Untitled

New Perspectives on Academic Writing
i
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
ii
New Perspectives on
Academic Writing
The Thing That Wouldn’t Die
edited by Bernd Herzogenrath
iii
BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC
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First published in Great Britain 2023
Copyright © Bernd Herzogenrath and contributors, 2023
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iv
Contents
List of Figures vi
Series Editors’ Foreword vii
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction: The Thing That Wouldn’t Die Bernd Herzogenrath 1
1 The Structure and System of Academic Writing Levi R. Bryant 13

2 Walking on Sunshine Jessie Beier and Jason Wallin 25
3 Science Fiction Devices David Burrows and Simon O’Sullivan 39
4 Mythoplasia and Fictioning in Academic Practice: “Writing; Other” Liana
Psarologaki 53
5 [Fill In the Blank] Kalani Michell 61
6 How Can One Be Farocki? Rembert Hüser 85
7 Step 2 Hearing: “The Parties Agree to Use Their Best Efforts”.
A Dramatic Academic Work Jennifer Hayashida 99
8 Writing the Unwritable: Raveling Worlds Julie Vulcan 109
9 Writing In Between Anna Gibbs 121
10 Unwriting for the Anthropocene: Looking at the Disaster from
the Inside . . . David R. Cole 137
11 La Mise-en-Abîme: Placing Academic Writing in Scare
Quotes Mick Wilson 149
12 Abstract Academic Expressionism: An Alternative
Aesthetics of Scholarly Practice Anne Pirrie 161
13 Affective Academic Writing Bernd Herzogenrath 173
14 Write to Life Erin Manning 187
List of Contributors 191

Index of Subjects 197
Index of Names 199
v
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-from-
the-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
vi
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 re-
searching 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
viii Series Editors’ Foreword
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 ever-
multiplying 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.
ix
x
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 pre-
Trump 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
2 New Perspectives on Academic Writing
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:
Introduction 3
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
“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 5
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 non-
indexed, 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
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.
Introduction 7
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 sometimes-
dirty 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 neo-
imperial 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
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 non-
reappointment 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 human-
centered 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
Introduction 9
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 self-
referential 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
broader questions about the epistemology, ontology, and aesthetics of academic

practice writ large. Drawing on a curatorial view of the artistic process of the abstract-
expressionist 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
Introduction 11
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.
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.
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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
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
Structure and System 15
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 = The Master-Signifier
S2 = Knowledge
$ = The subjective
a = 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 $
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
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.
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.
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,
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
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
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
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.
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.
2
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
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 self-
circularity 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).
Walking on Sunshine 27
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
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
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 anti-
immigrant 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
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
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 anti-
oppressive 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
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
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, non-
philosophical 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, non-
philosophical 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:
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 non-
philosophical 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
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
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).
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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
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
Science Fiction Devices 41
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
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
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 one-
way 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
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 technologically-
induced disaster—casting the reader as a possible character in Riddley’s play.
Furthermore, in reading Riddley’s thoughts on being puppeted, does the reader
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 half-
hearted 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
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 retro-
causality). 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.
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 half-
Oankali):
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 slave-
owners 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
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.”
“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 far-
out 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
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 two-
dimensional. 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 epistemically-
driven 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
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 non-
human 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 Pharmako-
AI ”, 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.
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
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
Mythoplasia and Fictioning 55
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
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 . . .
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
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 Paraphrasing Wellmon 2017.
2 Please refer to the UK government white paper available at https://www.gov.uk/
government/publications/skills-for-jobs-lifelong-learning-for-opportunity-and-
growth.
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).
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.
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.
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in Gaffney, P. (ed.), Force of the Virtual: Deleuze, Science, and Philosophy, Minneapolis:
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Becoming in Education: A Deleuze-Guattari Perspective, 35–52, Rotterdam: Sense
Publishers.
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Future of Knowledge”, https://www.abc.net.au/religion/the-university-is-dead-long-
live-the-academy-reflections-on-the-/10095222.
Whitehead, A. (1978), Process and Reality, New York, NY: Free Press.
5
[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
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
[Fill In the Blank] 63
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.
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.
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.
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
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
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-AU-
PRINCE, 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.
Figure 5.13
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
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
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
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
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
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 first-
person 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 visually-
impaired 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
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 text-
image 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
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 Hüser (2021: 43) and Felsch ([2015] 2021: 135–36).
2 Misner and Wheeler (1957: 532).
3 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).
4 Wollen ([1984] 2007: 109–10).
5 “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).
6 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
possibility of the photograph adding ‘fresh information’ to the verbal text; nor can the
verbal text be redundant” (Bryant 1996: 12–13).
7 Thornton (1978: 52).
8 “caption” (2021).
9 Nović (2021).
10 “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).
11 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).
12 Cf. Armstrong (1998: 441, n. 29).
13 “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).
14 Sharpe (2016: 118–20).
15 King (2019: 44–48).
16 “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).
17 “[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.
18 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.
19 Sharpe 2016: 30–38.
20 “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).
21 Sharpe 2016: 141–42, n. 15.
22 Interventions in the form of footnotes could also be read as alternative underwriting:
Shockley (2011: 813–15) and Sharpe (2020: 45–48).
23 See also Stafford 2006: 297–98.
24 “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
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).
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.
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84
6
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
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,
How Can One Be Farocki? 87
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.
“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
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
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 newly-
formed 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-in-
residence 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
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).
The new provider from the Netherlands was not part of the Schreiben-Bilder-
Sprechen-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
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
American audience . . . Called by one critic “the best known unknown

