration, between composition and explanation Between all these there arises “composition as explanation,” as Gertrude Stein has it in the title of one her lectures. This is an attempt to show as well as simultaneously tell, or perhaps better, by virtue of showing, to explain “how writing is written.” It is in the inbetween of impossible choices—between Scylla or Charybdis, damned if you do or damned if you don’t—that writing happens. Yet the in-between is not a site, a fixed location or locale. Rather, to be in the in-between is to be moving precariously through the unstable, constantly shifting terrain of the situation. Situations are messy things, with no firm edges and no fixed boundaries in space or time. They are dynamic, volatile, 121

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exuberant. Their outcome is unpredictable: they happen in the now, like steam pouring out of a fissure in the rock, its turbulent movements never the same twice, or that tiny slice of a present moment constantly disappearing—never to be repeated in exactly the same way—between the past and the future. This dimension of potentiality I am calling the in-between is a space in which something is always in process, a becoming, locatable neither in subjects nor objects, nor in any opposition between them, but rather in the in-between of their active relations. This is an interstitial space, a space of encounter, a space of transaction, a space of appropriation and thereby of capture and possession, in the magical sense of that term. Between this and that, between here and there, between now and then, between go and woe, between sink and swim We are in the midst, in a messy situation, caught between things. Not so much or not always between alternatives or between opposites or antinomies as it might first appear, but between incommensurables and the strange spaces, conjunctions or perhaps conjunctures that open inside the whirlwind they make between them: a myriad of teaming relations, constantly forming, dissolving, and forming again. Deleuze writes in this connection of the “melodies of development . . . each spilling over its frame and becoming the motif of another such that all of Nature becomes an immense melody and flow of bodies” (Deleuze 2006: 155), although taking into account the second nature created by human technologies, scratch orchestra might be a better image. Nevertheless, to make a list of some of these thousand several “things,” human and nonhuman, material and conceptual—a universe of bits and pieces—is to create a refrain, a way of holding it all together—temporarily, provisionally—in a kind of hyperbolic space that perhaps allows the making of new connections through the folds of repetition and lace-like iteration the form creates. Yet the list also always undoes itself in that inevitable slippage between correspondence and non-correspondence, such that equivalence can never be established and all those proliferating series of examples must remain completely without exemplarity. That’s the thing about examples: they are various and endlessly proliferating, and you can always find one to displace or disrupt another. Lists, too, are heterogeneous. In her beautiful brief essay on the work of the incomparable Lauren Berlant, Kathleen Stewart (2012: 366) characterizes lists as ways of magnetizing all the bits and pieces of what is happening across a prolific landscape and in moments of suspension or in moments of the emergence of something snapping into form or intimating that something might become recognizable as a thing.

Lists also possess the strange power of being able to transform themselves from one thing into another, from something into something else, as they grow, changing their nature as they extend themselves by the addition of items so that more becomes not more of the same but something different by degrees. And sometimes something altogether different. With each new “and,” the differences, and the possibilities, proliferate.

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Between dualism and monism, plant and animal, between individual and organism, between organism and environment, between repetition and difference, between difference of degree and difference of kind Writing in the in-between is what I am calling “situation-creation.” To write is to be submerged in a situation we create as we go. To write is to bring this present alive. To write is to conjure a relational magic, for each new situation entails a new organization of relations. A situation might be material, affective, or political or it might be conceptual, imagined, or speculative. The methods of situation-creation might involve remembering, storying, rearranging, imagining and dreaming its relational magic into being, but the use of these methods is above all experimental: that is to say, the experiment always entails risk; it is a matter of trial and error, and it admits of potential failure: It’s not easy to see things in the middle, rather than looking down on them from above or up at them from below, or left to right or right to left: try it, you’ll see that everything changes. It’s not easy to see the grass in things and in words. Deleuze and Guattari: 1987

Between chaos and complexity, between one thing and another, between this world and that, between motion and commotion

Situation-creation I derive what I am calling situation-creation in the first instance from Roy Harris’s linguistic theory of Integrationism, which, according to him, describes the way meaning is made. According to Harris, utterance is always something invented on the run: it is not a case of carefully chosen parole as selection from a pre-existing and finite corpus of langue, but something which takes its meaning from the “situation” composed by the ephemeral intersection or coincidence of the disparate, multiple, and shifting contexts of speaker and listener. The term situation seems to envisage something apparently formless or informe, messier and more volatile and much less predictable in its dynamics, than the image that might be called up by the word context, which perhaps conjures something cleaner and clearer, more easily—at least on the face of it—and cleanly cut out from its connections to other surrounds. In this optic, then, language is performative in the sense that signs must always be created through communication, in the present, in a particular situation which is never the same twice. This means that humans are active makers of language, not simply the mere users of something that pre-exists us, as Harris makes clear (1980), and communication is always a result of a specific interaction (Harris 1995: 64). The actual use of words, and consequently their meaning, constantly fluctuates, as Vygotsky also recognized, when he wrote that dictionary meaning is only a “potentiality that finds diversified realisation in speech” and that, according to the principle he called “agglutination,” the sentence will always predominate over the word, and context over the sentence (1986:146–47).

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This implies in turn that words can flow into each other and influence each other (as we know, for example, from the relationship of undecidability that pertains between novel titles and text, or the way in which we are entrained as one word seems inevitably to call up another to follow it). What this recognition enables for Harris and others, is a view of writing as “integrational” of human activities, rather than representational of them after the event. That is to say, in Harris’s terms, that the sign acquires meaning from the activities it integrates and there can be no abstract invariant of the sign that persists untransformed from one interactive situation to another. What works as an utterance is what directs you to the right context, that is, what manages to “integrate other human activities” (Harris 1995). It is context in this sense which enables the linguistic production of the splitting of hairs or the skinning of hares. And yet homophonic correspondence can also be the source of productive ambiguity that might hover in the middle—or it can be used as a switch point in the detournement of expectation performed, for example, by a joke. When it comes to poetic language (by which I mean experimental, investigative, literary uses of language), hairs are always shadowed by hares, and sometimes overshadowed: the difference between them is always charged, and sound can and frequently does prevail over sense. It is by virtue of this quality of language that we can describe the work of a writer as oscillating “between a language that can be transmitted to all and a language that works for them alone” (Clément 1987: 64). Between a tree and a bush, between blue and green, between hair and hare, between dear and deer, between verb and noun, between does and does, between second and second, between bank and bank, between matter and matter, between partial and partial, between words and things Situations as I see them though, are broader than the linguistic frame Harris erects around them, taking us beyond language as such and into the world of active relations, beginning (although not ending) with interlocutors, whether here and now, or virtual and still to come. In any case for me as for Harris, it is the “speech situation” (Bakhtin’s term), rather than language as such, that is what matters. While language is the medium of communication in the speech situation, that situation as Bakhtin (1986) elaborates it is also composed of the relationships between utterances, the relationship of utterance to reality and to the speaker, as well as the relationship between utterances of the past and future utterances. The speech situation, then, is actually a complex network of implication, presupposition and anticipation. That is to say, it is an ever-changing network of dynamic, sometimes deferred, and ever unpredictable relations. Then again, relations between what, exactly? Harris (and to a lesser extent Bakhtin) tend to assume that individuals and sovereign subjects can be taken for granted. Other theorists of language and language use are less sure about that. One way to approach this question is through a consideration of the inner speech tapped in the writing process. Between bits and pieces, between this and that, between rubbish and waste, between whole and part, between immanence and emergence, between the abstract and the individual

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If we tune in to our own stream of consciousness when we sit down to write, we soon discover that inner speech is a flow full of debris, for, as Riley writes, inner speech is no limpid stream of consciousness, crystalline from Its uncontaminated source in Mind, but a sludgy thing, thickened with reiterated quotation, choked with the rubble of the overheard, the strenuously sifted and hoarded, the periodically dusted down then crammed with slogans and jingles, with mutterings of remembered accusations, irrepressible puns, insistent spirits of ancient exchanges, monotonous citation, the embarrassing detritus of advertising, archaic injunctions from hymns, and the pastel snatches of old song lyrics. Riley 2004

As Riley makes clear, inner speech is not a monologue but a polylogue or polyphony: it is the “upwelling” and “indwelling” of a multitude of voices, most coming unbidden from the outside and selectively internalized. Inner speech is anonymous, but not coming from nowhere, being composed of selectively internalized traces of otherness in the form, say, of injunctions or warnings or perhaps of compliments and encouragements. Often recognizable in it are the readymade forms of words much like those found in language manuals: the foreign language phrase book and the guide to etiquette, or the ritualistic forms of polite social ritual, the stock phrases of chit chat, or maxims, proverbs, and formulae—all those forms of cliché which Baudelaire characterized as marking sites of the immense depth of the reservoir of cultural memory by which we are all inhabited: those “holes dug by generations of ants.” Moreover the term “inner speech” names only the linguistic dimension of a level of awareness composed not only of words, but also of their sludgy surrounds, which may be linked to what infant researcher Daniel Stern (1985: 97)refers to as the “representations of interactions generalised,” in which conjoined cognitive and affective aspects of particular relationships are internalized as procedural patterns of relating to others, so that a repertoire of response to the other becomes embedded in our affective life. So is the outside folded into an inside, so that the boundaries between them become porous, complex and constantly shifting. Between open and closed, between affect and emotion, between action and passion, between inhale and exhale, between outside and inside, between the you in me and the me in you, between myself and strangers I take “inner speech” to mean the speech which crystallizes, if one allows it to, from the affective-volitional state that Vygotsky (1986) identifies as such but never really describes, so keen is he to characterize its linguistic component. This state might be said to comprise a kind of stream or flow of consciousness, but not one composed solely of words. Rather, coenesthetic sensation, sensory sensation, including, especially, images and sounds, but also touch, and, crucially, affect, all intermingle in it. This is a space of diagrammatic tendencies—like the space of the sketch—in which “the mattermovement of not-yet-formalized thought and sensation” (Vygotsky 1986) are palpable but not or not yet articulated. It is a site of a flux of pressures and impulsions, not so much a “mixed semiotics” (Guattari 1987: 119) perhaps as a becoming-semiotics.

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Attention is the condition of emergence of inner speech in this state, but this speech, as Vygotsky realized, employs a different syntax from socialized, communicative speech. Like the language of play, it is full of abbreviations and ellipses: it is not grammatical, proceeding rather by resemblance and associations. “It is,” Vygotsky writes, “a dynamic, shifting, unstable thing, fluttering between word and thought [in which the] senses of words combine and unite—a process governed by different laws from those governing combinations of meanings” (1986). “Meaning traffics [first of all] in patterns, images, qualities, feelings” before it ever takes the form of concepts and propositions, as Mark Johnson writes (2007: 9). These patterns and qualities might be described as vitality affects, affects that have shape and contour and which might be felt as a vibration, sensation, maybe even feeling, mood, tone. They might be inchoate, or diffuse and not readily identifiable or easily characterizable. They are, however, inherently synaesthetic, and they are only brought fully into awareness by paying them attention. We don’t say “paying” for nothing, because attention requires a sacrifice of everyday automaticity. Although it might be shaped by the immediate context of action in the everyday, this form of consciousness has no real content—that comes later, with the advent of “silent sound,” that is to say, sound apprehended before it is sounded aloud. In paying attention to the inner voice, we tune into a stillness which is always full of movement and a silence which is seething with sound. There is in this space both vitality and liveness: it is a (com)motion of particles and potentials comprising its own milieu. This milieu has to do, as Riley (2004) hints, with the verbal and preverbal dimensions of experience which conjoin in the music of speech. Sound, or the music of speech, has its own personal timbre—writers attune to it as it begins to take the shape of words, or rather, it begins to take the shape of words as writers attune to it. Between immersion and comprehension, between premonition and prognostication, between prediction and pre-emption, between actual and virtual The in-between, then, is a dimension or an active passage through which im- or pre-personal material forces—including sensations and affects—circulate and sometimes momentarily coalesce in an “I.” This is the realm of “impersonal passion,” to borrow the title of another of Denise Riley’s works (2005), which recognizes that it is not I as such who writes, but rather something unqualifiable (or “pre-individual”) within or beyond the I that produces the “I” in writing as one of its effects. Impersonal passions might nevertheless emerge from or be activated by the intensely personal. They arise from the materiality and corporeality of language, through its textures, tones and timbres, through its rhythms, and sound patternings, through the appearance of text on a page (the negative space in poetry, the size and sharpness of a font, or textual animation), and through the feel of words as they shape themselves—even silently—in the mind’s mouth and their resonance in viscera. And they speak through affectively imbued connotations and resonances, as when Proust’s Marcel needs only to pronounce the names Balbec, Venice, or Florence to conjure a desire for storms or sunshine or lilies (Proust 2003: 550). This is the dimension of subjectivity Guattari terms “existential”: it is non-discursive, but “acts as the creative force of enunciation” (Lazzarato 2014: 204).

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Between sound and meaning, between form and substance, between expression and content, between milieu and territory, between the sayable and the seeable Writing arises and is impelled from this existential dimension, and the situations it creates metaleptically fold in (rather than represent) what lies outside, beyond, or secreted in non-discursive dimension of language. Its address is ultimately indeterminate: a letter that might not be delivered (Derrida 1987) but which arrives wherever it does arrive transformed (Latour 1996: 119)—perhaps radically—by its journey through the worlds of the postal system, including the technical apparatus of writing itself, via whichever means of transport, and the material environment of the site of arrival. Here we are not so far from the kinds of situation-creation envisaged by the Situationist International of the twentieth century: Our central idea is the construction of situations, that is to say, the concrete construction of momentary ambiances of life and their transformation into a superior passional quality. We must develop a systematic intervention based on the complex factors of two components in perpetual interaction: the material environment of life and the behaviours which that environment gives rise to and which radically transform it. Debord 1957

Between coming and going, between original and copy, between participation and belonging, between contact and contagion, between affect and cognition, between proximity and distance, between empathy and sympathy Writing as situation-creation brings the present alive now, and at the moment it arrives somewhere else. It unravels story and undoes representation to animate the present, rather than represents something—art-making, fieldwork, thinking and reading—that happened in the past and requires a report. It is a process of invention that enables its own forms of discovery, resonating with and in the present, potentially presenting a form of resistance to some contemporary currents and a way of advancing and driving others. Writing, in this view, must be wrested from the grip of knowledge ossified in the authority of the disciplines and returned to the unruly domain where multiple practices—including writing—intermingle, contaminate, propagate and breed each other, giving rise to new situations which always emerge from the living, heterogeneous, generative space of the in-between. Between praxis and poiesis, between search and research, between invention and discovery, between critique and creation, between percept and concept, between reason and rhyme, between repetition and rhythm, between suspension and resumption This necessitates an experimental approach to writing, an approach at odds with pervasive metrics of universities as the corporations they now are, especially in the anglophone world. Such an approach demands new, more inventive ways of writing

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that engage peoples’ interest, excite their curiosity and sustain their attention. Not writing that simplifies and popularizes, but writing as invention, writing as discovery, writing as adventure, writing as affect. This is the kind of writing that encourages people to immerse themselves in a situation—to persist through difficulty, to grasp complexity, to admit ambiguity of interpretation, or to acknowledge the limits of knowledge, to think imaginatively about problems, and creatively about strategies and solutions. This is the writing we need. Between the incision and the interval, between the cut and the stitch, between the wound and the scar, between the thing and the object, between myth and history, between rupture and return Whether it can or will ever be recognized and rewarded in the university is another question, despite fifty years of feminist critique of Western metaphysics and the creative subversion of it in new approaches to writing (Gibbs 2005), despite decades of argument about practice-led as distinct from practice-based research, and despite ever-increasing criticism of the systems of journal ranking and all the other metrics that accompany it. Between opposition and alternative, between in and against, between ground and underground, between community and assembly, between anomie and alienation, between closure and foreclosure, between attachment and detachment All of this the work of academic critique and critique of the academy is no doubt necessary. But perhaps the restoration of the university at which it aims is not now possible, at least not in the anglophone world. Or perhaps it’s really not even desirable as Harney and Moten’s (2004) compelling vision of the Undercommons of the university suggests. They image this Undercommons as an “unsafe neighbourhood,” a “nonplace” where all the motley, heterogeneous crew of the marginalized take refuge even as they remain fugitive, on the run within it. The question then is, to what kinds of writing impelled by what desires might such a neighborhood give rise? Between the devil and the deep blue sea a rock and a hard place the frying pan and the fire between the devil we know and all that we don’t won’t can’t between all the things we didn’t see coming because they had already arrived and we were in their midst right where we are now

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Between the grids metrics regulations the air Perhaps contemporary poetry1 in all the wildly proliferating variety and diversity generated by its experimental ethos might now make a richer and more exciting source of possible models for research writing in many humanities and creative arts disciplines than the increasingly standardized academic paper. Its active and often antagonistic engagements with philosophical, historical and political texts and with statute, document and archive,2 its disruptive work in the in-between of originals and copies through forms of appropriation, recontextualization and the erasure, rewriting or insertion of commentaries of various kinds into existing works3 and the flourishing of the “minor”—especially black, indigenous, and queer—voices that now animate it all make for ways of remaining dialogic—let’s say, semi-detached, leaving enough space between for the air to circulate, for something to be released and perhaps, let go. Like the exhalation of air in a whimper—barely a protest, more a refrain summoning the will to go on in adverse conditions, working under liberating constraint,4 neither inside nor outside, but in-between. Whimper (after Allen Ginsberg) I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, complying, qualitycontrolled, broken, dragging themselves down the concrete corridors at dawn looking for a working printer, Round-shouldered, anxious, burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the student body in a world of thought, who passion-stripped and stressed and hollow-eyed and hating it sat up working in the supernatural starkness of after hours offices staring across the tops of consoles contemplating redundancy, who bared their brains to Hell in the departmental meeting room and saw endless emails staggering on computer screens illuminated, who once passed through tutorials with radiant youth hallucinating feminism, socialism and reconciliation among the eventual administrators of Wars on everything, who were rationalized from the academies ultimately for thinking & publishing obscene odes speaking truth to power, who cowered in the clandestine crannies of campuses, deleting their seditious emails from hard drives and listening to the managerial Terror through the wall, who feared being busted for unauthorized public comment and said nothing in case of retribution who wrote anonymously who never talked to the press nor posted to

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Facebook returning reeling from the security guarded university senate meeting discussing financial speculation, real estate investing and capital works but not research and education who ate chips in cheap student cafeterias or drank tepid coffee in a campus dive called “Paradise Alley”, or purgatoried their talents night after day with dot points, with powerpoints, with pointless applications for funding, with branding and rebranding and endless bullshit incomparable illuminated freeways of shuddering audit and restructure leaping towards poles of Armageddon & evacuation, eliminating all the teeming world of thought between, Orwellian doublespeak and perversions of language, impacts and outputs, choice and flexibility, IT-enabled strategic planning and key priorities, improvement actions, excellence, bootstrapped learning outcomes, organizational change, learning opportunities, embedded engagement principles, cost benefit analyses, core competencies, key performance indicators, offensive “Empowering People” slogans on wretched performance review software, so-called “voluntary” redundancy amid endless bulletins of University Research Success and the incomprehensible punishment of My Career Online, who fixated with horror to announcements from the Department of Education selfmedicated with booze and pills until the clamour of the “customers” formerly known as students, brought them down shuddering mouth-wracked and battered bleak of brain all drained of brilliance in the drear light of class, who sank all night in the submarine light of laptops floated out and sat through the stale office afternoon in desolate meeting rooms, listening to the crack of doom from the gods of finance many of whom became the new precariat, teaching continuously year after year on casual contracts from U-this to U-that a lost generation of feminist thinkers dreaming of jumping off the highrise bocks of the former ivory towers, out of the “sector,” yacketayakking screaming vomiting whispering stories of compulsory unpaid attendance at OH&S seminars and assessment workshops, crying screaming vomiting whole intellects disgorged in total recall over conspiracy among fellow outcasts and erstwhile colleagues with brilliant eyes, dreaming of a class action, who the university believed dispensable and vanished into nowhere whose superannuated male colleagues once God-Professors suffered crises of relevance, sought retirement pathways, under autonomy-withdrawal in a new world of early career researchers and bleak digital futures,

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who wandered around and around at midnight in the halls of privilege wondering where to go, and went, leaving no broken hearts, who studied feminism and marxism and queer theory and all the new materialisms and read Rosi Braidotti, Elizabeth Grosz, Cela Sandoval, Sara Ahmed, Sianne Ngai, Donna Haraway, Saidiya Hartman, Mel Chen and Alison Whittaker to name just a few and who reread Shulamith Firestone and Aileen Moreton-Robinson and Audre Lorde and Angela Davis and Valerie Solanas and contemplated the futility of having faith in the management who were subjected to techno-fascism, benchmarks, spread-sheet logic, specious rubrics of risk, to audit culture and economic rationalism who were isolated by corporate techniques of surveillance and control, by performance management, benchmarking and competitive assessment, who were outranked by research-only mostly male professors appointed without advertisement on individual contracts and thereafter beholden to management practicing quietism and looking the other way, whose administrative support was made into relentless harassment and compliance to the metrics of administration, whose curricula were standardized, whose pedagogies were monetized, whose citations were counted, who were accused of wasting time at conferences while managers travelled first class to hot tub bonding at upscale hotels, who reappeared on campus to find their courses cut, their workloads increased and wished themselves anywhere elsewhere, who bit their lips and said nothing as they performed countless acts of affective labor while every rewritten “best-practice” policy on bullying, harassment and discrimination further enabled their daily repetition who broke down crying in foreign bars where, evacuated unappreciated at home to better jobs abroad, remembered bullying and institutionally-sanctioned psychopathy let loose in the Schools to do some Dean’s anonymous dirty work who lived on their knees in any refuge available and were dragged out of their dreams waving poetry and other unpublished manuscripts, who blew and were blown by those human flotsam the administrators, caressers of spreadsheets and capitalist lore, who wept in the morning in the evenings in traffic jams and on trains and buses, at work, at home and in bars, scattering their tears freely to whomever come who may,

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who were managed, threatened, directed, restrained, obliged, fearful, administered, who, fucked over by economic fundamentalism, by all the extreme forms of fractured capital, dead but dominant zombified neo-liberalism, triumphalist bloated neoconservatism and all the new topologies of rent, took it all personally and drowned in the last drops of their toxic shame, who sweetened their five year research plans according to the directions of managers armed with track changes and were red eyed in the morning but went to soften the student body to feed the hungry maw of the corporate looneyversity who dreamed of promotion at their institutions deemed Employers of Choice for Women, but woke to find the favored few were once again all men or almost, who watched their male peers elevated and then the sons of those peers elevated by appointment without even having to apply who were refused study leave which was now subject to quotas and competitive application and endless criteria which had to be net but which the selectors ignored anyway if it suited them who when protesting cutbacks and unremitting organizational restructuring were deemed to be speaking outside their field of expertise, charged with serious misconduct, kangaroo court-martialed and sacked, who were forced into so-called “voluntary” redundancy and coerced into signing scaremongering confidentiality clauses preventing truths being told, who mourned the death of academic freedom, and shuddered as decisions were made by Marketing were justified post hoc by IT men and managers of Teaching and Learning who scribbled all night rocking and rolling over lofty incantations which in the yellow morning were tracts of unpublishable bile, who threw their devices off the roof to cast their ballot for an Eternity outside of Time, & the anonymous online control systems of the corporate university fell on their heads every day for the next decade, whose performance data was onsold in California in contravention of the university’s own IT policy who were told the future was virtual by the tanked-up clatter of the iron regiments of educational fashion & the nitroglycerine shrieks of the fairies of marketing & the mustard gas of sinister business savvy Chancellors, or were run down by the drunken buses of The Bottom Line,

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who hung their cell phones out of windows looking for a new connection and were tempted to jump who unpaid adjunct anyway was sacked for publishing a satirical poem this actually happened and walked away unrecognized and forgotten into the ranks of forgotten outcasts who heard the university’s infomercials and advertisements offering prospective students “a university that fitted in with you” or a free iPad who finally went away and never came back and the looneyversity is not lonesome and does not miss them who withdrew into their offices as last decade’s most mediocre graduate students became the new managers with the whole edifice finally fucked and the office emptied down to the last piece of mental furniture, an unframed degree certificate yellowing on the floor, and that means nothing now, nothing but a hopeful bit of hallucination now the future is upon us ah, colleague, while you are not safe I am not safe, and now we’re really in the university of no idea and we might as well run through the halls of The Centre for the Design of the Future with a blowtorch or hurling molotov cocktails, who dreamt and imagined and created and taught, and set the noun and dash of the virtual together with the sensation of eternal becoming to recreate from the bullshit the syntax and measure of articulate human prose and stand before you all anonymous and fearful yet confessing out the soul to the rhythm of life in these desperate times Even Bill Readings didn’t see it coming to this, but putting down here what might be left to say in time come after even the ruins have crumbled to dust and been washed away in the floods and rose incarnate in permaculture gardens and old age communes and blew the suffering of the global precariat into a wailing saxophone cry that shivered into nowhere at the end of the world with the absolute heart of the dream butchered out of their own bodies good to eat a thousand years if there’s any one left on earth to do it

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Notes 1 2

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Kate Lilley (2012) characterizes contemporary Australian poetry as an “exuberant Undercommons” in the sense used by Harney and Moten (2004). Black and decolonial writers from M. NourbeSe Philip with her cross-platform work Zong! (2008) to Natalie Harkin with Dirty Words (2015) and archival-poetics (2019) have opened new ground here. Of course such strategies are not new and Bruce Boone and Robert Glück’s translations of La Fontaine (1981) are an excellent early example, or more recently Alison Whittaker’s “a love like Dorothea’s” in her collection Blakwork (2018) or Kate Lilley’s “Harm’s Way” (2018) provide powerful examples among many possible ones. I take the idea of the liberating constraint from the Oulipo, a group which came into being at the same time as the Situationists, and in homage to the collaboration of Lauren Berlant and Kathleen Stewart, working under the constraint of the word count in The Hundreds (2019).