filmmaker in the world,” Ruiz has created a body of work whose quiet fame (as well
as its notable obscurity) rests with his position as the quintessential foreign
filmmaker.
Bowen 1990: 30
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
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,
in 1956 I was the paper boy for Rasselbande in my hometown, so I must have held
in my hands and distributed the very issue that carried Farocki’s article. For almost
sixty years, then, I’m proud to say, I have been helping to spread Harun’s work.
Elsaesser and Alberro 2014
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 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 self-
evidence in the shift from telling to showing.
2 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”
[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-visible-
thomas-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-sms-
der-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/learning-
farocki, 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.
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-in-
motion/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.
7
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 first-
generation 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
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
“The Parties Agree . . .” 101
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 non-
reappointment. 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
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.
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.
8
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
“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, writing-
with 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.
Writing the Unwritable 111
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
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 post-
fire 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
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
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
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. Raveling-
out 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 multi-
sensorial ways—including how it invites our body to move, rest and absorb the multi-
molecular. “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
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. Writing-
with 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.
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 “material-
semiotic 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
the unfamiliar world of a post-fire terrain with its proposition to engage and imagine
with it and what it is becoming.
2 Gundungurra country is the traditional lands of the Gundungurra Aboriginal people
in the south-east of NSW, Australia.
3 See “Executive Summary”, iv. https://www.unep.org/emissions-gap-report-2020
accessed June 4, 2021.
4 See https://www.ipcc.ch/report/sixth-assessment-report-working-group-i/ (accessed
August 10, 2021).
5 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.
6 The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary On Historical Principles, 3rd ed. (1973), s.v.
“ravel”, “unravel”.
7 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.
8 Clarke and Yusoff (2018) offer a version of companion writing in their “pyrosexual
counter-narrative” of sex and fire.
9 Pyne 2019 outlines an historical overview of our changing pyrogeography.
10 See https://www.science.org.au/curious/bushfires accessed June 4, 2021.
11 See https://www.anbg.gov.au/bryophyte/ecology-fire.html accessed April 30, 2021.
12 See https://www.birdlife.org.au/bird-profile/spotted-pardalote accessed April 30, 2021.
13 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).
14 See https://www.ipcc.ch/report/sixth-assessment-report-working-group-i/ accessed
August 10, 2021.
15 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.
16 I am overlaying my definition of companion to these writing relationships. It is not
necessarily how these writers personally identify their writing relationships.
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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 in-
between 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
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.
Writing In Between 123
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).
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
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 matter-
movement 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.
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).
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
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
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, quality-