References Bakhtin, M. (1986), Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, trans. V. W. McGee, Austin: University of Texas Press. Berlant, L., and K. Stewart (2019), The Hundreds, Durham, NC : Duke University Press. Boone, B., and R. Glück, R. (1981), La Fontaine, San Francisco: Black Star Series. Clément, C. (1987), The Weary Sons of Freud, trans. Nicole Ball, London; New York: Verso. Debord, G. (1957), “Report on the Construction of Situations and on the International Situationist Tendency’s Conditions of Organization and Action”, trans. Ken Knabb, http://www.bopsecrets.org/SI/report.htm accessed May6, 2022. Deleuze, G. (2006), The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, trans. T. Conley, London: Continuum. Deleuze, G., and F. Guattari (1987), A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Minneapolis, MN : University of Minnesota Press. Derrida, J. (1987), “The Purveyor of Truth”, in The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Gibbs, A. (2005), “Fictocriticism, Affect, Mimesis: Engendering Differences”, http://www. textjournal.com.au/april05/gibbs.htm accessed May 6, 2022. Grosz, E. (2001), Architecture from the Outside: Essays on Virtual and Real Space, Boston, MA : MIT Press. Harkin, N. (2015), Dirty Words, Melbourne: Cordite Books. Harkin, N. (2021), archival-poetics, Sydney: Vagabond. Harney, S., and F. Moten (2004), “The University and the Undercommons: SEVEN THESES ”, Social Text 22 (2 (79)): 101–15. Harris, R. (1980), The Language-Makers, London: Duckworth. Harris, R. (1995), Signs of Writing, London: Routledge. Johnson, M. (1987), The Body in the Mind: The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination, and Reason, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Johnson, M. (2007), The Meaning of the Body: Aesthetics of Human Understanding, Chicago: Chicago University Press. Latour, B. (1996), Aramis, or the Love of Technology, trans. Catherine Porter, Cambridge, MA : Harvard University Press.

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Lazzarato, M. (2014), Signs and Machines: Capitalism and the Production of Subjectivity, trans. J. D. Jordan, Boston, MA : MIT Press. Lilley, K. (2018), “Harm’s Way”, in Tilt, Sydney: Vagabond Press. Lilley, K. (2021), “Archiving the Undercommons: an Infrastructural Reading of Contemporary Australian Poetry”, in D. Disney and M. Hall (eds.), New Directions in Contemporary Australian Poetry, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Philip, M. NourbeSe (2008), Zong! Middletown, Wesleyan University Press. Proust, M. (2003), In Search of Lost Time Volume 1: Swann’s Way, New York: The Modern Library. Riley, D. (2004), “ ‘A Voice Without a Mouth’: Inner Speech”, Qui Parle 14 (2): 57–104. Riley, D. (2005), Impersonal Passion: Language as Affect, Durham, NC : Duke University Press. Stern, D. (1985), The Interpersonal World of the Infant: A View from Psychoanalysis and Developmental Psychology, New York: Basic Books. Stewart, K. (2012), “Pockets”, Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 9 (4): 365–68. Vygotsky, L. S. (1986), Thought and Language, ed. A. Kozulin, Cambridge, MA : MIT Press. Whittaker, Alison (2018), Blakwork, Broome, Western Australia: Magabala.

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Unwriting for the Anthropocene: Looking at the Disaster from the Inside . . . David R. Cole

Introduction We are plunging over the edge, into a disaster, the disaster of climate change created by us, and called the Anthropocene (Clark 2014). Academic writing is singularly brilliant at dividing up the problem of climate change into component (disconnected) parts, and nullifying possible solutions/progress through and due to this separation. This chapter will explore the “unwriting” of the traditional academic approach with respect to the Anthropocene, by applying the theory of Deleuze and Guattari (1984) to its analysis. Initially, there is the Deleuzian (1994) philosophical endeavor, which undermines the Western domination of thought (i.e., as transcendence/territorializing), by attending to its break-out spots and weak points. Secondly, we may add Guattari’s (1996) social ecology, which suggests that another regime of thought and life is possible with respect to the Anthropocene, and the continual (re)creation of our own destruction. Combined, the philosophical analysis of Deleuze and Guattari (1984) leads to the idea that academic unwriting could (re)connect us, despite the synchronous effects of plunging and resurfacing into disparate knowledge specialisms, being taken along preset methodological tramlines to nowhere/dead ends, and being set abstract data analyses, that have little effect in the Anthropocene, other than proving their own efficacies; and that, in sum, a (re)formed academic unwriting could (re)make a new whole (in thought and action): beyond capitalism and schizophrenia. To get closer to this new whole, this chapter will illustrate unwriting for the Anthropocene as a mode of “theory-fiction,” with narrative writing taken from the 2019–20 Australian bushfire season, one of the greatest disasters (so far) of the Anthropocene.

The Foundations of the Disaster Fire is endemic in the Australian landscape. The vegetation and animals have evolved strategies for regeneration and survival over millennia, as fire takes holds in the remaining forests that are scattered around the edges of the immense dry desert center 137

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of the continent during the hot months. In contrast, Australian human communities have developed a system of volunteers, who pass a basic training course, before being registered as volunteer fire fighters. Some of the volunteers take their firefighting duties very seriously, and go on to pass numerous further courses, and wear the badges for these courses on their uniforms to demonstrate their seniority and experience. Indeed, the Rural Fire Serve (RFS) is run on a quasi-military basis, with strict hierarchies and protocols adhered to and enforced at all times. Yet the majority of the volunteer brigade remains dormant, unused until a disaster occurs such as the 2019–20 black summer bushfire season. I had been a volunteer firefighter since 2013, when a fire had swept behind my house, one valley away from coming over the ridge and engulfing our line of houses. The topography of the Blue Mountains of New South Wales (NSW) is one of very steep forested valleys that meander through the landscape and act as fire channels after ignition on windy searing days, and 2019 had been especially hot and dry, with no rainfall for months. It took a single lightning strike in an inaccessible region of ancient forest to the north of the Blue Mountains to start Australia’s largest recorded fire from a single ignition point. Further, a fire had started to the south of the Blue Mountains region, so that my place of residence was effectively surrounded to the north and south by fire. These two enormous and growing fires smoldered in the undergrowth for weeks, until a windy day fed them with oxygen and they made runs through the deep ravines and gathered pace and energy, as they extended menacingly towards human inhabitation.

Deleuze, Difference, and Fire Deleuze’s philosophical project, if taken as a whole and applied to problems such as asking the question as to how to “unwrite” academic detachment in the Anthropocene, is an extraordinary one. Deleuze does not “fit in” with traditional philosophical traditions and categories such as the empiricists, phenomenology, the rationalists or deconstruction. Rather, he looked to invent a category of his own, and used concepts and distinctions to write against the easy categorization and representation of his work. Admittedly, there have been attempts to define his philosophy under headings such as vitalist because of his admiration for Bergson (Deleuze 1991), or materialist, because he has written against traditions such as Hegelian and Platonic idealism (Deleuze 1994). However, none of these definitions entirely work throughout Deleuze’s oeuvre, as he gave himself the freedom to think and write otherwise, and this is one of the first clues to the nature of “unwriting”—not to fall into cliché, the obvious, the normatively agreed in advance, the sealed, the closed, or the previously understood and/or given (Deleuze 1995). Rather, Deleuze’s philosophy may be figured as the ceaseless search for escape routes from the ways in which thought may be trapped, curtailed, subjectivized, and/or stuck in place by exterior, dominating forces and powers. In effect, unwriting as defined here is the process of searching for escape routes from the domain of previously represented forms, language types, and expressions. This is a seemingly impossible task, given that as academics we are continuously implored to write in certain knowledge frames, and that there are preset styles of academic writing that conform to

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the sciences, humanities, arts, etc. One way to understand the Deleuzian philosophical influence on unwriting for the Anthropocene is to take a line of argument back to Heraclitus, as an origin and source for the maverick image of thought coming from process philosophy (Graham 2021). One might say that locating the source of Deleuzian unwriting in a figure such as Heraclitus, and following on with others such as Whitehead (1957) and Simondon (2017), simultaneously locates the writing in the western tradition, but within that tradition, whilst prioritizing non-subjective flows and processes that constitute its unwinding. In contrast to, for example, Derrida (Wolfreys 1998), who perceived a homogeneity in logos, and hence his philosophy questions this self-same repetition of logos, by looking for traces and differences in western philosophy and literature, Deleuzian unwriting unpacks the flows and dissonances that emerge as real differences in thought (and not only reason). Heraclitus perceived everything beginning in fire (Graham 2021), and in the context of this piece of unwriting, fire is the constitutive process impulse (substance), it is a motive element, that is immanent to the situation, and that provides the impetus for thought from the inside. Thinking differently about fire and its effects in the Anthropocene, and unwriting these effects beyond tired and separated academic categories, is a preparation for the future, and the known facts of climate change (Randall 2009). Deleuze’s method has been called “dramatization,” and in this context it involves seeing fire not as something far off and remote, but as entering us, as we venture further into a changed anthropogenic environment. Fire is the event that we are creating in time through our collective existences.

Heading towards the Disaster The temperature on that day was predicted to reach 48.5°C. I was billeted along with other members of my brigade to a staging post. Luckily, the staging post was a local air-conditioned fire shed that belonged to a neighboring fire crew. By this time, the fire to the north of our location had been raging for weeks, but it was the southern fire that caught our attention, as thick plumes of smoke could be seen if we dared to venture briefly out into the stifling heat to take a look. The southern fire, that had started in the Warragamba region of New South Wales, was taking a run, and the prophecy of complete encirclement was coming true, as we were being surrounded by fire walls. We were part of a strike team, billeted to the staging post to be sent out to tackle any blaze that approached residential areas. However, even though we could clearly see the immense fire to the south making a run and coming closer to us, no word came to mobilize, and we settled into hours of waiting for the orders to leave. Eventually at 5:00 p.m., after waiting for the whole day to do something, the order came through, we were to go south and help fight an “out of control” blaze in the Nowra region of south-east New South Wales. Suddenly, we were awakened from our stupor and clambered aboard our awaiting fire trucks that had been sitting in the burning sun all day. I was squashed onto the back seat of the truck, with my three other firefighters and our protective equipment, slung anywhere that we could fit it in the packed environment. We were part of an official strike force, and that meant we could travel with our sirens blazing,

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and ride through traffic lights. Cars pulled to the sides of the road as we approached. It was exciting, the windows of the truck were open in lieu of air conditioning. The hot wind streamed into the interior stuffed with sweaty bodies. However, the mood in the truck changed as we trundled along the highways heading south. In the distance, and coming increasingly closer, was the largest plume of smoke any of us had ever seen. This what was latterly named as the Currowan fire, and that burnt a huge area of bush in the Shoalhaven region of New South Wales and beyond, covering half a million hectares of land and destroying 312 homes. The smoke plume filled the entire horizon. As we approached the fire, we could see large formations of Pyrocumulus clouds above and to the sides of the smoke plume. Ironically, given that it was the hottest (and driest) day of the year, rain started to fall from these clouds, made by the fire. We were heading straight into it.

Guattari, and Unwriting the Disaster Deleuze’s base for unwriting is a philosophical one; in contrast, Guattari (2013) presents an anti-psychiatric, transversal, or schizoanalytic mode of unwriting. Guattari was initially a student of Lacan, but through heterodox practice at La Borde institute in France he developed a new approach to psychoanalysis, that reversed the notion of a personal Freudian subconscious that was a receptacle for repressed thoughts and sexual desire, or in Lacan’s terms, a lack, that was filled by the symbolic order, that consists of: the social world of linguistic communication, intersubjective relations, knowledge of ideological conventions, and the acceptance of the law (Lundberg 2012). In contrast to Lacan, Guattari prioritized the unconscious in the social field, saw the unconscious not as a lack, but as something expressive and potentially free, and he sought the experimental and intellectual means to connect the unconscious as a fully social phenomenon with this potential freedom. Guattari (2009) recognized the environment in the formation of the psyche, as well as the social, but adds the machine as an important formative aspect of the self, and in particular emphasized the “machinic phylum,” which is the milieu through which the social world is processed. Guattarian unwriting could be understood as a machinic process through which reality can be routed and diverted in terms of influences such as IWC (Integrated World Capitalism) (Guattari 1981). In essence, Guattari’s schema for unwriting attempts to face the overwhelming influences of capitalism on the psyche. In contrast to Deleuze (1994), this schema is not meant to found a new philosophy that thinks otherwise to dominant and homogenising western traditions, but is designed to help patients with real psychic difficulties under capitalism. Hence, the problem that the Guattarian project encounters, here reconfigured as “unwriting,” is that one is immediately faced with an almost insurmountable wall of capitalist endeavor to negotiate, and this wall is constantly broadcast and rebroadcast through the global media (Pettman 2016). In effect, we are continually bombarded with pro-capitalist messages, which can take any shape or form, can morph into other forms, and have the combined implication of seizing the unconscious and rendering it submissive to pro-consumer messaging through sonic immersion (cf. Herzogenrath

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2017). Guattari’s own writing can suffer from a lack of clarity and a complicated system for dealing with the semiotics of integrated world capitalism (IWC), making it almost impossible to purposefully use for, in our case, working out a mode of “unwriting for the Anthropocene.” Rather, parallel to the uptake of Deleuze’s new philosophy as unwriting in terms of fire and difference, Guattari’s solo works helps in terms of unwriting with consideration of the nature of the disaster itself. The Anthropocene is primarily a designation of this epoch as a human-produced one, and this designation was initially connected to the changes in the atmosphere that human-induced activity has caused through CO2 emissions. Hence, one might surmise that the disaster of the Anthropocene might be addressed through techno-scientific solutions that reduce CO2 emissions (Soriano 2018). However, this is clearly not the case, otherwise these solutions, such as carbon sequestration or geoengineering would have already been implemented. Rather, the disaster of the Anthropocene requires a wholesale turning away from the use of fossil fuels in every aspect of human life, and this behavioral change is more than a choice, or an external responsibility of government and corporations, but is a deeply felt and believed desire. Currently, most of the world’s population accept the status quo, and live as best they can within the parameters of the world system of fossil fuel capitalism. Oil is still pumped in enormous quantities, coal is still mined and shipped around the world (Mitchell 2009). In sum, Guattari’s unwriting treats these phenomena as parts of a machine in which we are fixed, and it creates the situation in which are desires are stuck. Hence, to do anything about the disaster of the Anthropocene, we have to unplug ourselves from the machine, and reboot on a different course to avoid the disaster, which will ultimately lead to the sixth great extinction event. In corollary, Guattari’s solo work acts as a recursive and fluid means to circumvent the human conditioning of IWC, and helps to chart a way out through unwriting the disaster from the inside, by mobilizing internal and machinic forces to aid with this endeavor.

Arriving at the Disaster We pulled into the southern NSW town of Nowra after passing through the threshold of the Pyrocumulus cloud storm. Residents who were braving the outside conditions, lined the streets, and waved, cheered and clapped, as we sped along the urban roads, full emergency signals switched on. The “officer in charge” was having difficulties with the radio communications, and even though we were travelling in a convey, required instructions as to where we were meant to be going. Hence, he passed the radio duties on to the very experienced firefighter who was sitting next to me and seemed to be capable of fixing anything. He was soon madly playing with the radio devices until an audible signal was achieved. We all sat and listened to the random messages and instructions that were being passed on the fire brigade bandwidth. It was a chaos of confusion and mixed instructions. The whole of the south coast seemed to be engulfed in an enormous fire event and we were now in the middle of it. The officer in charge barked an order to the driver about the meeting place, which was in a local fire station. After rounding a few more corners, we arrived at the congregation point, and

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unconsciously took note of the array of the red fire trucks already parked there, part of our strike team. Leaving the safety and squashed intimacy of the fire truck was a shock for all of us. The wind from the Pyrocumulus cloud storm swirled in every direction, making speech impossible, vision difficult, and walking across the car park of the fire station to the shed a major endeavor. Firefighters were milling about, some sheltering from the storm, others checking that everything on their fire trucks was still in place; a couple of firefighters were having a nervous cigarette in a sheltered air pocket in which their lit nicotine relief would not blow away. Suddenly, the attention of the scene was drawn to an RFS vehicle that swerved into the parking lot. It was the local commander, the one who had ordered us down to this region. He would give the direct instruction as to what we were to do, and where we had to go. The RFS vehicle came to a halt, and the commander emerged into the storm, clutching a large map that flapped about like a flag on a boat at sea. He struggled to lay the map out on the bonnet of the still warm car, and several firefighters immediately came to his aid, and held the corners of the flapping paper, to make sure that it did not blow away. Everyone sheltering in the shed or milling about in the car park instinctively wafted over to form a collective throng of firefighters that partially sheltered the commander, the map, and the vehicle from the storm. He started to speak. “Well, as most of you know, we are here,” pointing to a mark on the map that we all craned our necks and eyes to see; it was the position of the fire station. “You will go going here,” he pointed to a road that jutted into a large patch of white. “The whole of this area is on fire,” he swirled his finger around the white space of the map, which contained the road that was our destination. “You are on property protection. I will follow you down; we will allocate two trucks per house. These properties are right next to the fire front. I want to say good luck to you all. It is hell out there, but we will be right behind you.” Feeling rather stunned, and not consoled at all by the words of our leader, we trailed back to our trucks. Our truck leader gave us a quick run through of the protocols we had to adhere to, and we were on our way, “to hell.”

Deleuze/Guattari, and Unwriting Capitalism and Schizophrenia The concept of progress must be grounded in the idea of catastrophe. That things are “status quo” is the catastrophe. It is not an ever-present possibility but what in each case is given. Thus: hell is not something that awaits us, but this life here and now. Benjamin 1999: 473

This quote from Walter Benjamin has never been more relevant than in the Anthropocene. It is the proposition of this writing, that academic writing (in general) has to be responsive to the changing climatic conditions in the Anthropocene (from the inside); hence the narrative of the Anthropocene, which is written in between the explanations of unwriting. The conditions that have upheld human society since the beginning of the Holocene are changing so fast (Malm and Hornborg 2014) that one

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might define this process as the catastrophe, or as hell, and as a continuous present in which we are living, called the Anthropocene. In this section, the concept of unwriting will be unpacked with respect to the joint writing of Deleuze and Guattari (1984) in order to bring us closer to the reformulation of academic writing proposed by this chapter. Firstly, AntiOedipus (Deleuze & Guattari 1984) was written in the shadow of the May ’68 student rebellion in Paris. Hence, it is a text that embodies and demonstrates the restless and rebellious action of the May ’68 event, in which, even though it was ultimately unsuccessful, at least something happened. The power of the synthesis of Anti-Oedipus is that it incorporates and shakes into alignment, post-war antiestablishment writing with Deleuze’s philosophical endeavors and Guattari’s antipsychiatry. At the time, there was still the sense that the cultural revolution in the 1960s, which had led to a wave of experimentation by writers, artists, theorists, and social commentators, could henceforth lead to significant and widespread social change (Horn 2007). We might look back at the 1960s as being idealistic and having in many ways helped to produce and reinforce the conservative, reactionary politics of the subsequent modern police state, yet in terms of the unwriting of this article, the 1960s are pivotal to comprehending the force and power that led to the first combined text of Deleuze and Guattari (1984). Further, the reason that the 1960s are pivotal to the unwriting of this article is because the combined artistic and creative energies that feed into Anti-Oedipus present a mode of questioning the mainstream of capitalist endeavor that has long since diminished and severely curtailed. Since that time, even though left wing, Marxist and alternative theorists and commentators are commonplace (e.g., Eagleton 2018), the overwhelming nature of one world capitalism and especially its proponents in and through the media, has made these efforts to undermine and work against the economic and financial capital mainstream increasingly reactionary (cf. Kotsko 2020). This point, which underpins the notion of unwriting for the Anthropocene, has at least three dimensions:

The Philosophical Dimension Deleuze and Guattari (1984) name the philosophy that they are working with as transcendental materialism. The transcendental aspect of the thesis corresponds to Deleuze’s earlier “transcendental empiricism” that he described in his work on Difference & Repetition (1994), and the influence of Kant on the thesis in terms of synthesis (conjunctive, connective and disjunctive), and the focus on critique. The materialist aspect of the thesis of Anti-Oedipus comes from Marx, and the particular reading of Marx in Anti-Oedipus is not a straightforward historical materialism; nor does it posit that capitalism will be overcome by the forces of the proletariat, as they rise up against the oppression of the bourgeoisie (Weil 2013). Rather, the argument is that the forces of capital will be undermined from within, due to the immanence of capital, which has to exceed its previous boundaries in order to flow. Deleuze and Guattari (1984) refigure a passage from the Grundrissse (Marx 2005), to fit in their notion of flows of money and machines with social change and desire and to connect the functions of material flows with the disjunctive forces in consciousness that create

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schizophrenia. In sum, Anti-Oedipus gives us a thinking platform to think other than capitalism is a universal machine engulfing everything in its path to process and to create profit. In the terms of Anti-Oedipus, capitalism deterritorializes (and reterritorializes) everything, whether natural resources or human subjectivities, and subsequently codes them to make consumption-production possible in universal terms. Deleuze and Guattari (1984) assemble the elements of capitalist functioning as a monstrous machine, not to suggest a clear and easy way out of its machinations but to leave the door open for the formulation of schizoanalysis, a reversal of psychoanalysis (Guattari 1998), which is a positive task in the light of the capitalist machine, and not a further entrapment of and by its desire (cf. Cole and Moustakim 2021). In totum, the philosophical dimension of Anti-Oedipus adds up to a thinking resource to escape capitalist exploitation, without recourse to a dialogic process that might figure one as the other, and be incorporated as such into further capitalist machinations, as can simple opposition, for example, to be found in the oscillations of left-right politics in the mainstream, or in climate change protest (Giddens 2009). Rather, Anti-Oedipus gives one the freedom to think otherwise to the functioning of capitalism, whilst being able to conceive of its functioning to its greatest and (in terms of the Anthropocene) its most terrifying extent. This dimension sits underneath unwriting as an unconscious resource with respect to what it can achieve (from within).

The Time Dimension Stating that we are now in the Anthropocene adds the time dimension to this analysis and to unwriting. Human-created climate change is happening, taking us away from the stable conditions of the Holocene, and introducing instability, contingency, and chaos into the life of the planet (Dalby 2014). The problem is that we don’t exactly know when or how these new features will emerge. Similarly, Anti-Oedipus charts the development of the capitalist machine from the practices of primitive and feudal systems, but does not suggest exactly when these capitalist processes will overcut themselves through deterritorialization, or precisely how the immanent rupturing from within will occur (cf. Noys 2014). Rather, in line with the vitalist (Packham 2012) and monist (Goff 2011) elements of unwriting, the time dimension itself will appear to fragment, and this suggests that unwriting is not a question of superimposing the problem of when in time onto a mechanized, calendar, linear clock time. Rather, the problem that unwriting confronts is one of time itself, demonstrated, for example, by the multiple timelines of a novel such as Slaughterhouse 5 (Vonnegut 1969). Thus, the time dimension is included in unwriting as the ability to produce multiple timelines from similar convergence and divergence points.

The Writing Dimension Deleuze and Guattari (1984) state that the capitalist machine has no use for writing. This is because the execution of writing does not fit in with the quantified clock time of the factory, or the capitalized calculations of surplus value in terms of the inputs (costs) and the outputs of the writers. Rather, the anti-establishment writing of the post-war

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period that they reference, and that may be supplemented by the earlier works of Proust, Kafka, or Lovecraft, which questioned the reality in which we exist, and suggested new narrative forms to explain it (Eco 1994). Indeed, the types of writing that feed into the unwriting of this chapter set up the scope of writing as being fundamentally about delving into the unconscious realms of experience, and in producing something new. This process and challenge stands in contrast to the majority of academic production today, which is determined in advance by the academy as following highly specialist lines of knowledge, and/or of having a specific monetary payoff, such as being connected to grants, awards, and positive PR (cf. Cole and Somerville 2020). In contrast, the unwriting of this chapter is closer to art, and as having the artistic intent of rendering the insensible sensible for consciousness to comprehend. In the specific case of this chapter, this endeavor involves reconnecting ourselves as frequently disjointed and displaced academics to the reality of the Anthropocene.

Inside the Disaster We finally made it to the map coordinates in our strike force convoy. It was now deep into the night. The wind still swirled and howled mercilessly. We couldn’t directly see the fire, but we could hear it all around us. Further, the air was alight with embers that floated like disabled fireflies in the vortex of the night. We were allotted individual houses to defend. The properties were strung out along a single track, and two fire trucks per house would defend either side of the house. We trundled slowly along the long driveway and reached the property that we had been tasked to defend. The inhabitants had long since evacuated. We were given an operations brief by our team leader, and hopped out of the truck and immediately leapt into action. I had been paired with the very experienced firefighter, who seemed to have an encyclopaedic knowledge of everything connected to fire. He instructed me to roll the hoses, connect them to the truck and fix a suitable nozzle for the operation. After scrambling around somewhat in the dark of the side of the truck, I found what I thought he required, and began to roll the hoses, and make the necessary fixtures. However, of course I hadn’t got it right, and the “firefighter of the year” was impelled to systematically correct my shoddy, imprecise work. However, within a short period of time we were ready to go. We were a two-man team, assigned to defend one corner of the house. We went to our specific space and waited, hose and nozzle at the ready. The fire was somewhere in the trees, and it could apparently emerge at any time, or at least that was what we were told by the officer in charge. However, the fire did not come out of its forest retreat. In the end, we put our equipment down, and milled around for the rest of the night. We chatted amongst ourselves, but never strayed far from our fixed position. There were flare-ups in the trees, as the fire made runs, but the flames never broached our position, or launched an attack on the houses. A highlight of the night came when the commander arrived in our lane with Chinese takeaway. It was hard to know what was in the plastic containers in the dark, and I chose a tasteless dish of overcooked vegetables. Anyway, it was free, and it broke up the boredom of the endless night. On the way back, we were lumped together uncomfortably in a people carrier; we stopped at a McDonald’s along

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the highway and ordered coffee and buns. There were other blackened, wasted firefighters, police, and a few assorted personnel in uniforms. It was like a scene from a future war film, focusing on a congregation of servicemen, supping on their rewards for fighting in the early morning. It was a strangely desolate scene.

Conclusion: Unwriting for the Anthropocene I went into the field 24 times during the catastrophic fire season of 2019–20. During that period, I simultaneously wondered about my continuing role as an academic, and the part we play in climate change. It seems to me that the science of the Anthropocene has been agreed upon: human activity is warming the planet through CO2 emissions (Steffen et al. 2018). However, the problem remains with respect to knowing what to do about it. Prior to the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, there had been a groundswell of support and demonstration in favor of doing something about climate change, embodied by movements such as Extinction Rebellion and Greta Thunberg’s “Fridays for Future.” However, movement in this space at university level seemed to be limited to specific subject areas, such as ecology and environmental studies, that particularly address the issues of climate change. Now, in the light of corporations and governments declaring a move to net zero emissions by 2050, and organizations such as the IPCC publishing their latest report (IPCC, forthcoming), university bodies seem much more willing to be part of the pro-climate change action group. This chapter adds to this momentum, by proposing a writing practice to permeate and supplant the traditional distinctions and apartness that frequently exists in academic production (cf. Cole 2021): unwriting. The narrative that is inter-woven into this theorization of unwriting serves as an example of relation and expression in the Anthropocene, and not simply as an alternative mode of academic writing. Rather, unwriting embodies communication and affect, and allows the writer to get to the heart of the matter, without compromising their principles and being able to effectively tell the story of the Anthropocene. What unwriting points to is being able to keep hold of specific insights through writing directly and honestly about the Anthropocene, without psychically selling out to the pressures and forces that currently underpin most academic operations (for example, as portrayed by academic ranking and funding imperatives). One may state that this is simultaneously the easiest and most difficult task confronting academics and their writing practices today.

References Benjamin, W. (1999), The Arcades Project, R. Tiedemann (ed.), trans. K. McLaughlin, Cambridge, MA : The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Clark, N. (2014), “Geo-politics and the Disaster of the Anthropocene”, Sociological Review 62: 19–37. Cole, D.R. (2021), “Caught between the Air and Earth: A Schizoanalytic Critique of the Role of the Education in the Development of a New Airport”, Educational Philosophy

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and Theory, online pre-print: DOI: 10.1080/00131857.2020.1864322 accessed May 6, 2022. Cole, D. R., and M. Moustakim (2021), “The Flash of a Van: A Cartography of a Mobile Educational Initiative in the Claymore District of Sydney”, European Educational Research Journal, pre-print, https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/147490 41211020244 accessed May 6, 2022. Cole, D. R., and M. Somerville (2020), “The Affect(s) of Literacy Learning in the Mud”, Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, online pre-print, DOI: 10.1080/01596306.2020.1818183 Dalby, S. (2014), “Rethinking Geopolitics: Climate Security in the Anthropocene”, Global Policy 5 (1): 1–9. Deleuze, G. ([1966] 1991), Bergsonism, trans. H. Tomlinson and B. Habberjam, New York: Zone Books. Deleuze, G. ([1968] 1994), Difference & Repetition, trans. P. Patton, New York: Columbia University Press. Deleuze, G. ([1990] 1995), Negotiations, trans. M. Joughin, New York: Columbia University Press. Deleuze, G., and F. Guattari ([1972] 1984), Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism & Schizophrenia, trans. R. Hurley, M. Steen and H. R. Lane, London: Athlone Press. Eagleton, T. (2018), Why Marx Was Right, New Haven, CN : Yale University Press. Eco, U. (1994), Six Walks in the Fictional Woods, Cambridge, MA : Harvard University Press. Giddens, A. (2009), Politics of Climate Change, Cambridge: Polity. Goff, P. (ed.) (2011), Spinoza on Monism, London: Palgrave Macmillan. Graham, D. W. (2021), “Heraclitus”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2021 Edition), E. N. Zalta (ed.), https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2021/entries/ heraclitus/ accessed May 6, 2022. Guattari, F. (1981), “Integrated world capitalism and molecular revolution”, presentation at the Conference on Information and/as New Spaces of Liberty (CINEL), Rio de Janeiro, https://adamkingsmith.files.wordpress.com/2016/10/integrated-world-capitalism-andmolecular-revolution.pdf accessed May 6, 2022. Guattari, F. ([1989] 1996), The Three Ecologies, trans. I. Pindar and P. Sutton, London: Athlone Press. Guattari, F. (1998), “Schizoanalysis”, trans. M. Zayani, The Yale Journal of Criticism 11 (2): 433–39. Guattari, F. ([1995] 2009), “La Borde: A clinic unlike any other”, in F. Guattari, Chaosophy: texts and Interviews 1972–1977, 176–94, trans. D.L. Sweet, J. Becker and T. Adkins, Los Angeles: Semiotext(e). Guattari, F. ([1989] 2013), Schizoanalytic Cartographies, trans. A. Goffey, London: Bloomsbury. Herzogenrath, B. (ed.) (2017), Sonic Thinking: A Media Philosophical Approach, New York: Bloomsbury Publishing. Horn, G. R. (2007), The Spirit of ’68: Rebellion in Western Europe and North America, 1956–1976, Oxford: Oxford University Press. IPCC (forthcoming), Climate Change 2021: The Physical Science Basis. Contribution of Working Group I to the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [Masson-Delmotte, V., P. Zhai, A. Pirani, S.L. Connors, C. Péan, S. Berger, N. Caud, Y. Chen, L. Goldfarb, M. I. Gomis, M. Huang, K. Leitzell, E. Lonnoy,

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J. B.R. Matthews, T. K. Maycock, T. Waterfield, O. Yelekçi, R. Yu and B. Zhou, eds.]. Cambridge University Press. In Press. Kotsko, A. (2020), The Political Theology of Late Capital, San Francisco: Stanford University Press. Lundberg, C. (2012), Lacan in Public: Psychoanalysis and the Science of Rhetoric, Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press. Malm, A., and A. Hornborg (2014), “The Geology of Mankind? A Critique of the Anthropocene Narrative”, The Anthropocene Review, 1 (1): 62–69. Marx, K. ([1858] 2005), Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy, Harmondsworth: Penguin UK . Mitchell, T. (2009), “Carbon Democracy”, Economy and Society 38 (3): 399–432. Noys, B. (2014), Malign Velocities: Accelerationism and Capitalism, Winchester: John Hunt Publishing. Packham, C. (2012), Eighteenth-century Vitalism: Bodies, Culture, Politics, Geneva: Springer. Pettman, D. (2016), Infinite Distraction, Cambridge: Polity Press. Randall, R. (2009), “Loss and Climate Change: The Cost of Parallel Narratives”, Ecopsychology 1 (3): 118–29. Simondon, G. (2017), On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects, Minneapolis: Univocal Publishing. Soriano, C. (2018), “The Anthropocene and the Production and Reproduction of Capital”, The Anthropocene Review, 5 (2): 202–13. Steffen, W., J. Rockström, K. Richardson, T. M. Lenton, C. Folke, D. Liverman, and H. J. Schellnhuber (2018), “Trajectories of the Earth System in the Anthropocene”, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 115 (33): 8252–59. Vonnegut, K. (1969), Slaughterhouse 5: The Children’s Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death, New York: Random House. Weil, S. (2013), Oppression and Liberty, London: Routledge. Whitehead, A. N. (1957), Process and Reality, New York, NY: Macmillan. Wolfreys, J. (1998), Deconstruction-Derrida, New York: Macmillan International Higher Education.

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La Mise-en-Abîme: Placing Academic Writing in Scare Quotes Mick Wilson

Irritating Pedagogies There are diverse circumstances within which academic writing is problematized. Linda Tuhiwai Smith provides a compelling instance of this when she writes: To begin with reading, one might cite the talk in which Maori writer Patricia Grace undertook to show that “Books Are Dangerous.” She argues that there are four things that make many books dangerous to indigenous readers: (1) they do not reinforce our values, actions, customs, culture and identity; (2) when they tell us only about others they are saying that we do not exist; (3) they may be writing about us but are writing things which are untrue; and (4) they are writing about us but saying negative and insensitive things which tell us that we are not good. Although Grace is talking about school texts and journals, her comments apply also to academic writing. Much of what I have read has said that we do not exist, that if we do exist it is in terms which I cannot recognize, that we are no good and that what we think is not valid. Smith 1999: 35

For several years now, more than a decade in fact, I have been teaching courses on research methods to arts practitioners (artists, musicians, designers, filmmakers, and so forth.) A recurrent theme in the discussions that such courses engender is a disparaging of academic writing, albeit in less existentially fraught terms than Smith. Typically, in the very first session of these courses the participants will often express a disdain for having to write academically. They often indicate a sense of frustration, both intense and diffuse, at the imposition of certain demands to demonstrate (inter alia) conceptual clarity, reasoned exegesis, citation of recognized authorities, and adherence to stylistic conventions and formulae. This last includes such perceived strictures as avoidance of first-person constructions like “I believe that . . .” and “I feel . . .”; restraint from anecdotal accounts of personal experience; and abstinence from emotional and affective disclosures. It also includes such seeming imperatives as the necessity to use 149

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specialist and obscure terms; the requirement to adopt a “neutral” voice; and the demand that key terms are defined at the first point of use within a text. In protesting against the impositions of academic writing, there are certain recurrent appeals to “practice,” “the aesthetic,” “embodiment,” “situated knowing,” overcoming “Cartesian dualism,” the need to “decolonize the university,” the need to recognize, resist, and no longer reproduce “epistemic violence” and “epistemicide,” the importance of affect, of queering, of “knowledge from below,” the critique of representation, and the urgency of leaving the old tyranny of Eurocentrism behind. It would be fair to say that these formulaic utterances disparaging “academic writing,” rehearsed each year by participants with appropriate expressive gusto (and even an occasional smattering of self-righteous disapprobation), are for me, just a tad irritating. Perhaps this is because I am deeply invested in writing and in the possibility of the academic institution. Perhaps my personal and professional attachment to the work of the university, including its many genres of writing, means that in my overidentification with the academic institution I feel personally affronted and disparaged. However, I am not so fond of that style of explanation. I prefer to believe that I am irritated because this scenario is just irritating in its repetitiousness: it’s irritating to go through the ritual disdaining of ritualism; to have the canon of all those dissident and insurgent knowledges recklessly detonated in the seminar room; to become a proxy target in place of the system, capital, the patriarchy, the institution and so forth; to be designated the bearer of ill by subjects working strenuously to secure their own self-image as agents of the good against all those phobic alterities accorded residency in my bad heart; and to be the surface of projection for all those unhappy experiences of acquiring literacy, of schooling, of parenting, and of becoming subject within a grossly unjust distribution of violence and power. And so, in a spirit of intellectual generosity, I try to reciprocate the irritation. “When you say ‘academic writing’ . . . how do you mean?” I offer innocently. “Do you mean like the writing in say Nature, the weekly international journal in the natural sciences that eschews footnotes,1 and Social Text, the USAmerican cultural studies journal caught up in the famous Sokal Hoax,2 and the writing produced by something like the Transnational Institute (TNI)3 a research and advocacy platform for global social justice, and the writing of STS scholars like Donna Haraway and Karen Berad, and of critical race theorists like Stuart Hall and Paul Gilroy?” Flooding with concrete instances of divergent protocols and modes of address usually creates a little helpful confusion. Then, if a little bit of irritation is spreading through our student body, but the irritation is still not quite evenly and fairly distributed among us, I will often proceed to do an oral-dump of as many names as possible that might resonate with the participants’ preferred positions and espoused values: “Gayatri Spivak, Anabel Quijano, Walter Mignolo, Denise Ferreira da Silva, Gilles Deleuze, Achille Mbembe, Fred Moten, Saidiya Hartman, Paul Feyerabend, Jacques Rancière . . .?” On good days, everyone gets a little bit annoyed, but not so annoyed as to leave indignantly, rather just annoyed enough to stay in the conversation and see where we might get to after our ritual exchange of opening gambits has been dutifully performed in the seminar space: libations have been poured out; the ancestors have been invoked; the fun can begin. Perhaps the trap of the institutional apparatus has been well and truly sprung here. On

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the one hand, the request for defining key terms has been set in play; the list of citations initiated; and the move away from centralizing personal testimony to other genres of persuasive speech and collective discursivities has been enacted. On the other hand, it might be that eventually Europe is re-decentered, and talk of world-making words and world-destroying words may yet set the world to spin on its axis with renewed eccentricity. Different, often new trajectories emerge after the repetitions of these familiar opening gambits. One might want to argue then that the disdaining of academic writing is the initiate’s first move in their induction into the game of academic writing, and that what is rehearsed above is merely a scene of scholar’s mate and the complacency of the mere hack academic. However, this account of ritual pretences and gaming is not the institutionalized cynicism that it might well at first appear to be. Rather, the moves described are efforts to differentiate this field of operations comprising academic writing, in a way that allows something of that field’s multiplicity to come into play, without disavowing the distribution of power and desire that this field is partly structured by, and that it in turn partly structures. Later in the course of these opening sessions, participants are typically invited to reflect on how they previously acquired their literacy skills, asking that this be considered particularly in contrasting relationship with how they developed their primary language skills. The contrasts are then drawn out in terms of their respective settings, relations, economies of affirmation, sources of authority and precedent, and degrees of explicit formulation of learning tasks etc. This exercise is part of the attempt to disclose the ways in which this field of operations called “academic writing” is coordinated with the prior formation of literate subjects through various orders of schooling. It also becomes a way of introducing the less remarked inter-operations of speaking, doing and writing within academic settings—so that the primary orality of many academic settings is also brought into focus, and the genealogies of writing practices may begin to be rehearsed, so that the different stakes of different contentions over academic writing may be interrogated. At this point in the process, the early work of Bourdieu on Academic Discourse (Bourdieu, Passeron and Saint-Martin 1994) is usually cited. This formative research maps, with reference to the pre-1968 university system in France, the ways in which university students are inducted into a mode of discourse through the nuanced enforcement of unspoken socially-contingent codes of “good” style, and the general enculturation process of higher education. It is perhaps easy to recognize aspects of the process described by Bourdieu as in many ways specific to French higher educational practices which have privileged the value of a certain “Cartesian” clarity of prose4 and a French institutional culture that has developed highly codified language standards. However, the focus proposed to the course participants is, firstly, the variability of academic writing stylistic conventions, and secondly, the broader critical proposition that Bourdieu makes to the effect that the university and its disciplines are built upon practices which are for the most part un-reflexive, unexamined and operating in a conservative function of social reproduction. He asserts that a key aspect of learning is the un-reflexive inculcation of norms that establish the unspoken rules of the game. Indeed, these often are precisely the unspoken rules of what may be spoken; rules as to

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what may properly find “serious” reflective treatment and a secure passage into accredited language. Importantly, within the seminar discussion, the disdain of academic writing earlier rehearsed is now revisited and considered as potentially a kind of everyday habit of the academy within the terms Bourdieu outlines. What different functions might these disdaining utterances serve? Following on from the schematic references to Bourdieu, the ways in which the development of colonial-modern epistemological cultures have been marked by different projects to perform a therapy of language is introduced. This summary account of language therapies in the service of the work of knowledge begins with Francis Bacon’s critique of scholars who manifested what he saw as a fastidious overattention to language, to its style, rather than its substance. Bacon pointed to “an excess” and a “distemper of learning” that arises “when men study words and not matter”—and yet he too also found it necessary to pronounce on the nature of words: “for words are but the images of matter” (Bacon [1605] 1873: 25) As commentators have often noted Bacon’s own rhetoric of anti-rhetoric hints at a dilemma of circularity: There is a strong element of irony, if not of bad faith, in Bacon’s attack on rhetoric, even if it may have been more tempered than that of many of his followers. At the same time that he criticised accepted rhetorical practices, denigrated language, and urged his readers to direct their attention instead to nature, Bacon’s success largely lay in providing a new rhetorical model. Bauman & Briggs 2003: 25

The genealogical account of language therapies proposed in service of knowledge projects then proceeds by noting that Bacon’s challenge to the extravagances of language gave rise to a series of projects for the rehabilitation of language that are also marked by the dynamics of aporia and paradox. As Bishop Spratt noted in his history of that institution, the Royal Society was characterized for many decades by the “constant Resolution, to reject all the amplifications, digressions, and swellings of style: to return back to the primitive purity, and shortness, when men deliver’d so many things, almost in an equal number of words” (cited in Steiner 1982: 98.) John Wilkins, a member of the Royal Society and a supervisor of “The Committee for Improving the English Tongue,” proclaimed language as one of the “curses inflicted on mankind.” Wilkins proposed not only a purified and distilled economy of words-and-things in the service of knowledge but also as a therapy for society, politics, and economy.5 That these cautionary measures against the extravagances of language generated in turn unexpected extravagances is further elaborated: e.g., Francis Lodwick (elected to the Royal Society in 1681) proposed A Common Writing: Whereby two, although not understanding one the others Language, yet by the helpe thereof, may communicate their minds one to another (1647); and another of the Society’s Fellows, Wilkins, proposed to displace natural language with an object code. Wilkins argued for the construction of a vast taxonomy of objects, whereby each additional letter of a name would specify a further sub-division in the descent from genera to species to evermore particularized named things. It may be worth recalling that Dean Swift’s parody on the “Grand Academy of Lagado” in Gulliver’s Travels (Swift 1995: Part III, Chap. 5; orig. 1735) was

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targeted at actual projects informed by Bacon’s call for the “plain style,” a project which had been extended via Wilkins’ call for a universal thing-language to the point where the hope was held out that words and things might correspond in a univocal, one-toone manner.6 While it seems at first blush clear that caution should be taken with how language operates and is operated in the work of knowledge, the need to make language articulate itself, to speak itself, precipitates a tendency to circularity, as when Bacon rhetoricizes against rhetoric or when the Royal Society prescribes rules of plain usage against “natural” language, in the quest to better know nature, and produces a fantastic, impossible, totalizing artifice of arboreal representation. The foregoing account of classroom practices—a situation where writings are put to work in different ways and where the work of writing is being contested—is a device used here to manifest the ways in which the discussion of academic textual production is fraught with tensions as to how the generic constellation of the academic writing machine is to be described, analysed, and, for some critics, corrected. On the one hand, there is a widespread tendency toward a reductive account of academic writing as if there were a singular, well-defined and monolithic genre whose regime of orthodoxy stretched from genomics to art history and from literary criticism to medicine. On the other hand, there are those claims made for the ways in which different disciplinary and institutional prescriptions for appropriate style are both explicitly and implicitly transmitted and reproduced as part of performing and policing academic legitimacy. These tensions often generate various forms of self-referential paradox and performative contradiction in the scholarly attempt to improve or proscribe certain writing practices. Rather than a theory of academic writing, it seems more useful—and feasible—to propose a reframing of academic writing as a field of operations articulated to a network of other operational fields. The question of academic writing sits within a space of wider, overlapping but non-identical, problematics that pertain to the affordances and determinations of writing cultures; the entanglements of multiple oralities/literacies; institutional reproduction; disciplinary archipelagos; the formation of the (“transparent” and “affectable”) subject;7 and the frictions of competing onto-epistemological framings. Within the field of operations that is academic writing, certain constructions of, and pronouncements upon, these problematics contend with each other. Academic writing is also a distributed site from within which certain therapies of language are often proposed as a curative means to check the excess, the eccentricity, the exclusionary drives and self-referential enclosures of knowledge work. It is proposed here then that these therapies have a necessarily aporetic, circular or self-complicating tendency that might best be suggested by the literary figure of the mise-en-abîme. In order to outline this approach, I will continue to draw upon the footnotes from my research methods course, the opening scenes of which are outlined above, where talk of academic writing unfolds in a pedagogy of mild reciprocal irritation.

Empire of Footnotes8 One of the oddest situations I’ve ever encountered was a journal article where the first line of text called three footnotes. The third footnote took over three full pages

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to set, even in 8-point type. The fourth note was called on the second line of text. After talking it over with the publisher, it was decided to set the article opening, the first line of text, then the notes on the rest of that page & the next two full pages (with rule, of course), before picking the text up again on the fourth page. Obviously, a poorly written/edited piece. The author would have been better to either incorporate the note in the text or make an appendix of it, and the editor surely should have pointed this out before accepting the article. But it happens.9

This discussion of an odd footnote leading, as it does, to a reflection on the quality of a writer’s and an editor’s work, framed by a discussion between a typographer and a publisher in pursuance of their work, seems a really helpful device to unsettled the image of academic writing as the work of the lone scholar with quill or keyboard, and the image of writing as a solitary unfolding of the authorial subject. It also illustrates the way the footnote has often functioned as a kind of exemplary conceit revealing the essentially pedantic, indulgent and vain character of academic writing. This is a well attested conceit. Noel Coward, in a wonderfully suburban familial image of textual coitus, famously said that: “Having to read footnotes resembles having to go downstairs to answer the door while in the midst of making love” (Grafton 1997: 70, fn. 16). Footnotes are often dismissed as the self-congratulatory pedantry or the back-channel bitching of academics. Not only targets of humour, the footnote has of course manifest its own comic potentials. Grafton gives as an example of the tirelessly witty banter of the footnote, describing how Gibbon, the eighteenth-century historian of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, made fun of his friend M. de Voltaire by noting that he “unsupported by either fact or probability, has generously bestowed the Canary Islands on the Roman empire” (Vol. 1, Chapter 1, fn. 94). The Irish writer Flann O’Brien in a series of novels used the footnote device within a broader lampoon of academic conventions and the self-regarding and petty disputatiousness for which scholars are often ridiculed: Le Fournier, the reliable French commentator (in De Selby—l’Enigme de l”Occideni) has put forward a curious theory regarding these “habitats.” He suggests that de Selby, when writing the Album, paused to consider some point of difficulty and in the meantime engaged in the absent-minded practice known generally as “doodling,” then putting his manuscript away. The next time he took it up he was confronted with a mass of diagrams and drawings which he took to be the plans of a type of dwelling he always had in mind and immediately wrote many pages explaining the sketches. “In no other way,” adds the severe Le Fournier, “can one explain so regrettable a lapse.” O’Brien 1967: fn. 3

The above note is taken from The Third Policeman, a surreal narrative of hellish rural dystopian experience, and it refers to a character called de Selby, a master thinker and researcher credited with some unlikely beliefs and the subject of complex and tendentious debates by scholarly commentators on his oeuvre, such as such as Le Fournier. Although a much-maligned convention, the footnote has also been the subject of sustained scholarship in its own right, as seen in the work of Anthony Grafton (1997),

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the playful scholarship of Chuck Zerby (2003), and the somewhat more-cranky scholarship of Robert Hauptman (2008). As well as being a target of ridicule, the footnote has seemed, to some at least, to do great service for the production of a critically accountable scholarship. It has provided a textual instrument for the citation of evidence, and for the framing of arguments in relationship with contextual scholarship and divergent opinions. It has been used as part of an ethical approach to the acknowledgment of others’ works and achievements and the avoidance of plagiarism. Some disciplines favor the footnote more than others—for example, legal studies and legal opinions are notorious for the dense accumulation of footnote citations of precedent while some disciplines and academic journals frown upon such practices. Thus, the International Journal of Business and Economics for many years informed intending authors that “Endnotes and appendices are discouraged but allowed provided that the number of endnotes are just a few, length of each endnote is short, and they are well justified for the adoption.1 Footnotes within the text body are not allowed.2” (Intriguingly, when giving this instruction they saw fit to attach two endnotes, one each to these two sentences.)10 In the genealogy of the footnote, the role of biblical translation and the textual scholarship, realized in such monumental works as the Complutensian Bible, are often centrally placed. This aspect of the footnote’s genealogy places it in the tradition of textual authority, foregrounds the footnote as a textual technique for establishing control and concordance, an instrument for fixing and finalizing readings. However, there are two great works of eighteenth-century scholarship that speak to a very different affordance of the footnote, its capacity to unfix, to produce dissonance, to render polyvalent and ambivalent that which seems clear and distinct—the footnote may serve to derail logos’ motion. The two works in question are Bayle’s famous Critical Dictionary (1697), and Hamann’s less well known, though equally compelling and beautiful, Socratic Memorabilia (1759). I will focus here on the more familiar work, but I would wish to underline that Hamann’s footnoting and citation practices open up a complementary but divergent mode of textual destabilization. Bayle’s Dictionary is regarded as one of the most widely disseminated texts of the eighteenth century and seen as the “Arsenal of the Enlightenment,” providing the intellectual and critical weapons used by the eighteenth-century enlighteners in their conflict with established authorities and inherited tradition. In addition to the many French editions produced throughout the eighteenth century, the Dictionary was translated into English (two versions, 1709, 1734–41) and into German (1741–44). Bayle (1647–1706) originally conceived his Dictionary as a response to the errors in Louis Moréri’s earlier Grand dictionnaire historique, but Bayle’s project evolved from a catalogue of errors to become one of the most complicated textual works ever printed. Bayle’s Dictionary is a book of non-knowledge, a book of misbeliefs; it dissolves the stable idea of the book into a criss-crossing network of texts of commentaries on commentaries on articles that refer us to commentaries on commentaries on other articles. The page itself becomes a weave of fragments and the priority of any one level in the hierarchy of texts becomes destabilized. Daniel Selcer (2010) provides a graphic analysis of the article on Jerome Rorarius11 in Bayle’s Dictionary.

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In the 1702 edition of the Dictionary, the article is spread over 14 pages in folio, with the article text comprising a mere 25 sentences accompanied by 4 marginal notes [. . .] This text is supplemented by 11 lengthy, lettered remarks running in columns over the bulk of the page, their 162 lettered and numbered marginal notes [. . .] Only a few lines of the article itself appear on most pages, often merely fragments of sentences in slightly larger typeface (only 3 [of the 14] pages include more than 2 typographic lines of article text), while the complex remark and citation structure constitutes approximately 95% of the page space and the conceptual-critical content of the “Rorarius” text as a whole. Selcer 2010: 73

And what does this Rorarius article and its notes contain? It informs the reader of a sixteenth-century and somewhat obscure author who wrote a booklet entitled That Animals Use Reason Better than Man, published posthumously in 1654 as a contribution to the debate over Descartes’ view of animals as unthinking machines. It is worth quoting some of the 25 sentences in the article from the English translation of the book: Leibniz, one of the greatest minds in Europe [. . .] has offered some leads that ought to be followed up. I shall say something about his view if only to indicate my own doubts. (H) But to get back to Rorarius, I do not believe I am mistaken in giving my opinion that he was born in Pordenone in Italy. I wish I could have read the speech he made in favor of rats [. . .] I shall here give my readers the remainder of the compilation, the chief part of which appears in articles “Pereira.” Popkin 1991: 218–19 In this way we are referred to another entry in the Dictionary where Bayle provides a catalogue of views on the question of the soul of animals. After several columns of text in this other article, Bayle notes that he fears that his readers might find him too long-winded, and so he will continue the matter elsewhere, and he refers the reader to the article “Rorarius.” Popkin 1991: 219, fn

Selcer argues that something fundamentally new is emerging here in the material production of the text and the experience of reading. He claims that the primary text has disappeared and that any and every text can be taken as central. “The master text can be Bayle’s article itself, the text that is the source of the commentary in that article, the discursive remarks to Bayle’s text . . . the quotations or references located in the margins of either Bayle’s text or his remarks and so on” (Selcer 2010: 78). Selcer’s claim is amply supported by the way in which the reception of this work has evolved over time. Illustrative of this is the way in which the development of the footnotes to the “Rorarius” article has become central to the debate on the relationship and exchanges between Bayle and one of his contemporaries, the philosopher Leibniz. In the first edition of 1697, the footnote (H) to the Rorarius article contained a discussion of Leibniz’s work. This triggered an exchange between Leibniz and Bayle which was mediated by one Henri Basnage de Beauval and which resulted in Bayle

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producing a further footnote (L) to the article on “Rorarius.” These footnotes are central to the philosophical exchange between Leibniz and Bayle and are the subject of extensive commentary and discussion by later philosophers, many of whom would not have any particular awareness of, nor accord any great significance to, Jerome Rorarius the ostensible subject of the “main” article. Bayle’s Dictionary was itself a response to another dictionary, that of Moréri. These Dictionary projects were a familiar aspect of Renaissance scholarship and antiquarianism. There was some debate about the organizational principles around which such compilations should be constructed: Should material be assembled by a subject order? What should that subject order be? How to avoid repetition of contents? Should material be assembled alphabetically? Bayle’s Dictionary departs from these earlier logics of organization by abandoning a top-level organization by subject matter in favour of an alphabetic system which is underpinned by the deeper logic of the cross-reference and the multi-layered text of commentaries upon commentaries etc. But the overall effect of the accumulation of these cross-references and layers is not a grand accumulation of knowledge, not a positive body of solid affirmation, but a corrosive flow of scepticism that undermines confident assertion of truths and beliefs by counter-posing opinion and dissenting opinion, by assembling argument and counter-argument, so that the consequence of the extensive scholarship employed to produce the Dictionary is a destabilizing of authority as such. What is emerging here in Bayle’s Dictionary is a different typographical practice and a different discursive practice. The book is not construed as a stable fixed entity, an ideal essential book, but a work in progress that evolves in subsequent editions and is shaped by the proliferation of new texts and new errors to be catalogued and cross-referenced. The Complutensian Bible12 is incredibly complex in its correlation of textual sources across multiple languages (Aramaic, Hebrew, Greek, Latin) and produces an elaborate apparatus; however, the overall intent—and to a significant degree the effect—of this is to enshrine a unitary sense of the book and of the word of God. Bayle’s elaborate crossco-ordination of a multilayered and multi-voiced (mono-lingual) text is to produce a labyrinthine knot of undecidability and instability. What was to become the formidable “Arsenal of the Enlightenment” also gives, graphically and materially, clear evidence of the paradox at the heart of the vaunted project of Enlightenment and the public use of reason: each attempt by a system (a text, a discourse, etc.) to transcend itself through reasoned method (to offer correctives to an earlier text and to observe its own operations) renders that system once again incomplete (open to further correction, amendment, etc.) These are the same intrinsic dynamics of various other therapies of language—manifesting the same aporetic, circular or self-complicating tendency in the attempt to mandate the straight and correct way to write. Of course, with Bayle there is a will to fully opportune this affordance of the footnote, to multiply complexity and to render the text undecidable.

Untrimmed Academic Hedges? And so, dear reader,13 you may be forgiven for wondering to what end this excursus on academic writing has brought us. Has it not all turned out to be a walk up the garden

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path, trailing the length of one enormous academic hedge, to finally say nothing much at all? Perhaps, and then again perhaps not. Let me return you to the citation that is placed at the head of this essay, where Linda Tuhiwai Smith writes about a paper that Patricia Grace read at the Fourth Early Childhood Convention in Wellington, Aotearoa/ New Zealand, in 1987. Smith, with exemplary precise academic craft, cites, summarizes and repositions the words from that paper and uses them to give a force of authority and challenge to the erasure, occlusion and suppression of indigenous lives that she sees as characteristic, not just of school text books and children’s literatures as described by Grace, but also of academic writing in general, and research writing in particular. Very often my colleagues, when they are protesting the imposition of academic writing upon them, announce their resistance to the imperiousness of the footnote, by way of seeking alignment with the analyses of Smith, Grace and many other theorists and activists, who refuse subaltern erasure, who refuse Eurocentric universalist dispensations and who resist epistemic-corporeal violences. There is a certain ease with which this symbolic solidarity is proposed (most often unilaterally) across a profound asymmetry of genealogies, possessions, and geopolitical positions. There seems to be a certain unburdening by an avowedly critical subject whereby it releases itself from the constitutive contradictions of its own imperial and Eurocentric inheritances. And there is, again, that familiar therapeutic appeal to corrected and improved language practices, proposed as the remedy to make language epistemically fit for purpose within a new dispensation of humility and caution. But what if this rhetorical move is not what it announces itself to be? What if disdaining academic writing, disdaining all manner of European institutional dispensations, disdaining all the tired weight of the dead generations of traditional scholarships, were just another move in the tired game of colonial-modernity’s refusal of its irrefutable heritage of violence?

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https://www.nature.com/srep/author-instructions/submission-guidelines accessed November 7, 2021. In the 1996 a scandal was generated around the cultural studies journal Social Text because of its apparent failure to implement proper academic quality control and peer-review process. Social Text is a journal edited at Rutgers University and published by Duke University Press and provides a forum for interdisciplinary and theoretically ambitious work in the humanities and is especially identified with American strains of cultural studies. Alan Sokal, an accomplished physicist, submitted a hoax article for inclusion in an issue on what was termed the “Science Wars.” A set of rancorous exchanges between scholars and commentators was set in play by the appearance in 1996 of the hoax article entitled, “Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity,” which was immediately upon publication revealed as a hoax by the author. https://www.tni.org/en/transnational-institute accessed November 7, 2021. This is perhaps ironic given that the most common criticism of academic language is precisely targeted at its tendency to obscurity rather than clarity. However, the salient

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issue here is that Bourdieu is identifying a process of cultural induction into a privileged mode of discourse, a process of transmitting symbolic or “cultural capital.” The nature of the privileged mode of discourse may shift across different domains and periods (for example shifting from prioritising clarity to prioritising self-reference or technical difficulty in academic prose) but the critical issue is that a differentiation of ways of speaking is enacted and reproduced. This linguistic practice also works as a mechanism for differentiating reputational status and hierarchy. Barthes has provided a classic argument in respect of the French academic context which seeks to unmask the ideological investments of “clarity” in French academic prose of the pre-1968 moment. “ ‘French clarity’ is a language whose origin is political. It was born at a time when the upper classes hoped in accordance with a well-known ideological practice— to convert the particularity of their writing into a universal idiom, persuading people that the ‘logic’ of French was an absolute logic” (Barthes [1966] 2004: 10). This work on language by the Royal Society has prompted one commentator to quip that “For a group that wished to distance itself so clearly from language, the Society’s activities and publications focused to a surprising degree on language, and this part of their program constituted a key means by which the Fellows sought to demonstrate their usefulness to king and society” (Bauman and Briggs 2003: 28). Swift’s account of the extravagance of the quest for plain speaking is worth citing: “We next went to the school of languages, where three professors sat in consultation upon improving that of their own Country. The first project was to shorten Discourse by cutting Polysyllables into one, and leaving out Verbs and Participles; because in Reality all things imaginable are but Nouns. [. . .] An expedient was therefore offered, that since Words are only Names for Things, it would be more convenient for all Men to carry about them, such Things” (Swift, 1995, pp. 175–6; orig. 1735). The reference here is to the work of Denise Ferreira da Silva and her reading of the global distribution of violence through the constitutive global division of the self-regulating autonomous subject of reason and the subject marked by their subordination and condition of external affectability (da Silva 2007). Some material in this section was first drafted with my colleague Dr. Tim Stott, for a co-authored paper on discursive and typographical innovation in Bayle’s Dictionary. This is material, originally sourced from a now defunct, and unarchived, online chatroom for designers and typographers, is from a learning resource used in conjunction with my research methods course, where the material is also used as an example of the potentrially fugitive nature of digital source materials and citations. http://www.ijbe.org/instruction.htm (accessed September 8, 2010; no longer current). Bayle’s article suggests that the common view that animals are capable of reason has the disadvantage that it obscures the distinction between humans and animals, and so makes it very hard to show that the human soul is immortal. Comparing Descartes and Aristotle on this question, he concludes that neither the ancient nor the moderns can properly account for the cases of animal cleverness that Rorarius presents in his text. Begun in 1502 and taking fifteen years to complete, the Complutensian Polyglot Bible is the first printed polyglot of the entire Bible. It was initiated and financed by Cardinal Francisco Jiménez de Cisneros (1436–1517) and published by Complutense University in Alcalá de Henares, Spain. “Dear Reader” is a classic formulation that is typically unused across all genres of academic writing with its delegitimized sentimental mode of address. For a discussion of this formula and a more detailed discussion of a pedagogy of writing for artist researchers, see Wilson (2010).

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References Bacon, F. ([1605] 1873), The Two Books of Francis Bacon: Of the Proficience and Advancement of Learning, Divine and Human, ed. Thomas Markby, London: Parker, Son, and Bourn. Barthes, R. (2004), Criticism and Truth, London and New York: Continuum. Bauman, R., and C. L. Briggs (2003), Voices of Modernity: Language Ideologies and the Politics of Inequality, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bourdieu, P., J. C. Passeron, and D. Saint-Martin ([1965] 1994), Academic Discourse: Linguistic Misunderstanding and Professorial Power, Stanford, CA : Stanford University Press. da Silva, D. F. (2007), Toward a Global Idea of Race, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Grafton, A. (1997), The Footnote: A Curious History, Cambridge, London: Faber and Faber. Hauptman, R. (2008), Documentation: A history of Critique of Attribution, Commentary, Glosses, Marginalia, Notes, Bibliographies, Works-Cited Lists, and Citation Indexing and Analysis, Jefferson, NC and London: McFarland & Company. O’Brien, F. (1967), The Third Policeman, London: MacGibbon & Kee. Popkin, R. H. (trans.) (1991), Pierre Bayle, Historical and Critical Dictionary Selections, Indianapolis: Hackett. Selcer, D. (2010), Philosophy and the Book: Early Modern Figures of Material Inscription, New York: Continuum. Smith, L. T. (1999), Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples, London and New York: ZED ; Dunedin: Otago University Press. Steiner, W. (1982), The Colors of Rhetoric: Problems in the Relation between Modern Literature and Painting, Chicago : University of Chicago Press. Swift, J. (1995) (orig. 1735), Gulliver’s Travels, Christopher Fox (ed.) Boston: Bedford/ St. Martin’s. Wilkins, John (1668), An Essay towards and Real Character and a Philosophical Language, London. Wilkins, John (1694), Mercury, or, The Secret and Swift Messenge, 2nd ed, London: Rich. Baldwin. Wilson, M. (2010), “Dear Reader: Of private and public writing”, ArtMonitor 8: 7–20. Zerby, C. (2003), The Devil’s Details: A History of Footnotes, New York: Simon & Schuster.

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Abstract Academic Expressionism: An Alternative Aesthetics of Scholarly Practice Anne Pirrie

Introduction The argument advanced in this chapter is that it is not possible to conceive of new perspectives on academic writing without first considering broader questions that relate to the epistemology, ontology, and aesthetics of academic practice writ large. Perhaps we need to break into new territory and vault over academic practice altogether in order to queer the academic essay, change the co-ordinates of academic writing, and put some steam back into critique. Let’s see . . . In 2010 the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) hosted Abstract Expressionist New York, a major exhibition that celebrated the legacy of the American artist Jackson Pollock and his contemporaries. In a short video produced to coincide with the exhibition, the curator Ann Temkin describes how “what Pollock was doing was so extreme, in terms of the painting tradition, that . . . even he . . . felt somewhat bewildered by it.”1 There are important lessons to be drawn from this “ex-positioning” of the artist beyond the canon of conventional artistic practice. But first the story, then the theory (or at least that is how this story goes). This is a deliberate move to reinstate lived experience as the heart of the matter by inscribing it into the text. Temkin recounts how when Pollock was in his studio in Long Island he invited his wife Lee Krasner to come and look at what he had done. He asked her “is this a painting?” There are other more prosaic and obvious questions that he might have asked. Is this a good painting? Is this a great painting? What do you think of this painting? How do you think this will play with the critics? As Temkin explains, Pollock wasn’t even sure that what he had made was a painting. Perhaps what prompted his question to Krasner was a vague awareness that he was manifesting an inner truth as a trial of courage. The form of Pollock’s question indicates that he was probably aware of how much was at stake, as an artist at least. As Folkers (2016: 8) puts it in his exploration of Foucault’s genealogy of critique: “The question that sums up the dramatics of truth-speaking is not the schoolmasterly ‘What are your reasons?’ but the tyrannical ‘How dare you?’ ” In short, Pollock probably knew that he was pushing the envelope when it came to the norms of contemporary artistic practice. 161

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Is this a book chapter? Is this a book? Is this an academic essay? For reasons that we shall explore below, it is difficult to imagine the author of an academic text asking a question similar in form to the one posed by Pollock. Indeed, the notion of an “academic essay” might turn out to be an oxymoron. A reviewer might have fewer scruples about asking such questions, as indeed might the editors of this collected volume. But let us leave aside for the moment the vagaries of the peer-reviewing process. Temkin suggests that the boldness of what Jackson and his contemporaries were trying to do, namely to transplant the center of the Avant-garde from Paris to New York, needed to be evident in the way that they made their paintings, that is to say in their radical departure from the figurative and the ensuing move to the abstract. This essay (if indeed that is what it is) will explore the parallels between Pollock’s process and the alternative vision of academic practice sketched out further below. This will entail foregrounding the process of making in both artistic and scholarly activity. We shall also explore the extent to which it is possible, or indeed desirable, to queer conventional academic practice in respect of the norms of academic writing: in short to decide “not to be governed like that” (Foucault 1997: 44) (emphasis in the original). There is more than a gentle hint of irony here, given the forthcoming critique of conventional appeals to a higher authority that are so commonplace in academic writing. The argument advanced here (albeit in a series of wavy lines painted in vivid colors) is that it is perhaps time that academics behaved a little more like Jackson Pollock and his contemporaries in respect of their professional practice. It is important to emphasize that I am referring to Pollock the artist rather than to the man. The latter is mythologized as a monster with a vast and volatile ego, a person who was given to booze-fueled cruelty and fits of rage. His example merely serves as an invitation to branch out in a new direction: to make a splash rather than cut a dash.

Painting, Writing, Looking First let us return to Pollock. Why? As a way of performing attention, perhaps, and slowly unpicking what it was in the curator’s account that draws us in, as it were. The focus on Pollock’s presence as an artist demonstrates sustained and intense scrutiny of an aspect of the world that lies at an oblique angle (preferably an acute rather than an obtuse one) to our theme. To do this is to run the risk of being accused of fixating on an object, stifling the development of a coherent line of argument, of championing obliquity rather than aiming for narrative coherence. It is almost as if arguments in an academic context have a peculiar internal rhythm that “we” all recognize. It seems indecorous, even indecent, to dwell too long with a particular image. Like diligent museum visitors who have paid a high price for admittance, we need to move through the galleries systematically, taking in all the objects. Yet as I attempt to demonstrate here it is precisely the protracted effort of looking at one thing that brings its specific rewards, and this applies to writers just as it does to painters. In short, as writers we need to perform our mode of attention. There are, however, powerful forces of resistance at play when it comes to writing for academic purposes. In his brilliant and lapidary text On Essayism, Brian Dillon (2020: 121) cites the art critic T. J. Clark, who in the

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opening pages of his book The Sight of Death prepares the ground for close and protracted examination of a pair of Poussin paintings. Many of us, maybe all of us, look at some images repeatedly, but it seems we do not write that repetition, or think it, once written, worth reading by others. Maybe we deeply want to believe that images happen, essentially or sufficiently, all at once . . . Maybe the actual business of repeated gawping strikes us as embarrassing, at least when set out in sentences . . . Maybe we fear that the work we depend on images to do for us—the work of immobilizing, and therefore making tolerable—will be undone if we throw the image back into the flow of time. my emphasis

Let us write that repetition, let us gawp once again at Pollock, the artist and his work, before going on to consider the systemic impediments to exploring repetition as longing, and the merits of staying still, of not being able or willing to find closure. Temkin explains how Pollock departed from the idea of handling a brush and using brush strokes to paint a scene and instead used the tip of the brush to “fling, drip, spread or ooze the painting across the canvas in these ecstatic, dramatic, slow, fast, wavy, straight . . . lines that fill it from corner to corner, from top to bottom, and left to right.” (“What if academic writing were more like this?” I ask, tentatively.) Temkin tells another famous anecdote about Jackson Pollock that gives further insight into his process. The artist Hans Hofmann once asked him if he liked to paint nature. “I am nature,” Pollock replied. His terse response conveys something about Abstract Expressionism that has implications for the revitalization of critique attempted in this chapter. Pollock’s response raises ontological questions about the status of the writer in relation to the subjects explored by writers (and I include scholars and academics in this category as writing is generally their main form of expression). The artist’s response also demonstrates how the genealogy of critique, where the former term is understood as a “coupling together of scholarly erudition and local memories,” can function as a new “knowledge of struggles” (Foucault 2003: 8). Perhaps this provides the key to reenlivening academic writing. Perhaps this is what is required to make it passionate and humane as well as “rigorous.” Temkin explains how for Pollock and other exponents of Abstract Expressionism, “the topic that most interested them was themselves, and in more general terms the human being.” She recounts that what fascinated these artists was “the energy of a person, the psyche of a person, the values or the principles of a person, the physical presence of a person . . . moving, leaping, dancing, straddling, juggling around the canvas on the floor.” It is a paradox that the move from figurative to abstract art was premised on putting the lived, embodied, kinetic experience of the artist at the very center of the process.2 However counterintuitive this may appear, Night Blue, an ingenious novella by the Australian author Angela O’Keeffe, is narrated by a Pollock painting entitled Blue Poles, a work that scandalized the nation when it was acquired for 1.3 million Australian dollars in 1973 (O’Keeffe 2021; Silcox 2021). The story begins in 1952, in the chilly barn on Long Island, New York, where Pollock worked. “His life gathered in his gestures,” the painting tells us. “His gestures gathered in me.” The scale

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of Pollock’s vast canvasses demanded grand gestures, continual movement. It was physically impossible for Pollock to work from a fixed point in a mobile universe in which he himself was immersed. The work had literally to be “floored” to enable him to encompass its scope. In conventional academic writing, on the other hand, the move to abstraction (i.e. critique of) generally entails severing the more figurative red thread of experience (i.e. critique in) and embracing stasis. The emphasis is on the view from (up) there, standing on top of the knowledge mountain. The object of inquiry is rendered visible with this and/or that by way of “conceptual apparatus,” in much the same way as a figurative painter might use an easel. Writing in the conventional academic mode generally means not only writing from a particular position, but privileging purely cognitive capacities. It means putting the object of inquiry under a spotlight and engaging in denunciative modes of critique rather than embracing a form that “better reflects the brave and curious but faltering nature of the writing mind” (Dillon 2020: 18). At this point it may be instructive to explore the parallels between the Abstract Expressionists’ conceptualizations of painting and contemporary conceptions of writing that characterized what has become known as New Journalism. Such a move might be considered the “literary expressionist” analogue of flinging, dripping, spreading or oozing paint. However, returning to matters relating to writing may serve to reassure the reader and provide some relief to those who are longing for the golden thread of narrative coherence. Such a move expresses my commitment to making it up as I go along. (I see the latter as a virtue rather than as a weakness.) To proceed in this way is to reinstate and render visible the joy of thinking, with all the risks, the interplay between shadows and light, the sudden flurries and digressions that thinking entails. Joan Didion was a member of the journalistic Avant-garde of the 1960s. She was more covert and tentative in style, and certainly less self-important in manner, than her male contemporaries Norman Mailer, Hunter S. Thompson, Truman Capote and Tom Wolfe. (It was the latter who coined the term New Journalism in 1973.) In Why I Write, an essay the title of which is self-consciously borrowed from the eponymous one by George Orwell, Didion (2021: 45) avows that “in many ways the act of writing is the act of saying I, of imposing oneself on other people, of saying listen to me, see it my way, change your mind” (emphasis in the original). In terms that echo Temkin’s account of the Abstract Expressionists’ focus on the self, Didion refers to writing as “an invasion, an imposition of the writer’s sensibility on the reader’s most private space” (2021: 46). In the case of Pollock, the result of the imposition of the artist’s sensibility is works that teem with life in all its vital abstractions. “Creation is a tactile, sensuous business: a paint-slick collision of memory, intention and wild possibility” (Silcox 2021). (“What would it be like if academics worked like this?” I ask, a little less tentatively.) As we shall see, Pollock’s vast canvases were literally shot through with traces of the quotidian. This was also the case with Didion, who describes how when trying to think, her attention is inexorably drawn “to the specific, to the tangible . . . the peripheral” (2021: 47). She recalls how when attempting to contemplate the Hegelian dialectic as an undergraduate at Berkeley her attention alighted on the flowering pear tree outside her window. She describes how she can no longer remember whether the sun or the earth lay at the center of Milton’s universe, but she can recollect “the exact rancidity of the butter” in

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the dining car of the Southern Pacific’s City of San Francisco (2021:48). Didion regards this absorption in the everyday as inimical to the systematic direction of thinking attention. “I am not in the least an intellectual”, she declares (2021: 46), before going on to set out why she places thinking at the center of her writing. She explains this apparent paradox as follows: “I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see, and what it means” (2021: 49). In Didion’s case, the ex-positioning of herself as an intellectual (or a critic) was the precondition for finding out what she was thinking. The French-Egyptian writer Edmond Jabès, whose work defies classification as it is a curious amalgam of dialogue, aphorism, fragments, poetry, and song, viewed writing in similar terms: “to write means to confront an unknown face,” he explained in characteristically gnomic style (Jabès 1996: ix). The abstract and the figurative collide in the writings of Jabès. Rosemarie Waldrop, who translated most of his work from French into English, describes how his aim “is not to invert the traditional hierarchy of sense over sound, but to establish parity between them, or, rather, to establish a dynamic relation between language and thinking, where the words do not express pre-existing thoughts, but where their physical characteristics are allowed to lead to new thoughts” (Waldrop 2002: 70) (my emphasis). Let us stand back for a moment and consider the process of painting in similar terms. For the Abstract Expressionists and the New Journalists of the same era, painting (and thinking) entailed reinstating subjectivities, desires, and political projects to the very center of human endeavor, reaching out to the uninitiated. These activities demand “that we make a leap of faith, and this involves that we regard ‘the adventure of thought’ not as a purely cognitive capacity . . . but as a profound ethical and educational endeavor that unconditionally testifies to an attitude of hope” (Vlieghe 2019: 121). To embody hope means daring to think, to write or to paint otherwise. It means putting our imaginations to work and espousing the view expressed by Montaigne in his essay “Of Practice,” which echoes the Abstract Expressionists’ emphasis on their own subjectivity: “What I write here is not my teaching, but my study; it is not a lesson for others, but for me. And it should not be held against me that I publish what I write. What is useful to me may also by accident be useful to another” (Montaigne 1965: 110). As we saw above, Didion’s attention was always on the periphery, on what she could see, taste, and touch. Her writing is essentially performative. It is a way of thinking that proceeds on the basis of personal experience and immersion in the world around her, just as it was for Montaigne. (“I am nature,” Pollock calls from the wings.) As Stengers (2002: 247) points out, “You cannot have true thinking without feeling.” Drawing again on Temkin’s response to what Jackson Pollock was trying to achieve in his artistic practice one might argue that feelings cannot be made manifest unless “the energy of a person, the psyche of a person, the values or the principles of a person, the physical presence of a person” take center stage. Didion’s “most absorbed and passionate hours” were spent arranging words on paper. Pollock’s were spent flinging, dripping, spreading, or oozing paint across a canvas. “When I’m painting I’m happy,” Pollock said. “It’s the rest of the time that’s the challenge” (Silcox 2012). As readers or viewers of these works, we are transformed by what we encounter in a way that dares us to think otherwise. They encourage us to trouble the canonical status of a unified perspective considered under a particular (theoretical) lens. Didion wrote and Pollock painted because neither

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of them could do otherwise. Perhaps the same applies to the “little polemical professional activities that are called critique” (Foucault 1997:42). As Mahon and Henry (2021: 4) point out, there are powerful external factors that drive over-production of text and conventional practice in respect of form in academia: “discursive priority is given . . . to performance, to output, to innovation and to excellence.” One might add that increasingly “performing” in academia also seems to be about getting one over on one’s rivals in what has become an intensely competitive arena. As we shall explore further below, the focus on “outputs” and the hollow tropes of “innovation” “excellence” and “rigor,” coupled with traditional modes of expression in academia, only serve to cut off thinking, to strangle thought and to foster compliance and complicity. As Edmond Jabès (1996: 13) puts it, “a knot cannot make another knot, but any thread can . . . Thought has no ties: it lives by encounter and dies of solitude.” Conventional scholarly practice might be compared to measuring up one meticulously elaborated knot against another. Thinking, on the other hand, involves weaving together disparate threads into a creative entanglement that both unravels and is unraveled by the reader. Before we turn our attention to the pernicious influence of the current emphasis on productivity and performance on academic writing, we need to look sideways, urgently, and fix our gaze once again on Jackson Pollock. If we are to queer conventional modes of academic writing, we need to give ourselves license to do so. We need to follow the injunction of T. J. Clark and gawp, repeatedly. According to Jabès (1996: 11) “we threaten what threatens us. Subversion is never one-way.”

The I/eye of the Beholder Pollock’s large-scale paintings seem to move in front of the observer’s eyes. (“What would it be like if academic writing teemed with life?” I ask, a little more boldly.) The paintings invite movement, and not just in the eye of the beholder. Engagement with an Abstract Expressionist painting entails not only movement of the eye, but of the whole body as the observer moves from side to side in the room to take in the full expanse of the work. The observer “digs in” to the picture, trying to figure out where one line starts and stops. Following Montaigne, the reader is invited to dig in to this text, mining what is useful and discarding what is not. How is the painting (text) layered? How do the blurred areas interrupt the lines or vice versa? What does the painting (text) know? During an encounter with one of Pollock’s paintings, the attentive, roving observer notices the different types of paint: shiny, matt, metallic; the multiplicity of textures, including the various objects that are embedded in it (keys, coins, cigarette butts and other detritus), excavating the conditions of its emergence. The painting is “all surface, torsion and poise.” This is precisely how Dillon (2020: 12) describes the essay, a form of writing that is “so artful it can hardly be told from disarray.” This is a description that might apply in equal measure to a painting by Pollock. Writing on the essay as form, the poet William Carlos Williams might also have been referring to Jackson Pollock when be described “ability” as not unity but “multiplicity, infinite fracture, the intercrossing of opposed forces establishing any number of opposed centres of stillness” (Williams 1971: 322). In a Pollock painting, the world is brought into the swirl of the surface. The

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processes of change and renewal are partially engulfed by the paint and partially disgorged by it. By the same token, the essay as form combines “exactitude and evasion . . . that would instruct, seduce and mystify in equal measure” (Dillon 2020: 13). In contemplating an abstract work of art or immersing oneself in an essay, the observer or reader is haunted by the literal or metaphorical traces of the artist’s presence, in the “actual business of repeated gawping” or daubing. During the encounter with a painting, time and space “collapse into one point that matters: duration, stillness, silence, gaze, knowledge, insight: it is a kind of black hole into which everything, every desire is sucked, and its energy pulsates through the universe.” In short, something happens that shakes us up. Something happens that makes us “think and feel anew” (Frosh 2015: 166–67), filling us with reverie. As the novelist Ali Smith explains, “art makes nothing happen in a way that makes something happen” (Smith 2014: 68). Just as Pollock challenged contemporary artistic conventions, in her oeuvre Smith subverts our expectations that a narrative should move seamlessly from A to B by way of a recognizable plot and sub-plot, populated by characters whose reputation proceeds them, as it were, and who are easily understood as being (about) one thing or another. In contrast, in academic writing, the “character” of the author is seen to reside in the extent to which they produce a faithful representation of this or that point of view or accepted wisdom. By this point the discerning reader will have noticed that certain features of conventional academic writing are coming into view. Significant among these is what the philosopher Mary Warnock has described as “the endless, tedious reference to other people who’ve been working in the same field.” In an interview with the philosopher Nigel Warburton, she expresses the view that contemporary academic publishing requirements effectively preclude academics from contributing to public life in any meaningful way (Warnock 2007). In short, the rigors of conventional academic practice mean that academics generally talk to themselves rather than say “hello” to intellectual strangers. In contrast, Didion describes how writing is a form of engagement with pictures in her mind, images that “shimmer.” In Didion’s book (as it were), thinking entails abandoning any notion of a Pascalian overview (surplomb) of the perspectives of others. (In contemporary academic discourse, this often amounts to a form of artful ventriloquism.) Thinking means lying low and letting the images develop. She explains how the picture “dictates whether this will be a sentence with or without clauses, a sentence that ends hard” or with a dying fall, whether the sentence is “long or short, active or passive” (Didion 2021: 51). In a passage in Why I Write that evokes Pollock’s assertion that he was nature, Didion recounts how the picture “tells you how to arrange the words and the arrangement of the words tells you, or tells me, what’s going on in the picture” (2021: 51). This resonates with how Collini (2012: 73) describes the hallmarks of academic writing in the humanistic tradition. He refers to the “angle of entry to the topic, the distribution of emphasis, the implicit placing or comparison, the specific touches by which a world, an episode, a figure, or a book is conjured up and given inwardness.” These are qualities that remind us of “the essentially relational nature of our being-in-the-world” (Pirrie 2019: 25). In her eloquent curatorial address in celebration of Abstract Expressionist New York, Temkin observes that Pollock never started out with a sketch. He did not proceed with a pre-calculated plan in mind, and by her own account neither did Joan Didion. She

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explains that she began Play It as It Lays as she began each of her novels, with “no notion of ‘character’ or ‘plot’ or even ‘incident’ ” (Didion 2021: 51). She began with a “technical intention,” i.e. to “write a novel so elliptical and fast that it would be over before you noticed it” (2021: 51). She had two pictures in mind. The first picture was of white space, empty space. This empty space dictated the narrative intention of the book. Yet as Didion explains, this first picture tells no story, suggests no situation. This is “a book in which anything that happened would happen off the page” (Didion 2021: 52) (my emphasis). It would be “a ‘white’ book to which the reader would have to bring his or her own bad dreams” (2021: 52). In Didion’s account, the second picture would be of something actually witnessed and addressed in great detail. In the case of the present chapter, the second picture was a short video of a curator at MOMA talking about Jackson Pollock. The “technical intention” was to contribute to a volume on “new perspectives on academic writing.” Temkin explains how Pollock set a precedent for the performance artists of successive generations. Didion (2021: 45) maintained that journalists had to risk “the act of saying I,” to locate themselves firmly within the world rather than to float above it. Pollock’s powerfully embodied process largely explains why he posed the question “Is this a painting?” rather than one geared to an invisible critic. (“Is this a good painting?”) (“Why do academics always play to the gallery?” I shout from the back of the room.) As Temkin points out, the results of his spontaneous set of actions were as much of a surprise to Pollock as they were to everyone else. It is as if he intuited that his artistic process constituted a form of reflective “insolence” (Foucault 1997: 47) and that embracing risk was at the core of his practice. These, I note in passing, are two hallmarks of the Foucauldian notion of critique. (I leave it to others to grunt and sweat their way to that discovered country from whose bourne no traveller returns.) There is more to Pollock’s work than meets the eye, as the attentive reader will have guessed by now. His process bears repeated gawping and writing that repetition. As we shall see, there is a greater degree of deliberation involved in his process and rather less intemperate “splashing out” than meets the eye. Temkin’s description of how Pollock made his paintings suggests not only that he worked quickly, flinging, dripping, spreading or oozing paint in a frenzy of creativity, but also that this process marked a distinctive break with the more mannered painting traditions of the past. Yet work undertaken by the J. Paul Getty Museum and the Getty Conservation Institute to restore Pollock’s Mural (1943) casts that story in a different light, revealing the enigmatic deftness and the temporal dimension of his craft (Blouin Artinfo 2014). There is scientific evidence to support the view that Mural marked a shift in Pollock’s ideas of how to apply the paint, and what type of paint to use. This paved the way for the transition from figurative to abstract painting. Scientific analysis revealed that Mural was executed almost entirely in oil paints, single pigments at high purity, used straight or in mixtures. However, there was one off-white paint used across the work that was of very different composition and appearance. This was a quick-drying, inexpensive water-based house paint, bound with casein (milk protein) rather than oil. As it contained an aluminium silicate extender, it was inherently more fluid than the twenty-five paints and paint mixtures detected in Mural through the use of hyperspectral imaging techniques. Lee Krasner recalled that Pollock painted Mural

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overnight. This story gained further traction when it appeared in the various autobiographies written by Peggy Guggenheim. These stories play into the trope of the tortured artist wracked by painter’s block (the lesser-known cousin of writer’s block). Faced with a vast expanse of stretched blank canvas, the story goes that Pollock didn’t know what to paint. Like Didion, he was faced with blank white space, the void, waiting for the lightning bolt that would render it (Jabès 1996: 14). As we saw above, the evidence suggests that Pollock never worked with a pre-existing sketch or with a specific plan in mind. But the stories circulating pointed to a more profound existential condition, terror of the void, angst when confronted with a blank canvas. According to Krasner, inspiration would strike and he’d suddenly begin to paint, completing the work within a 24- to 36-hour period, often working through the night. Yet the material evidence seems to support the veracity of Pollock’s own account, which paints a rather different picture. In a letter to his brother Frank in 1944, he wrote that he had painted Mural “during the summer.” There is substantive evidence to support this view. Oil paint typically takes several days to dry, and much of the paint on Mural was applied over areas of paint that had already dried. Scientific analysis reveals that four colors— lemon yellow, dark teal, red, and dark brown—were the first colors to be applied. Each was heavily thinned with solvent and brushed on rapidly while the others were still wet. Perhaps it was this part of the process that resulted in the story that Mural had been painted overnight during a fortuitous surge of creativity. In short, it appears that Pollock’s process was more mannered and curatorial, more essayistic, than first meets the eye. Similarly, the lightness and deftness of Didion’s prose belies the hard graft that made her sentences such marvels of magical thinking. In the case of conventional academic writing, the opposite applies, i.e. it is precisely the arcane art of “magical thinking” that makes reading academic texts such hard graft. Below we shall examine in a little more detail why this is the case.

A Bigger Splash3 How can we bring the type of energy evident in the work of Pollock and his contemporaries into academic writing? How can we rehabilitate the notion of the “essayistic”? How can we restore the performative dimension to academic practice? How can we resist the policing of unruly thinking that is inscribed into conventional modes of critique and “meta-critique” (i.e. the peer-review process)? What are the main obstacles to progress in these areas? As we saw above, the conventional apparatus criticus and the widely-accepted expectation that academics situate their work within a particular field of enquiry and align themselves with particular scholars has a distorting effect on academic practices, including on how writing is performed. In contrast, Angela O’Keefe, the author of the novel Night Blue, tells her interviewer that she “didn’t want [the novel] to feel like this is Pollock’s life put into a rectangle. It’s about life surging ahead.” The only way she could achieve this was to let the painting speak for itself, in this case literally. In the case of a painting, there is always the prospect of a bright new wall in a bright new gallery, a world away from the moment of creation. In academic writing, in contrast, it seems

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that was is often required, or at least expected, is precisely the careful placing of material in a rectangle. There is no prospect of a reckless fuite en avant. Although it is commonly understood that there can be no “last words” on a particular subject, academics are often wracked by an implicit expectation that their contributions to their (rectangular) field are if not “definitive” then at least “authoritative.” Academics are encouraged to position themselves within a particular discourse or tradition, to engage in a practice that is more akin to archery than the cultivation of human understanding (Mahon and Henry 2021). In contrast, Pollock’s paintings are invitations to engage with mess, with dynamic (inter-)relations. Neither he nor Didion set out to make grand, definitive statements or to signal a portentous movement “towards” a deeper understanding of the matter in hand. They make something happen in a way that makes nothing happen. Their works are about life surging ahead, thoughts and urges leading to new thoughts and urges. They are situated in rooms (literal and metaphorical) where the comings and goings of curious strangers are in the natural order of things. The journalist who interviewed Angela O’Keefe in the National Gallery in Canberra noticed the responses of other visitors as the interview drew to a close. “As we leave the gallery, another visitor shares their thoughts. ‘Look at that,’ he exclaims. ‘All of the complexity of human life, right there’ ” (Silcox 2021). The conditions of academic production mean that the writing of academics attracts few visitors, and almost none without credentials. How would it be if we really were to choose not to be governed like that? Sparks might fly. Life might surge ahead. Something might happen that would shake us up. Perhaps it just did.

Acknowledgment I would like to thank my friend and colleague Lewis Stockwell for drawing to my attention the video celebrating Abstract Expressionist New York. He is to all intents and purposes the curator of this piece. I thank him for freezing the moment and enabling me to let it become something else.

Notes 1 2 3

Ann Temkin on Jackson Pollock AB EX NY https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=oG45EoRh3F accessed May 7, 2022. Using “Jackson Pollock in his studio” as a search term reveals any number of images of Pollock engaged in such activity. I refer here to the eponymous painting by David Hockney (1967) that depicts a splash in a Californian swimming pool. Although the Abstract Expressionism was at its height when Hockney was just starting out, he explained that for him painting was picture making. “I’m not that interested in painting that doesn’t depict the visible world,” he said. “I mean, it might be perfectly good art it just doesn’t interest me that much.” There is an eerily seductive, sun-flushed stillness to the painting—apart, of course, from the splash. At one level this is a representational work (with its depiction

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of a carefully manicured lawn, a swimming pool, a diving board, an unoccupied chair, a couple of spindly palm trees, and a pink modernist house in the background). The irony is that what draws our attention is the splash, which is a presence that signals the lavish absence of a presence. Painting a splash might seem to invite gestural markmaking à la Pollock, but here Hockney, who had used expressive mark-making in previous works, used small brushes painstakingly to reproduce a photographic image of a splash. It took him two weeks to get the splash, the work of an instant, just right. See https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/hockney-a-bigger-splash-t03254/ understanding-david-hockneys-bigger-splash accesssed May 7, 2022.

References Blouin Artinfo (2014), See The Getty Restore Jackson Pollock’s “Mural” [video], https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=5tBEW_7Twrs accessed May 7, 2022. Collini, S. (2012), What are Universities for? London: Penguin Books. Didion, J. (2021), Let Me Tell You What I Mean, London, Fourth Estate. Dillon, B. (2020), Essayism, London: Fitzcarraldo Editions. Folkers, A. (2016), “Daring the Truth: Foucault, Parrhesia and the Geneology of Critique”, Theory, Culture & Society 33 (1): 3–28. Foucault, M. (1997), “What Is Critique?”, in S. Lotringer and L. Hochrot (eds.), The Politics of Truth, New York: Semiotext(e). Foucault, M. (2003) “Society Must Be Defended”: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–1976, New York: Picador. Frosh, S. (2015), “Endurance”, American Imago 72 (2): 157–75. Jabès, E. (1996), The Little Book of Unsuspected Subversion, trans. R. Waldrop, Stanford, CA : Stanford University Press. Mahon, A., and S. Henry (2021), “But Who Are All Those Journal Articles For? Writing, Reading and Our Unhandsome Condition”, Cambridge Journal of Education https:// doi.org/10.1080/0305764X.2021.1933903, accessed January 22, 2022. Montaigne. M. (1965), Essays, trans. J. Florio, London: Everyman. O’Keefe, A. (2021), Night Blue, Yarraville, VIC : Transit Lounge Press. Pirrie, A. (2019), Virtue and the Quiet Art of Scholarship: Reclaiming the University, London: Routledge. Silcox, Beejay (2021), “Angela O’Keefe on Jackson Pollock’s Blue Poles—and Engaging with the Art of Awful Men”, The Guardian (May 1), https://www.theguardian.com/ books/2021/may/01/angela-okeefe-on-jackson-pollocks-blue-poles-and-engagingwith-the-art-of-awful-men accessed May 7, 2022. Smith, A. (2014), How to Be Both, London: Penguin Books. Stengers, I. (2002), “A Cosmo-politics: Risk, Hope, Change”, in M. Zoumazi (ed.), Hope: New Philosophies for Change, 244–72, Annandale: Pluto Press. Vlieghe, J. (2019), “Education and Hope”, Ethics and Education 14 (2): 117–25. Waldrop, R. (2002), Lavish Absence: Recalling and Rereading Edmond Jabès, Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Warnock, M. (2007), “Can and Should Philosophers Contribute to Public Life?” [Interview with Nigel Warburton], recording available at https://philosophybites.com/applied_ ethics/ Williams, W. C. (1971), Imaginations, New York: New Directions.

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Affective Academic Writing Bernd Herzogenrath

This essay is a plea. A rather speculative, and at times playful plea. It is even a manifesto . . . maybe. Or, at least, it tries its best to be—even if I agree with Bruno Latour, that the “time of manifestos has long passed. Actually, is the time of time that has passed” (2010: 472), a time that depended on the military distinction between an avant-garde and an arrière-garde. However—I was always struck by the almost Adamic power of a manifesto’s language: Marx’ and Engels’ Communist Manifesto, the Declaration of Independence, MLK’s “I Have a Dream,” Barack Obama’s “Yes, We Can!” As Jacques Derrida has shown with regard to the Declaration of Independence, in a curious loop, the very act of writing and signing the Declaration miraculously creates the very “We, The People” that this document calls for—a moebial operation true for all manifestos, I argue.1 It is as if manifestos, by their sheer intensity, pointing at what seems wrong, are writing alternatives into existence—and not only alternatives, but visions of new worlds. With a little help of some rhetorical friends, of course—the whole bag of tricks: Hyperbole. Declamation. Exhortation. But manifestos are marked by a transformative power that goes beyond rhetorics, beyond the operations of meaning-production and subjectivity. But why is it always about things BIG? Big History? Big revolutions? Tidal changes? This following manifesto is a small one, a minor manifesto, I argue. To cool this hot question down: is there a place for “affective operations” in Academic Writing? And not only in the prose of those who can allow themselves the affective mode as a luxury, because they are their own style already, unfettered by the constraints of the “real book of academic writing” . . . what about the students? Term papers? Exams? Dissertations? Those gateways to an “academic career”? Is there any place for “affective operations”? Eugenie Brinkema has recently suggested that “The Affective Turn” is suffering from a “repetition-without-difference” complex that uses the endless monotony of vague signifiers to refer to various art forms and media—Brinkema is speaking from the perspective of a critic for whom any viable “affect theory” is only functional if it locates the forms of particular affects within the specific details of artistic production: “how is critique to keep grappling with affect and affectivity in texts if indeed one cannot read for affects to discover anything new about them” (2014: xiv)? It is not the place here to go into the intricate trajectories of the term “affect”—both before and after the “affective turn.” I nonetheless would like to point at two—at times 173

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parallel, at times divergent, at times convergent—strands of affect theory, a more psychological and a more philosophical one, which for the sake of simplicity I would label with two “proper-name pairs”: the Silvan Tomkins/Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick strand (psychology), and the Gilles Deleuze/Brian Massumi strand (philosophy). In a way, it all starts with Spinoza who, in his Ethics, gives a twofold definition of affect, as both affectus and affectio, and things are complicated by the fact that—at least in French, as Deleuze points out—these two words are translated “into” one: l’affect/ affect, which, according to Deleuze, is “a disaster because when a philosopher employs two words, it’s because in principle he has reason to, especially when French easily gives us two words which correspond rigorously to affectio and affectus, that is ‘affection’ for affectio and ‘affect’ for affectus” (1978: 1). Spinoza understands affect “as an action; otherwise a passion” (Spinoza 1994: 154). Thus, on the one hand, there is the side of affects by which the body’s power of acting is increased or diminished, aided or restrained” (1994: 154) [affectus]; and on the other hand, there are “the ideas of these affections” (1994: 154) [affectio]. It is this twofold aspect of the Spinozian affect that makes for its “forking paths” as both psychological state [Tomkins, Sedgwick, Damasio etc] and a “prepersonal intensity” (Massumi 2002a: xvi), as phase, and as phase transition.2 While the idea of affect as a psychological state can easily topple into reading affect as equivalent to “emotion” (seen as a “petrification” and conscious reflection of affect from the Deleuzian side), I will occasionally refer to Tomkins’ work, but on the whole go with the Deleuze/Massumi flow, linking to the tradition of Spinoza, Bergson, Whitehead, etc, and leaving behind the affect/reason dichotomy as much as the idea of affect as an epiphenomenon of interiority and subjectivity. And this is important for the simple reason: Deleuze and Massumi take affect beyond psychologizing, beyond the merely subjective, and thus make it possible “to consider that objects, such as artworks or literary texts, are transmitting affects” (van Alphen 2008: 25), in short, how affect becomes effect. According to Deleuze’s reading of Bergson, affection is “what occupies the interval, what occupies it without filling it in or filling it up. It surges in the centre of indetermination, that is to say in the subject, between a perception which is troubling in certain respects and a hesitant action” (1986: 65). Thus, between cause and effect, there’s affect. This interval might also be related to the case of the missing 0.5 second that Massumi has alluded to in his groundbreaking essay on “The Autonomy of Affect” (2002a: 28ff ). In the “shock to thought” (Deleuze 1989: 156) produced by this “affective interval,” the sensory-motor (or perception-action) scheme is de-linked. In this interval, this hesitation called affect, a “mode of thought insofar as it is nonrepresentational” (Deleuze 1978: 11) is installed. It produces an affective encounter, which might be solved rationally, or which might be prolonged and transmitted affectively and creatively, producing two different kinds of transformations. In its hesitant and non-representational (and also non-subjective, impersonal) character, affect—or, as Deleuze and Guattari also call it: life—produces “zones [of indeterminacy] where living beings whirl around, and only art can reach and penetrate them in its enterprise of co-creation” (1994: 173). Art produces affects in co-creation with life. Thus, art cannot be contained by making it conform to pre-existent categories and concepts, explanations and thus “judgments” that are brought to it from the outside.

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For Deleuze, the most important question is if—and in how far—art addresses life, how its creativity liberates vitality and processuality (of affects, of thought), or if it is rather a blockage to these forces, containing the free play of vitality and making it “play by the rules” of any given institution, language system, or “organization,” if it produces joyful or sad affects. Art thus is evaluated by the way it either enhances, or reduces our powers to act, and it does so by affecting us in a particular manner. Art—as well as life—is a process of production and creation, and by that very characteristic involved in the bringing forth of “newness,” which by definition is what evades “normative criteria:” the indeterminable processes of both life and art can only be evaluated by and on their own terms, by features that are immanent to these processes themselves, but not by explanatory logics external to them. Do not count upon thought to ensure the relative necessity of what it thinks. Rather, count upon the contingency of an encounter with that which forces thought to rise up and educate the absolute necessity of an act of thought or a passion to think. [. . .] Something in the world forces us to think. This something is not an object of recognition, but a fundamental encounter. Deleuze 1994: 139

Deleuze thus distinguishes between two strategies of knowing, of thinking, of making sense. The one is what we might call (re)cognition, which relies on matching our experience with our culturally acquired knowledge, ideology, habits and beliefs. It only confirms our expectations, what we already know, and this lack of friction does not allow for real thinking. The other strategy is what Deleuze calls an encounter. An encounter, on the contrary, challenges our habitual ways of experiencing and perceiving the world. It creates a fundamental break with our strategies how to conceive the world. Making or perceiving art is an encounter that opens up possible worlds, and it is “the object in question” that determines the strategies with which you “make sense.” For the sciences, “making sense” involves the creation of functions, of a propositional mapping of the world, whereas art involves the creation of blocs of sensation (or affects and percepts), and philosophy involves the invention of concepts. Yet, since “sciences, arts, and philosophies are equally creative” (5), it might be fruitful, as Deleuze proposes, “to pose the question of echoes and resonances between them” (1995: 123), that is, to pose the question of their ecology (and the very fact that “affect is persistent proof of a body’s never less than ongoing immersion in and among the world’s obstinacies and rhythms, its refusals as much as its invitations” (Gregg & Seigworth 2010: 1), affect is immediately tied up with both ethology—displacing anthropocentric morality with a non-human ethics— and ecology). As Deleuze specifies in one of his seminars, “between a philosophical concept, a painted line and a musical sonorous bloc, resonances emerge, very, very strange correspondences that one shouldn’t even theorize, I think, and which I would prefer to call ‘affective’ . . . these are privileged moments” (1983: n.p.). These moments privilege an affect where thought and sensation merge into a very specific way of “doing thinking” beyond representation and categorization—here, “traditional (rational) thinking” faces its own shortcomings. This is why, for Deleuze (and Guattari), “[p]hilosophy needs a nonphilosophy that comprehends it; it needs a nonphilosophical comprehension just as

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art needs nonart and science needs nonscience” (1994: 218), and maybe academy (and academic writing) also needs nonacademy (or nonacademic writing). In literature, Deleuze sees a notion at work that comprises the affective (as nonrepresentational) dimension of the written sign. In Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, Deleuze finds the following description: “The truths which intelligence grasps directly in the open light of day have something less profound, less necessary about them than those which life has communicated to us in spite of ourselves in an impression, a material impression because it has reached us through our senses” (2008: 61).3 Deleuze translates this affective dimension of “truths” into his concept of “encountered signs” (2008: 64). An encountered sign is not a recognizable object, but an object of a contingent encounter that “does us violence: it mobilizes the memory, it sets the soul in motion; but the soul in its turn excites thought, transmits to it the constraints of sensibility” (2008: 64). Such a sign produces an affect that in turn shocks us into thought—not rational or cognitive recognition, but “real thought.” “More important than thought is ‘what leads to thought’; more important than the philosopher is the poet” (2008: 61), because poetry and art produce ideas through affects. Affects (a body being affected by another body) increase or diminish our capacities to act (affectus), effecting a “state of being” (affection). This meeting of two bodies (and, of course, body here does not necessarily refer to the human form, but can also denote an animal body; a body of sound, color, light, or words; a climate, etc.), if it increases our capacities to act, can result in two different kinds of power (and here I am referring to another one of Spinoza’s pairs—potestas and potentia): on the one hand, there is a power marked by the reactive forced of resentment (potestas, “power-over”)—“Inspiring sad passions is necessary for the exercise of power” (Deleuze 1978: 14). But then there is also power as active potential, creative power (potentia, “power-to”). And here we come to a point where these two “affective modes” can be linked to two modalities of academic writing. If there is one mode of academic writing that has come under attack (not so) recently, is the (what I would call) default mode of academia per se: critique. As Jonathan Culler has recently shown (2015), the different (national) labels of criticism, critique, Kritik, critica, etc, open up a differential field that more or less successfully bundles a multiplicity of projects and approaches. One of the common denominators, however, is the accepted belief that critique functions as a diagnosis of “what is wrong in the State of [insert X].” In addition, as Armen Avanessian extrapolates from Judith Butler’s essay “Critique, Dissent, Disciplinarity,” critique also legitimizes, both the object criticized, by “ennobling” it from a simple “empirical given to being a phenomenon that exist because it is legitimate” (2017: 33), albeit ultimately wrong (the judgment day of critique), but even more so the one who critiques, declaring her- or himself as “the only possible [and lawful, B.H.] agent of change” (2017: 33). The negativity of critique is thus not only fundamental, but also foundational, i.e. constitutive: legitimation through negativity. Et in Academia Ego—where is the “I” in academia/academic writing? And is the “I” a subject, stable, and autonomous, an “I” that “expresses” thoughts and ideas (purely mental concepts?) in writing, in a writing that now might also add a “dose of affect” as an extra?

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As already pointed out, every writing is affective, but there are certain modalities of writing—institutionalized modalities, that is—that rather produce resentment and “sad passions,” the mode of critique, I argue, being one of them. One of the defining traits of critique—its supposedly disinterested, impersonal, and ergo (quasi) objective stance—could be related to one of the guiding principles of academic writing in the humanities per se [in their attempt to gain an “equal footing” with the higher-impact colleagues in the (Natural) Sciences] . . . at least on the level of students, Grads and PostGrads, those “undercommons” in which a personal style has not yet coagulated into a “proper name” (those who do not have to match academic conventions [anymore]). It might be argued that the very notion of “academic” conjures up the idea that any writing that adopts this term is (and has to be) disembodied, rational, objective, that authorial detachment is part of its ethos, that the very subjectivity (or: “human-ness’) of humanities scholars are not factors in and no contributive factors to their “knowledge.” Or is it? As Paul Feyerabend, who, by the way thinks “very little of experts” (1977: 389), muses: He [the expert] is not averse to occasionally venturing into different fields, to listen to fashionable music, to adopt fashionable ways of dressing . . ., or to seduce his students. However, these activities are aberrations of his private life, they have no relations whatever to what he is doing as an expert. A love for Mozart, or for Hair will not, and must not, make his physics more melodious, or give it at better rhythm. Nor will an affair make his chemistry more colourful. 1977: 389

But maybe it does! In his essay “Against Subjectivity,” Michael Bérubé summarizes some arguments “against subjectivity” in academic writing put forward by Maz’ud Zavarzadeh and Gertrud Himmelfarb: “The forms of autobiography, memoir, rhetorical self-staging, and confession they find in contemporary criticism are signs of a degenerate and enervated discipline that no longer seeks the truth and has lapsed into self-indulgence and navel-gazing” (1996: 1064). Bérubé concedes that personal narratives might “constitute some kind of generic violation of scholarship in the human sciences,” but personally entertains the idea that “as long as the scholarship in question concerns humans and is written by humans, readers should at least entertain the possibility that nothing human should be alien to it” (1996: 1065)—so maybe there is a place for art and affect in academic writing? But how? How can art and academia go hand in hand? The hiatus of art and research is the result of the idea of a linear process ranging from invention concept (mental) to design (material realization). This however does not do justice to the complexity of the matter: mental and corporeal processes and interactions as well as “implicit/tacit/practical knowledge” become relevant on all levels, for all decisions. As Martin Tröndle has pointed out (2011), conceptual cognitive and manual affective activities go hand in hand, the sensual examination of the material and emotional reactivity is also of highest importance. As Deleuze and Guattari put it in their idea of the “artisan” (rather than the “artist”): “it is a question of surrendering

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to the [materiality], then following where it leads by connecting operations to a materiality, instead of imposing a form on matter: what one addresses is less a matter submitted to laws than a materiality possessing a nomos” (1987: 408). The mind is tightly embedded in the interplay between body, environment, and matter. This is the quintessence of Embodied Mind Philosophy. Alva Noë, one of its originators, even takes it a significant step further: for him the mind evolves from the movements of the body in its environment—the mind is not a substance that could be simply located within the confines of our skull. Consciousness is not “something that happens in us, like digestion”—it is rather “something we do . . . a kind of living activity . . . . the ways in which each of us . . . carries on the process of living with and in response to the world around us” (2009: 7). Embodied Mind Philosophy, I argue, can stimulate a fertile resonance with the concept of artistic (or art-based) research: the artistic practice is here not (only) understood in terms of the finalized work of art (work-aesthetic), but rather in regard to the practices and strategies of artistic production (productionaesthetic). The process of the emergence of a work becomes the center of attention. Artists comprehend this process as the phase of examination or evolution of a work. With this shift from the work to artistic research comes also an altered handling of the work itself. It has become a medium of insight, at the latest since twentieth-century Modernity). The work materializes knowledge—beyond the aesthetic experience it facilitates comprehension of the world. Making art then means, initially programmatically in general, to explore something with the specific means of art, to discover something about the world. This entails that art does not solely comprehend itself as a medium of representation and that artistic production does not solely revolve around questions of depiction. This alleged reduction of the artistic to a mere tool serving questions of content, turns out to be an actual extension far beyond selfoccupation and the function of representation. The artistic position does not ignore the dimension of aesthetic experience; it rather collaborates with it and perceives it as a mode of negotiable understanding. Not to be mistaken: it is not that art morphs into science. Art and science are rather poised in a force field of “mutual becoming.” As Julian Klein has noted, “[a]rtistic experience is an active, constructive and aesthetic process, in which mode and substance are fused inseparably. This differs from other implicit knowledge, which generally can be considered and described separately from its acquisition” (2010: 4)— (cf. e.g. John Dewey, Michael Polanyi, Deleuze, etc.). The reflection of artistic research occurs on the plane of artistic experience itself. This neither excludes an interpretation on a descriptive plane, nor a theoretical analysis on a meta-level. It is however a false conclusion to assume that reflection is only possible from the exterior: artistic experience is a form of reflection. And affect-driven artistic production can arrive at more singular thought-positions than purely rationally organized philosophical systems of thought. Drawing from the concept of Artistic (or Arts-based) Research, I want to point out the notion of “voice,” and the notion of “the personal” in academic writing. Just as the close-up is the “objective correlative” of Deleuze’s affection-image, the voice—or even the “grain of the voice,” to quote Roland Barthes—is the “affective carrier” in speaking (and singing). How can this be translated into writing? As Barone and Eisner point out, “[a]rts-based

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research is defined by the presence of certain aesthetic qualities or design elements that infuse the inquiry and its writing” (1997: 74).4 These qualities include expressive modes of writing, the use of a language more directly related to lived experience, to affect as “radical situatedness” (Slaby 2017).5 John Dewey, in his Art as Experience, had claimed: “The poetic as distinct from the prosaic, esthetic art as distinct from scientific, expression as distinct from statement, does something different from leading to an experience. It constitutes one” (1980: 85). Following the etymological root of “aesthetics” to the Greek αἴσθησις [aísthēsis], which also means experience, we see that affect and the “aesthetic mode” are intimately intertwined. In a way, Barone and Eisner situate “voice” as the “personal signature of the researcher/writer” (1997: 77) that is instrumental in promoting an affective understanding, with affect, again, having an epistemic function here: there are things you cannot know until you sense them, feel them, encounter them. As Darsie Bowden (1995) has shown, there has been a tradition in the USA of introducing “voice” into academic writing. Curiously poised between a post-Sputnik hysteria of enforcing rigorous academic training, and Roland Barthes’ proclamation of the “Death of the Author,” the countercultural movement of the 1960s and 70s propagated “voice” as a counterpoint to academia’s rigorous constraints, by attempting to introduce “spontaneity, dynamism, rhythm, and authenticity” (1986: 182), the unquantifiable and nonrepresentative aspects of writing—in short, writing’s affects— into academic writing, an attempt soon squashed by the reinforcement of said (and sad) academic constraints. But voice and the personal cannot be equated with adding personal anecdotes to a text that otherwise follows the generic conventions of academic writing or even critique. And as much as I understand and sympathize with the urge of practitioners of affect theory to spice up their essays with personal lore (see also the “appendix” to Gregg’s and Seigworth’s introduction to their admirable Affect Theory Reader), in order to “embody” and “enact” their research on affect, this can only be the “tip of the iceberg.” The concept of affect forces us to re-think all those seemingly stable givens, to such an extent that the idea of the subject, the relation of “feeling” and “thinking” are completely undermined—affect always already locates (and produces) the subject relationally, the subject is a bundle of affects and percepts “in the making,” affect is a most valuable “shocker into thought,” and all of this because affect is social, not personal/individual. Because affect is not only an (emotional) state and/or personal feelings, but also preindividual, not only affectio, but also affectus, I think that the default “personal intros” to essays about affect, and embodied thinking, that describe the current situation of the one writing, are important, but also too-much and not-enough at the same time. What is at issue, I argue, is rather both a certain approach and a certain style of academic writing as such, not one of critique and resentment, but a style that is “a style of life too, not anything at all personal, but inventing a possibility of life, a way of existing” (Deleuze 1995: 100). What is at stake, ultimately, is nothing less than the interrelated question of judgment, morality, and ethics. “The painter Gustave Courbet . . . spoke of people who woke up at night crying ‘I want to judge! I have to judge!’ The will to destroy, the will to infiltrate every corner, the will to forever have the last word” (Deleuze 1995: 39)—it is not hard to see the ugly face of critique in this description: the critic-priest, the critic-judge, the moralist.

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For Deleuze, judgment is unbearable, horrible, a morality that suppresses vitality, is full of resentment, subjecting everything to the permanent smart-alecky weisenheimer attitude of a subjugating, inhibiting, cutting-down-to-size (moral) critique aggressively perpetuating the “right” conduct and thought: Pour en finir avec le jugement thus is an ethical stance in Deleuze’s work: “Judgment prevents the emergence of any new mode of existence . . . If it is so disgusting to judge, it is not because everything is of equal value, but on the contrary because what has value can be made or distinguished only by defying judgment” (1997: 135). For Deleuze, a way to escape judgment is to concentrate on affect’s lines of flight: “It is not a question of judging other existing beings, but of sensing . . . whether they bring forces to us, or whether they return us to the miseries of war, to the poverty of the dream, to the rigors of organization (1997: 135)—sad passions, that is. Morality, according to Deleuze, by default operates within a transcendent a priori and external framework “that is posited as both a source of all explanation and as a higher reality . . . Presumptuous types, great and small, from the leader of a tiny fringe group to the president of the United States, run on transcendence like a wino runs on red wine” (2005: 716), run on constraining “universal values,” according to which “one has to judge and be judged.” In contrast, ethics is related to what could be called an anti-juridical ontology. Ethics is “enabled and invigorated by the capacity for transformation” (Bennett 2005: 15), because it takes into accounts the forces and affects it encounters, immanent forces and affects, that is, in contrast to external modalities of judgment and morality. According to Deleuze, an ethics is always paired with an aesthetics, with a style: “There are things one can only do or say through mean-spiritedness, a life based on hatred, or bitterness toward life. Sometimes it takes just one gesture or word. It’s the styles of life involved in everything that make us this or that” (1995: 100). Thus, as Karen Barad has observed, “reading and writing are ethical practices, and critique misses the mark” (2012: 49). Since critique has been the default (and seemingly only) option for academic writing, students “can spit out a critique with the push of a button” (2012: 49). But what are alternatives to the “destructive practice” (2012: 49) of critique? First of all, critique only poses as the “only choice there is.” As Helen Small has shown, “[t]he work of the humanities is frequently . . . appreciative, or imaginative, or provocative, or speculative, more than it is critical” (2013: 267). For Massumi, it is not a question of critique being right or wrong (which would again be an essentially moral question anyway). It is rather an ethical and pragmatic question: “It is simply that when you are busy critiquing you are less busy augmenting. You are that much less fostering” (2002a: 12). If you go from the assumption that activities such as thinking and writing are inventive and not “about this world,” but “part of this world,” then critique is an approach marked by a disavowing of this (its very own!) inventiveness, because “it sees itself as uncovering something it claims was hidden or as debunking something it desires to subtract from the world, it clings to a basically descriptive and justificatory modus operandi” (2002a: 12). Thus, the tactics would be to shift gears—to turn academic writing from a tool inspiring sad passions to a tool using affirmative affects, “techniques which embrace their own inventiveness and are not afraid to own up to the fact that they add (if so meagerly) to reality” (2002a: 12). And what such an (as Massumi

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calls it) “productivist approach” adds to the world hopefully is exactly this—“that ounce of positive experience to the world you are affirming it, celebrating its potential, tending its growth, in however small a way, however really abstractly” (2002a: 12). To Felski’s question—“Why . . . is the affective range of criticism so limited? Why are we so hyperarticulate about our adversaries and so excruciatingly tongue-tied about our loves? (2015: 13), Deleuze and Guattari’s reaction—maybe not answer—would read: “Most of the books we cite are ones we love (sometimes for secret or perverse reasons): It matters little that some are well known, others little known, still others forgotten. We would wish only to cite with love” (1981: 67).6 “Love” here is another name for the affect that increases the powers to act, that liberates life—it is not so much what a book means, but what it does, which affects it releases, which powers to act it incites. This “love” also stands in direct contrast of what Deleuze—with Proust—sees as the dominating affect of the truth-seeker (critic, or even philosopher, the “lover of wisdom”), who is but “the jealous man who catches a lying sign on the beloved’s face” (Deleuze 2008: 62), and then judges in a tribunal of right or wrong. Deleuze and Guattari prefer writers who write in a foreign language (e.g. Samuel Beckett), or even more writers that make their own language into a kind of “foreign language within language” (Deleuze 1997: 5) (such as Kafka, or Proust). Thus, rather than opting for a “critique of critique,” which, as Helen Small sees it, “continues to take its warrant from critique” (2013: 27), critique would have to invite a “foreign language” of its own. According to Latour, what needs to be done is “to associate the word criticism with a whole set of new positive metaphors, gestures, attitudes, knee-jerk reactions, habits of thought” (2004: 247)—in short, a new affective ethos. Earlier on, I declared critique as not only being depressive, but also depressed. In kinesiology, depression is an anatomical term that speaks of motion, denoting a downward movement, the opposite term of which is elevation—“to bring into existence and not to judge” (Deleuze 1997: 135). Affirmation and elevation are affects sorely missed these days, joy and hope are affects worth inciting, in order to inspire a “belief in this world” (Deleuze 1989: 172). So—how does that play out? It’ll play out in style: “Two things work against style: homogeneous language or, conversely, a heterogeneity so great that it becomes indifferent, gratuitous, and nothing definite passes between its poles” (Deleuze 1995: 141). As Gregg and Seigsworth have pointed out, in the writings of Sedgwick or Massumi, “affect serves as force and form” (2010: 5), creating a style that precisely, one might argue, turned the publication of their early essays into a “watershed moment” (2010: 5). Producing affect in writing thus seems to be tied to ways of engaging with it in the very process of writing in the first place, in style—not writing about, but writing with. Affect must be written—to quote Roland Barthes: “it is perhaps time to dispose of a certain fiction: the one maintaining that research is reported but not written” (1986: 70), with writing being just an a posteriori and “vague final operation, rapidly performed” (1986: 70). According to Barthes, what needs be done is “to extract the ‘ego’ . . . from that scientific code which protects but also deceives, in a word to cast the subject across the blank page, not to ‘express’ it (nothing to do with ‘subjectivity’) but to disperse it: to overflow the regular discourse of research” (1986: 71)—entering the play of signifiers, inventing academic writing’s foreign language:

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The language for doing that can’t be a homogeneous system, it’s something unstable, always heterogeneous, in which style carves differences of potential between which things can pass, come to pass, a spark can flash and break out of language itself, to make us see and think what was lying in the shadow around the words, things we were hardly aware existed. Deleuze 1995: 141

Deleuze even gives advice that will sound counterintuitive, if not downright blasphemous to academic writers—talking about ideas and concepts, “all you should ever do is explore it, play around with the terms, add something, relate it to something else, never discuss it” (1995: 139), but it is precisely this “playing around” that gives rise to the inventiveness and affectivity of the writing process: creative production rather than re-ception, re-presentation, re-production; anything re-active might also in the long run turn re-actionary. A “productivist approach” (Massumi 2002a: 12), or a “compositional approach” (the term is Latour’s, 2010) is aimed at turning the text into a “co-actor . . . that helps makes things happen” (Felski 2015: 12). John Cage once commented on the ethical responsibility of experimenting: “I can’t understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I’m frightened of the old ones” (Kostelanetz 2003: 221). And when Cage’s “patron saint” Henry David Thoreau, in Walden, states that literature, that the “written word . . . is something at once more intimate with us and more universal than any other work of art. It is the work of art nearest to life itself ” (1973: 102), then not because of some autobiographical claim to truth, but because “[o]ne’s always writing to bring something to life, to free life from where it’s trapped, to trace lines of flight” (Deleuze 1995: 141)—it is affect in writing that “appeals to that part of our being which is not dependent on wisdom: to that in us which is a gift and not an acquisition—and, therefore, more permanently enduring” (Conrad 1926: xii). Changing that old idea of “Et in Arcadia Ego” into the question “Et in Academia Ego?,” such an ego may not be found in mastery and control, in the depressive but self-elevating differentiation and isolation that critique offers, but in the joyful acceptance that an ‚I‘ may only find itself in being-with, and thinking-with (rather than thinking about, see Herzogenrath 2021), and it may well be in that affective “thinking with the world” that “the-genre-formerlyknown-as-academic-writing” finds its new vistas that open up into and connect with the world. Of course, there can be no panacea how to do this, no one-size-fits-all recipe, but only a tactic. In a way, academic writers have to become artist-philosophers, combining concepts, percepts and affects, experimenting with multiple and mobile modalities of affective expression, moving away from posited meanings to affective operations, in order to test “how one performatively contributes to the stretch of expressions in the world” (Massumi 2002b: xxii), which is an ultimately ethical act, since it is “to ally oneself with change: for an ethics of emergence” (2002b: xxii). Related to the realm of (university) education, it might be worthwhile to take the meaning of educare literally: to lead out. Experimenting then would mean not to pick somebody up where they are, but to lead them and us out to a place where we have not yet been, providing an encounter with an outside of thought that forces us to think.7

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Notes 1

2

3

4

5

6 7

Thomas Jefferson drafted the declaration on behalf of a committee appointed by the Continental Congress—thus, Jefferson speaks for a committee that represents Congress, which in turn represents “one people” that at the very moment of declaration is neither “one” nor “a people.” In a lecture to mark the bicentennial of the Declaration of Independence in 1976, Derrida attempted a reading of the document in terms of the performative act of founding an institution. In asking “who signs, and with what so-called proper name, the declarative act” (1986: 10), Derrida links his critique of the concept of the author to a particular temporality. With regard to the “we” of the declaration, he writes: “But this people does not exist. They do not exist as an entity, it does not exist, before this declaration, not as such. If it gives birth to itself, as free and independent subject, as possible signer, this can hold only in the act of the signature. The signature invents the signer.” (10, emphases in the original) This structure shows an elementary kinship with another entangled bifurcation, that of light as both wave and particle, with affectus/intensity being the wave, and affection/ stage being the particle, I argue. I am following Jill Bennett’s reading of Deleuze in Emphatic Vision here. The English translation of Deleuze’s book includes translator Richard Howard’s own translations from Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu. The existing translation of Proust’s “Search” gives the quote in question as follows: “For the truths which the intellect apprehends directly in the world of full and unimpeded light have something less profound, less necessary than those which life communicates to us against our will in an impression which is material because it enters us through the senses” (Proust 2003, VI: 273). Although jan jadodzinski and Jason Wallin point out the representationalist and instrumentalist underpinnings of the Barone/Eisner approach, and although I share their concern, I am interested in the fact that affect here plays a role in academic writing as an epistemological force. In his Heidegger-induced reading of affect, Slaby refers to Heidegger’s concept of Befindlichkeit, which Slaby fruitfully renders as “radical situatedness,” a concept that refers both the mood of the subject, but also to the fact that mood and subject are always rooted in the thick of relations, in the milieu of the social. This is from an earlier version of the “Rhizome Chapter” that did not make it into the final version of A Thousand Plateaus/Mille Plateaux. In German school and university education, there is this common advice: “Man muss die Schüler/Studenten da abholen, wo sie stehen.” “You have to pick up the pupils/ students, where they stand” (that is, in their interest, development, etc).

References Avanessian, A. (2017), Overwrite. Ethics of Knowledge—Poetics of Existence, trans. N. F. Schott, Berlin: Sternberg Press. Barad, K. (2012), “Interview with Karen Barad”, in R. Dolphijn and I. van der Tuin (eds.), New Materialism: Interviews & Cartographies, Ann Arbor: MPublishing—University of Michigan Library, 48–70.

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Barone, T., and E. W. Eisner (1997), “Arts-based educational research.” in R. M. Jaeger (ed.), Complementary Methods for Research in Education, 2nd ed., Washington: AERA , 72–116. Barthes, R. (1986), The Rustle of Language, trans. R. Howard, Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Bennett, J. (2005), Emphatic Vision: Affect, Trauma, and Contemporary Art, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Bérubé, M. (1996), “Against Subjectivity”, PMLA 111 (5): 1063–68. Bowden, D. (1995), “The Rise of a Metaphor: ‘Voice’ in Composition Pedagogy”, Rhetoric Review 14 (1): 173–88. Brinkema, E. (2014), The Forms of the Affects, Durham, NC : Duke University Press. Conrad, J. (1926), The Nigger of the Narcissus, New York: Doubleday, Page & Co. Culler, J. (2015), “Kritik und ihre differenziellen Felder”, in A. Allerkamp, P. Valdivia Orozco and S. Witt (eds.), Gegen/Stand der Kritik, 49–64, Berlin und Zürich: diaphanes. Deleuze, G. (1978), “Spinoza’s Concept of Affect”, Cours Vincennes Lecture Transcripts 24/01/1978, https://www.gold.ac.uk/. . ./deleuze_spinoza_affect.pdf, accessed December 14, 2017. Deleuze, G. (1983), “Image Mouvement Image Temps.” Cours Vincennes—St Denis: le plan 02/11/1983, www.webdeleuze.com/php/texte.php?cle=69&groupe=Image%20 Mouvement%20Image%20Temps&langue=1, accessed December 14, 2017. Deleuze, G. (1986), Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, trans. H. Tomlinson and B. Habberjam, Minneapolis, MN : University of Minnesota Press. Deleuze, G. (1989), Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. H. Tomlinson and R. Galeta, London: Athlone 2000 Press. Deleuze, G. (1994), Difference and Repetition, trans. P. Patton, New York: Columbia University Press. Deleuze, G. (1995), Negotiations: 1972–1990, trans. M Joughin, New York: Columbia University Press. Deleuze, G. (1997), Essays Critical and Clinical, trans. D. W. Smith and M. A. Greco, Minneapolis, MN : University of Minnesota Press. Deleuze, G. (2005), “Pericles and Verdi: The Philosophy of François Châtelet”, trans. Charles T. Wolfe, The Opera Quarterly 21 (4): 716–24. Deleuze, G. (2008), Proust and Signs. The Complete Text, trans. R. Howard, London and New York: Continuum. Deleuze, G., and F. Guattari (1981), “Rhizome: Introduction”, trans. P. Patton, in I&C 8 (Spring 1981): 49–71. Deleuze, G., and F. Guattari (1987), A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. B. Massumi, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Deleuze, G., and F. Guattari (1994), What is Philosophy?, trans. H. Tomlinson and G. Burchell, New York: Columbia University Press. Derrida, J. (1986), “Declarations of Independence” trans. T. Keenan and T. Pepper, New Political Science 15: 7–15. Dewey, J. ([1934] 1980), Art as Experience, New York: Perigee. Felski, R. (2015), The Limits of Critique, Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. Feyerabend, P. (1977), “Experts in a Free Society”, Amsterdams Sociologisch Tijdschrift 3 (4): 389–405. Gregg, M., and G. J. Seigworth (2010), The Affect Theory Reader, Durham, NC : Duke University Press.

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Herzogenrath, B. (2021), “Toward a Practical Aesthetics: Thinking With” in B. Herzogenrath (ed.), Practical Aesthetics, 1–24, New York/London: Bloomsbury. jagodzinski, j. and Wallin, J. (2013), Arts-Based Research. A Critique and a Proposal, Rotterdam, Boston and Taipei: Sense Publishers. Klein, J. (2010), “What is Artistic Research?” originally published in German in Gegenwörte 23. Berlin-Brandenburg: Academy of Sciences and Humanities. English version available online: http://www.researchcatalogue.net/view/15292/15293, accessed December 14, 2017. Kostelanetz, R. (ed.) (2003), Conversing with John Cage, London: Routledge. Latour, B. (2004), “Why Has Critique Run out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern”, Critical Inquiry (Winter): 225–48. Latour, B. (2010), “An Attempt at a Compositionist Manifesto”, in New Literary History 41 (2010): 471–90. Massumi, B. (2002a), Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation, Durham, NC : Duke University Press. Massumi, B. (ed.) (2002b), A Shock to Thought. Expressionism after Deleuze and Guattari, London and New York: Routledge. Noë, A. (2009), Out of Our Heads: Why You Are Not Your Brain, and Other Lessons from the Biology of Consciousness, New York: Hill and Wang. Proust, M. (2003), In Search of Lost Time. Volume 6, trans. A. Mayor and T. Kilmartin, rev. D. J. Enright and J. Kilmartin, New York: Modern Library. Small, H. (2013), The Value of the Humanities, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Slaby, J. (2017), “More than a Feeling: Affect as Radical Situatedness”, Midwest Studies in Philosophy 41 (2017): 7–26. Spinoza. B. (1994), A Spinoza Reader: The Ethics and Other Works, trans. E. Curley, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Thoreau, H. D. (1973), The Illustrated Walden, J. L. Shanley (ed.), Princeton: Princeton University Press. Tröndle, M. (2011), “Methods of Artistic Reasearch—Kunstforschung im Spiegel künstlerischer Arbeitsprozesse”, in M. Tröndle and J. Warmers (eds.), Kunstforschung als ästhetische Wissenschaft. Beiträge zur transdisziplinären Hybridisierung von Wissenschaft und Kunst, Bielefeld: transcript, 169–96. van Alphen, E. (2008), “Affective Operations of Art and Literature”, RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics 53–54: 21–30.

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Write to Life Erin Manning

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22.

Write to life. Write to activate the force of the unthought. Write to field the conditions for other ways of living. Write to encounter the quality of existence that exceeds you. Care for how the writing makes a world. Note its tendency for centering, especially if yours is an existence that benefits from the center. Don’t recenter that which can only come to matter through a centering. Remember: the recentering of the center, the (re)making of the center, is how whiteness thrives. Another way of putting it: if the center is writing (with) you, you are the center. Too often, what we call critique feeds that center. Writing with the critic at your heels writes critique (that is, the center), into your work. Writing the center is writing white. Writing white rarely recognizes its whiteness. It’s too busy building a frame for knowledge. Building frames may temporarily stave off the critics. But really it produces them. To write white is to produce the conditions for reading white, and to read white is to uphold the limits of that frame. Nothing hones reading white better than anonymous peer review. Anonymous peer review is a free (usually unpaid) lesson in centering. Writing white is neurotypical. It knows, in advance, where knowledge is situated and how to wield it. Neurotypicality is an unspoken but commonly practiced wager that frames knowledge in advance of any question of where else knowing is at work. Neurotypicality styles not only a text, but also a body. It directs the sitting, back straight, eyes forward. Neurotypicality is learned. It is an accounting of what counts. Academia depends on it to contour what it means to produce. To learn under these conditions is to be taken over by the critic, body hardened to anything that escapes the formality of what counts. 187

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23. Just because it sounds poetic doesn’t mean it isn’t recentering of the center. 24. Beware of the tendency to (re)place the critic with a poet-overseer. Every time you send an article for peer review, every time you review, the overseer returns, no matter the style of the enterprise. 25. The critic can be flexible: don’t forget his ability to cross genres. 26. The genre of writing is a false problem. It’s not about the shape writing takes. It’s about how it styles informality. 27. Informality cannot be a genre. It must be practiced. It must be made. 28. Informality is the movement of thought that escapes the form it might otherwise know how to take. Informality moves thinking into an environment that troubles any solid account of before and after. Informality is writing writing itself into being. What is informal is not the person-saying. It’s the movement-moving. 29. A movement-moving is a movement of thought that trembles against the edifice of knowing. 30. The edifice of knowing is the control society that keeps the frame intact. To write white is to write with an instrumental knowing that disables the movement of thought, that shames its frolic. Any informality in this genre is choreographed in advance. It is formalized. 31. To ask a thinker to have laid out their sources in advance is to act as though the world knew how to source its thinking. 32. Citation can be necessary. But it can also be limiting. 33. Cite what moves the thinking into act. Beware of using thought to police thinking. 34. But be wary: you are never writing alone. 35. To ignore the power of inheritance is to write white. 36. Writing to life carries with it the ineffability of worlding at work. 37. Writing to life does not have the last word. 38. Writing to life moves with what emerges in the writing to connect to all that comes into contact to provide the emergent sociality into which we write. 39. If moving into thought implies an alongsideness, if you already know that thinking is never yours alone, buoyed as you are by ancestors who are always in the midst, you know you are not writing white. 40. The danger: citational practice can parentheticalize thought. 41. An inheritance is not a citation. 42. Because not only does the parenthesis situate the writer (Nietzsche, Whitehead, Harney and Moten, Morrison)—it speaks to all kinds of centering tendencies. Who got left out? 43. So recognize: citation is a gift. Care for how you invite people to be in the writing with you. Care for how their words produce a reverberation. 44. Call and response: “the response is already there before the call goes out” (Harney and Moten 2013: 133). 45. To hear the undercommoning of thought in the response echoed parenthetically by a voice calling out is to listen for the rhythm of an alongsideness that plays with that excess-on-itself being created in the middling. 46. Proof of importance, proof of legibility, proof of intelligibility (citational promise, citational death)—this is not what is heard in the call and response.

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47. Hear instead: the spark, the joy, the almost-repetition of a difference. 48. “But I think the call, in the way I would understand it, the call, as in the call and response, the response is already there before the call goes out. You’re already in something” (Harney and Moten 2013: 134) 49. Write to life: start in the middle, already be in something. 50. To be in something: to move at the rhythm of the production of a relationscape. 51. Peer review: “Your work is irrelevant to the discipline.” 52. It is indeed irrelevant to the discipline, running as it does against the wind, wild flows of movement coursing through it. 53. To discipline is to write white. 54. To write white is to be in good standing. To stand out. To be in front of the work. To speak for the work. 55. Write for life: move with it. 56. Writing that refuses to stand for myself is a terror to review. 57. To terrorize the review is to begin to write. 58. To begin to write is to write to life. “Was that life? Well then once more!” (Nietzsche 1961: 125). 59. To write to life is to be brought into the living through the rhythm of a call and response that “is already there before the call goes out.” 60. To write to life is to compose with the edges of existence to carry the force of life-living into the wor(l)ding. 61. Wor(l)ding is always an aesthetic proposition. It unknows existence. Thinkingfeeling. 62. Thinking-feeling: field the edges of the world making itself. 63. A coming to expression that grows from the middle is not born of the first person singular. 64. It comes from a crowd. 65. “Wherever there is a region of nature which is itself the primary field of the expressions issuing from each of its parts, that region is alive” (Whitehead 1938: 31). 66. Refrain from writing if the region is dead. 67. Don’t make it about you. 68. This isn’t a plot against memoir. Sometimes there is a lot to say about how existence fashions itself. Just remember the ecology of it. It was never all about me. 69. The danger: the critic is always around the corner (writing white can take any form). 70. Let the writing write you into being. 71. Don’t worry about the genre—the writing will take care of how the words make contact with the page. 72. Just take care not to try to “put something into words.” Words can’t be managed. They aren’t encapsulators of existence pre-contained. 73. Words make worlds. 74. “You don’t know anything.” (Morrison 2014) 75. Write from unknowing. 76. “It is bigger than your overt consciousness or your intelligence or even your gifts; it is out there somewhere and you have to let it in.” (Morrison 2009)

190 77. 78. 79. 80. 81.

82. 83.

84.

85.

86.

New Perspectives on Academic Writing “You’re already in something.” (Harney and Moten 2013) Write yourself into thought. Move at the pace of thought’s informality. Run with it! But beware: it matters how it’s said. “The systematic looting of language can be recognized by the tendency of its users to forgo its nuanced, complex, midwifery properties for menace and subjugation. Oppressive language does more than represent violence; it is violence; does more than represent the limits of knowledge; it limits knowledge.” (Morrison 1993) Write from the thick of it. “Language can never ‘pin down’ slavery, genocide, war. Nor should it yearn for the arrogance to be able to do so. Its force, its felicity is in its reach toward the ineffable.” (Morrison 1993) Participate in the power of language’s movement. Care for the precision of what it can do, of what it will do, in the crafting of existence, in the movement of thought. “She is convinced that when language dies, out of carelessness, disuse, indifference and absence of esteem, or killed by fiat, not only she herself, but all users and makers are accountable for its demise.” (Morrison 1993) Writing white kills.

References Harney, S., and F. Moten (2013), The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study, Wivenhoe: Minor Compositions. Morrison, T. (1993), Nobel Peace Prize lecture, December 7, 1993, https://www.nobelprize. org/prizes/literature/1993/morrison/lecture/, accessed November 21, 2021. Morrison, T. (2009), “Toni Morrison: The Precious Moments a Writer Lives for”, interview by Pam Houston, https://www.oprah.com/omagazine/toni-morrison-on-writing, accessed November 21, 2021. Morrison, T. (2014), “Write, Erase, Do It Over” in The Art of Failure: The Importance of Risk and Experimentation, National Endowment for the Arts, interview by Rebecca Sutton, https://www.arts.gov/stories/magazine/2014/4/art-failure-importance-risk-andexperimentation/toni-morrison, accessed November 21, 2021. Nietzsche, F. (1961), Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. Walter Kaufman, New York: Penguin. Whitehead, A. N. (1938), Modes of Thought, New York: Free Press.

Contributors Jessie Beier is a teacher, artist, writer, and conjurer of strange pedagogies for unthought futures. Beier is currently a PhD Candidate in the Department of Secondary Education, University of Alberta, Canada and an artist-researcher with the collaborative researchcreation initiative Speculative Energy Futures (University of Alberta, Canada). Her recent publications include “Tracing a black hole: Probing cosmic darkness in Anthropocenic times,” “Pedagogy of the Negative: Pedagogical Heresy for ‘The End Times’” (with Jason Wallin), and she is currently completing a co-edited book titled  Ahuman Pedagogy: Multidisciplinary Perspectives for Education in the Anthropocene (Palgrave Macmillan). For more information, visit jessiebeier.com. Levi R. Bryant is Professor of Philosophy at Collin College outside of Dallas, Texas, USA. He is a prominent figure in speculative realism and object-oriented ontology, and the author of The Democracy of Objects (Open Humanities Press, 2011), and OntoCartography: An Ontology of Machines and Media (Edinburgh University Press, 2014). He has written widely on Deleuze, Badiou, Luhmann, and Lacanian psychoanalysis. David Burrows is an artist, writer, and Reader in Fine Art at the Slade School of Fine Art, University College London, UK, where he runs undergraduate Fine Art Media. His exhibitions include: Micro/Macro: British Art 1996–2002, Mucsanok, Budapest (2003); Take Me With You, Circulo des Bellas Artes, Madrid/Mori Art Museum, Tokyo (2006); All Over the New Smart, FA Projects, London (2008); Waving From Afar, Star Space, Shanghai (2009); The Diagram Banner Repeater, London/Torna, Istanbul (2011); In Outer Space There is No Painting and Sculpture, Summerhall, Edinburgh (2014); The Birmingham Show, Eastside Projects, Birmingham (2014). In 2015 he co-organized and co-curated A Plague of Diagrams at the ICA, London. Recent published book chapters include: “The Sinthome/Z-Point Relation or Art as Non-Schizoanalysis” (with Simon O’Sullivan) in Deleuze and the Schizoanalysis of Visual Art (Bloomsbury, 2014) and “Negative Space War Machines” in Occupy: A People Yet to Come (Open Humanities Press, 2015). From 2001 to 2010 he was editor of Article Press at Birmingham City University, editing and convening a number of books, conferences, and public seminars including Making a Scene (with Henry Rogers) (2000) and (as series editor) five Art Writing volumes, including (as editor) Art Writing: Performance Fictions (2011). In 2002 he was awarded a Paul Hamlyn Visual Arts Award. David R. Cole is an Associate Professor in Education at Western Sydney University, Australia. He studied philosophy at the University of Warwick, UK, and was part of the 1990s flourishing connected to Deleuze/Guattari. He has been employed full time in teacher education in Australia since 2004, and has contributed fifteen books and more 191

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than 100 other significant publications to the field, as well as taking part in sixteen international research projects. David has started an online interdisciplinary institute for studying the Anthropocene: https://iiraorg.com. His latest book is Education, the Anthropocene, and Deleuze/Guattari (Brill, 2022). Contact: david.cole@westernsydney. edu.au Anna Gibbs teaches at Western Sydney University, Australia and writes across the fields of textual, media, and cultural studies with an emphasis on feminism, affect theory and mimesis, and fictocriticism. Co-editor of three collections of Australian experimental writing, she also performs her own experimental texts. Her experimental and cut up writing has been widely published and internationally performed, and she is a frequent collaborator with visual artists, most recently with Elizabeth Day, Julie Gough, and Noelene Lucas as a member of The Longford Project, which works with the colonial history of Longford in northern Tasmania to turn the coincidence of common ancestry into connection and reconciliation in the present through a collaborative practice in contemporary art. Jennifer Hayashida is a poet, translator, and artist based in Gothenburg and New York. She earned her BA in American Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, and an MFA in writing at the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College. In 2018, her debut poetry collection, A Machine Wrote This Song, was published by Gramma Poetry/Black Ocean, while her translations from the Swedish include books by Athena Farrokhzad, Lawen Mohtadi, Jenny Tunedal, Ida Börjel, and Burcu Sahin. With Andjeas Ejiksson, she is currently at work on Swedish translations of Don Mee Choi as well as Kim Hyesoon. Her work has been exhibited internationally, including at The Vera List Center for Art & Politics, The New Museum, as well as REDCAT, and published in journals such as Chicago Review, Rethinking Marxism, and The Asian American Literary Review. Honors include awards from the MacDowell Colony, the New York Foundation for the Arts, and PEN America. She has held contingent positions at the University of California, Davis; Montclair State University; Hunter College, CUNY; and Columbia University. From 2008 to 2017, she served as Director of the Asian American Studies Program at Hunter College, The City University of New York, a program almost exclusively staffed by contingent faculty. Hayashida is since 2018 a doctoral researcher at Valand Academy, with the project Feeling Translation, which explores translation as scene and event in relation to race, the body, and the nation-state. Bernd Herzogenrath is Professor of American Literature and Culture at Goethe University of Frankfurt am Main, Germany. He is the author of An Art of Desire: Reading Paul Auster; An American Body Politic: A Deleuzian Approach and editor of (among others) The Farthest Place: The Music of John Luther Adams and Deleuze Guattari & Ecology. At the moment, he is planning a project, cinapses: thinking film that brings together scholars from film studies, philosophy, and the neurosciences (members include António Damasio and Alva Noë). His latest publications include the collections The Films of Bill Morrison. Aesthetics of the Archive (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2017), and Film as Philosophy (University of Minnesota Press, 2017). He is also

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(together with Patricia Pisters) the main editor of the media-philosophical book series thinking media with Bloomsbury. Rembert Hüser has been Professor of Media Studies at Goethe University Frankfurt, Germany since 2014. Before that he was Associate Professor of German Studies and Moving Images in the Departments of German, Scandinavian & Dutch and Cultural Studies & Comparative Literature at University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, USA. In spring 2018 he was a Mercator Fellow at the Graduate Research Center “Documentary Practices: Excess and Privation” at Ruhr University, Bochum. In fall 2016, he was Max Kade Visiting Professor in the Department of German Studies at Brown University. Currently, he is the Co-Director of the Graduate Research Collective “Configurations of Film” at Goethe University, Frankfurt, Germany. Erin Manning studies in the interstices of philosophy, aesthetics, and politics, concerned, always, about alter-pedagogical and alter-economic practices. 3e is the direction her current research takes—an exploration of the transversality of the three ecologies, the social, the environmental, and the conceptual. An iteration of 3e is a landbased project north of Montreal where living and learning is explored. Legacies of SenseLab infuse the project, particularly the question of how collectivity is crafted in a more-than-human encounter with worlds in the making.  Kalani Michell is Assistant Professor of European Languages and Transcultural Studies at the University of California Los Angeles, USA. She has published on a variety of art and media topics, such as on Marcel Broodthaers’s experiments with ink in 16mm film, the circulation of canonical paintings in the set design of porn productions, and on a computer game that restages waiting for a performance by Marina Abramović. Her research on German cinema has examined concepts of surveillance and home movies in Thomas Heise’s Barluschke, invisibility techniques in a sci-fi film from the Third Reich, and experiments with moving image formats in the long sixties. Her most recent publications were about comics, sound studies, and bureaucracy: the comics storyboard in Christian Petzold’s filmic shot composition, the emergence of academic podcasts, and paperwork as a key, if overlooked, aspect of film labor and production. Simon O’Sullivan is a writer, artist and Professor of Art Theory and Practice and Head of Department of Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths College, University of London, UK. He is the author of the monographs On the Production of Subjectivity: Five Diagrams of the Finite-Infinite Relation (Palgrave, 2012) and Art Encounters Deleuze and Guattari: Thought Beyond Representation (Palgrave, 2005), as well as of various articles on art, aesthetics, and Deleuze in journals such as Angelaki, Parallax, Pli: Warwick Journal of Philosophy, Journal of Cultural Research, Journal of the British Society of Phenomenology, Parrhesia, Subjectivity and Deleuze Studies. He is contributing editor to the Oxford Encyclopaedia of Aesthetics and co-editor (with Henriette Gunkel and Ayesha Hameed) of Futures and Fictions (Repeater, 2017) and (with Stephen Zepke) of both Deleuze, Guattari and the Production of the New (Continuum, 2008) and Deleuze and

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Contemporary Art (Edinburgh University Press, 2009). Since 2005, Burrows and O’Sullivan have worked together (and with others) to produce the collaboration and “performance fiction” Plastique Fantastique, through the production of texts, artworks, and performance (see www.plastiquefantastique.org). Plastique Fantastique has exhibited and performed widely, most recently as part of the Hayward Touring show Shonky: the Aesthetics of Awkwardness (2017–18) and the TULCA festival We are the Screamers (2017). Burrows and O’Sullivan have also recently co-authored the monograph Fictioning: The Myth-Functions of Contemporary Art (Edinburgh University Press, 2019). Anne Pirrie is Reader at the School of Education and Social Sciences and a Reader at the Centre for Research in Education at the University of the West of Scotland, UK. Anne is interested in exploring the theme of authority in educational contexts, building upon her existing published work in this area. She has recently published a conceptual paper that explores the history of LEGO as a means to develop a more nuanced understanding of the complex nature of learning. Prior to her appointment as Reader in Education at UWS in 2007, Anne was a contract researcher for many years. As a result, she has diverse research interests, reflected in the range of her publications. In recent years she has published in the area of educational inclusion; education policy; the epistemology of social research; research ethics; lifelong learning in the context of the European Reference Framework; and authority relations in education. She is committed to interdisciplinary research endeavor and collaborates with visual artists, sociologists, philosophers, cultural theorists, geographers, and urban designers. Liana Psarologaki is an artist, architect engineer, and academic, originally from Greece and based in East Anglia. She holds a PhD from the University of Brighton, UK (2015), an MA in Fine Art at UCA Canterbury, UK (2010) and a combined Master’s in Architecture from the National Technical University of Athens, Greece (2007). Awarded many times for academic excellence, her work is internationally presented and published contributing in the current debate on empirical ontologies of architectural space, with a focus on post-theory. Dr Psarologaki is a Deleuze scholar, senior lecturer, and the Head of Architecture at the University of Suffolk, Ipswich, UK. Julie Vulcan is an interdisciplinary artist, researcher, and writer. Her work spanning performance, installation, digital media, and text has been presented in various international festivals and contexts. Her writing has appeared in the Power publication What is Performance Art? Australian Perspectives, arts journals, and independent publications alongside flash fictions for social media platforms. Deep research processes underpin much of her work developed through intensive residencies, participatory laboratories, and interdisciplinary exchange informing speculative imaginings for future worlds here and now. Julie’s current research interrogates notions of the dark and investigates multispecies worldings. Julie lives and works on Gundungurra country South West of Sydney. Jason Wallin is Professor of Media and Youth Culture in Curriculum at the University of Alberta, Canada. He is the author of A Deleuzian Approach to Curriculum (Palgrave

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Macmillan), Arts-based Inquiry: A Critique and Proposal (Sense Publishers), and coproducer of the extreme music documentary BLEKKMETAL (Grimposium, Uneasy Sleeper). Mick Wilson is an educator, artist, and researcher based in Dublin and Gothenburg. Currently Professor of Art and Director of Doctoral Studies at Hdk-Valand, University of Gothenburg, Sweden. He was previously Head of Valand Academy 2012–18; founder Dean of the Graduate School of Creative Arts & Media, Ireland 2008–12; and editor-inchief of PARSE Journal 2015–17. He recently co-edited “On the Question of Exhibition”, PARSE Journal, vol. 13, parts I, II, & III (2021). Co-edited volumes include: Curating After the Global (MIT Press, 2019); Public Enquiries: PARK LEK & the Scandinavian Social Turn (BDP, 2018); How Institutions Think (MIT Press, 2017); The Curatorial Conundrum (MIT Press, 2016); Curating Research (Open Editions/De Appel, 2014); SHARE Handbook for Artistic Research Education (ELIA, 2013); and Curating and the Educational Turn (Open Editions, 2010). Recent essays include “Living the Coming Death”, in M. Hlavajova and W. Maas (eds.), BASICS #1: Propositions for Non-Fascist Living, Tentative and Urgent, MIT Press, 2019; and “What Is to Be Done? Negations in the Political Imaginary of the Interregnum”, S. H. Madoff (ed.), What about Activism? Sternberg Press, 2019; and “White Mythologies and Epistemic Refusals: Teaching Artistic Research Through Institutional Conflict”, in R. Mateus-Berr & R. Jochum (eds.), Teaching Artistic Research, De Gruyter, 2020.

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Index of Subjects Abolition 30 abstract academic expressionism 10, 161 academic writing ix, 2–11, 13–16, 18, 20, 23, 27–9, 39, 51, 61, 100, 116, 137, 138, 142–3, 146, 149–54, 157–9, 161–4, 166–9, 173, 176–81, 183 affect ix, 8, 10–12, 125, 127, 173–7, 179, 181–5, 192 anthropocene 9, 25, 36–8, 119, 137–9, 141–8, 191–2 ash 109–18, attention 6–7, 10, 15, 17, 27, 58, 62, 68, 77, 80, 95, 99, 109, 111–5, 126, 128, 139, 142, 152, 162, 164–6, 170–1, 178 Australian bushfires 9, 137

essayism 162, 171 experimental writing 9, 192

blackness 34, 67, 82

judgment 80, 174, 176, 179–80

captions 6, 62, 66–8, 70–2, 74–7, 80, 82–3 climate change 9, 30, 110, 137, 139, 144, 146–8 communication 3, 7, 17–20, 22–3, 37, 39, 49, 86–87, 89, 91, 123–4, 135, 140–1, 146 contemplative life 55 contemporary art museum 85, 90–1, 95–6 contingent labor 8

mythoplasia 53, 57–8

dehiscence 32–4 desktop criticism 89–90 device 39–46, 48–51, 61, 66, 132, 141, 153–4 disaster vi, 9, 44, 71, 74–5, 81, 137–41, 145–6, 174 discourse 2–3, 7, 9, 15–16, 20, 25, 45, 93–4, 97, 100, 147, 151, 157, 159–60, 167, 170, 181 educacene 4, 25–30, 32–4 erasure poetry8, 101, 129, 158

fabulative writing 56–8 fiction 4, 39–46, 51–2, 59–60, 71 fictioning 4–5, 51, 53, 56–7, 59, 194 fire 86, 91, 100, 112–16, 118–19, 128, 137–9, 141–2, 145–6 footnotes 6, 78, 150, 153–7, 160 geotrauma 25–6 inner voice 126 irritating 150

perspectivism 40–41 philo-fiction 41 photography 66, 77–8, 80–2 research 4, 10–11, 26–8, 30–31, 35, 37, 58, 86–7, 89, 98–100, 119, 125, 127–32, 147, 149–51, 153–4, 158–60, 177–9, 181, 184–5, 191–5 response vi, 33, 35, 54, 86–7, 89–90, 97, 109–11, 113, 115–7, 120, 125, 155, 157, 163, 165, 170, 178, 188–9 Royal Society 152–3, 159 scholarly practice 161, 166 scholē 55, 57, 58 science fiction 39–43, 51–2, 56–7, 59 structure 3, 13, 15, 17, 23–4, 26, 28, 32–4, 111, 156, 183 subtitles 82–3, 91 system 3, 13, 16–9, 28, 55, 91, 141, 148, 151, 157

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text-image relationships 6 therapy of language 152 tracker-app 91, 94–6 translation 7–8, 54, 62, 72–3, 76, 82–3, 99–100, 108, 155–6, 183, 192 undercommons 128, 134–5, 177, 188, 190 unwriting 3, 9, 13, 137–46 video essay 6–7, 86, 90, 92, 96 virtual 55, 60, 113, 115–7, 124, 126, 132–4,

walking 25, 27–31, 33, 35–7, 43, 47, 61, 111, 142 worlding 7, 99–100, 188 writing 1, 3–11, 13–16, 18–20, 22–3, 25–36, 39–41, 44, 46, 48, 51, 54, 57–8, 61, 67, 71, 74, 86–7, 92, 94, 100–101, 109–12, 116–8, 121, 123–4, 126–9, 137–9, 141–6, 149–54, 157–9, 161–70, 173, 176–7, 179–83, 187–92, 194 writing-with 8, 109, 111, 117

Index of Names Allado-McDowell, K. 48, 51 Aristotle 55, 57, 59, 159

Hockney, David 170–1 Hunt, Erica 45, 59, 100–1, 108, 148, 164, 192

Bacon, Francis 152–3, 160, Barad, Karen 11, 116–18, 180, 183 Bayle, Pierre 155–7, 159–60 Benjamin, Walter 78, 80, 94–5, 142, 146, Berlant, Lauren 122, 134 Bourdieu, Pierre 151–2, 159–60 Braidotti, Rosi 56, 59, 118–9, 131 Brassier, Ray 27, 33, 36 Brinkema, Eugenie 10–11, 173, 184 Butler, Octavia E. 47–8, 51–2,

la paperson 7–8, 11, 99–101, 108 Lacan, Jacques 3, 15–17, 20, 24, 140, 148, 191 Laruelle, Francois 26, 28, 32–3, 37, 41, 52 Latour, Bruno 1–2, 11–2, 127, 134, 173, 181–2, 185 Lazard, Carolyn vi, 74–5, 80–1 Luhmann, Niklas 3, 17–21, 24, 191

Cage, John vii, 182, 185 Cixous, Helène 5, 56–9,

O’Keefe, Angela 169–71 O’Sullivan, Simon 4–5, 39–40, 43, 45–6, 51, 56–7, 59–60, 191, 193–4

Davis, Heather 27, 36, 99, 131, 192 Delany, Samuel R. 40–2, 51–2, Deleuze, Gilles 2, 9–10, 20, 26, 30–1, 35, 37, 55, 57, 59–60, 101, 122–3, 134, 137–44, 147, 150, 174–85, 191–4 Derrida, Jacques 20, 22–3, 90, 97, 127, 134, 139, 148, 173, 183–4 Didion, Joan 164–5, 167–71 Dillon, Brian 162, 164, 166, 167, 171 Farocki, Harun vi, 62, 72, 74, 76, 79–81, 85–97 Gagliano, Monica 111, 117, 119 Galloway, Alexander 28–30, 32, 37–9 Guattari, Felix 9, 26, 30–1, 35, 37, 60, 101, 123, 125–6, 134, 137, 140–4, 147, 174–5, 177, 181, 184–5, 191–3 Haraway, Donna 27, 37, 40, 56–60, 110, 112, 117, 119, 131, 160 Harney, Stefano 128, 134, 188–90 Heraclitus 139, 147 Hoban, Russell 43–5, 52

Mandel, Mike vi, 66, 82, 90, 97 Moten, Fred 128, 134, 150, 188–90

Pollock, Jackson 10, 161–71 Preciado, Paul B. 54–6, 60 Riley, Denise 125–6, 135 Sexton, Jared 29, 32–7 Sharpe, Christina 67–8, 70–1, 78, 82 Smith, Linda Tuhiwai 149, 158, 160, 167, 171, 184, 193 Stanitzek, Georg 92, 97 Steffensen, Victor 112 Sterne, Jonathan 93, 97 Stewart, Kathleen 122, 134–5 Sultan, Larry vi, 66, 82 Tsing, Anna 110, 115, 117 Tuck, Eve 7, 10, 12, 48, 52, 67–8, 74, 78, 87, 99–101, 108, 138, 141 Wallace, David Foster 87, 98 Wittig, Monique 45–7, 52 Yang, K. Wayne 7, 12, 99–101, 108

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