controlled, 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
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 self-
medicated 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,
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,
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 scare-
mongering 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,
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
Notes
1 Kate Lilley (2012) characterizes contemporary Australian poetry as an “exuberant
Undercommons” in the sense used by Harney and Moten (2004).
2 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.
3 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.
4 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.
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.
136
10
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
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
Unwriting for the Anthropocene 139
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,
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
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
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
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 anti-
establishment writing with Deleuze’s philosophical endeavors and Guattari’s anti-
psychiatry. 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
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
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
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.
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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,
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.
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Univocal Publishing.
Soriano, C. (2018), “The Anthropocene and the Production and Reproduction of Capital”,
The Anthropocene Review, 5 (2): 202–13.
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Schellnhuber (2018), “Trajectories of the Earth System in the Anthropocene”,
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Wolfreys, J. (1998), Deconstruction-Derrida, New York: Macmillan International Higher
Education.
11
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
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
Placing Academic Writing in Scare Quotes 151
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
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 over-
attention 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
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-to-
one 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
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),
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.
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
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 cross-
co-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
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?
Notes
1 https://www.nature.com/srep/author-instructions/submission-guidelines accessed
November 7, 2021.
2 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.
3 https://www.tni.org/en/transnational-institute accessed November 7, 2021.
4 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
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).
5 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).
6 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).
7 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).
8 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.
9 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.
10 http://www.ijbe.org/instruction.htm (accessed September 8, 2010; no longer current).
11 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.
12 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.
13 “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).
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.
12
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 school-
masterly ‘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
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
Abstract Academic Expressionism 163
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 re-
enlivening 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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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 Ann Temkin on Jackson Pollock AB EX NY https://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=oG45EoRh3F accessed May 7, 2022.
2 Using “Jackson Pollock in his studio” as a search term reveals any number of images of
Pollock engaged in such activity.
3 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
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 mark-
making 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 :
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-engaging-
with-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.
172
13
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
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 non-
representational” (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.
Affective Academic Writing 175
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
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 non-
representational) 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?
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
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 (production-
aesthetic). 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 self-
occupation 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
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 pre-
individual, 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.
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
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:
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-formerly-
known-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
Notes
1 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)
2 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.
3 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).
4 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.
5 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.
6 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.
7 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).
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14
Write to Life
Erin Manning
1. Write to life.
2. Write to activate the force of the unthought.
3. Write to field the conditions for other ways of living.
4. Write to encounter the quality of existence that exceeds you.
5. Care for how the writing makes a world.
6. Note its tendency for centering, especially if yours is an existence that benefits
from the center.
7. Don’t recenter that which can only come to matter through a centering.
8. Remember: the recentering of the center, the (re)making of the center, is how
whiteness thrives.
9. Another way of putting it: if the center is writing (with) you, you are the center.
10. Too often, what we call critique feeds that center.
11. Writing with the critic at your heels writes critique (that is, the center), into your work.
12. Writing the center is writing white.
13. Writing white rarely recognizes its whiteness. It’s too busy building a frame for
knowledge.
14. Building frames may temporarily stave off the critics.
15. But really it produces them.
16. To write white is to produce the conditions for reading white, and to read white is
to uphold the limits of that frame.
17. Nothing hones reading white better than anonymous peer review.
18. Anonymous peer review is a free (usually unpaid) lesson in centering.
19. Writing white is neurotypical. It knows, in advance, where knowledge is situated
and how to wield it.
20. Neurotypicality is an unspoken but commonly practiced wager that frames
knowledge in advance of any question of where else knowing is at work.
21. Neurotypicality styles not only a text, but also a body. It directs the sitting, back
straight, eyes forward.
22. 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
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.
Write to Life 189
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. Thinking-
feeling.
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)
77. “You’re already in something.” (Harney and Moten 2013)

78. Write yourself into thought.
79. Move at the pace of thought’s informality. Run with it!
80. But beware: it matters how it’s said.
81. “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)
82. Write from the thick of it.
83. “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)
84. 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.
85. “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)
86. 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-and-
experimentation/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 research-
creation 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 Onto-
Cartography: 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
192 Contributors
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
Contributors 193
(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 land-
based 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
194 Contributors
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
Contributors 195
Macmillan), Arts-based Inquiry: A Critique and Proposal (Sense Publishers), and co-
producer 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-in-
chief 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.
196
Index of Subjects
Abolition 30 essayism 162, 171

abstract academic expressionism 10, 161 experimental writing 9, 192
academic writing ix, 2–11, 13–16, 18, 20,
23, 27–9, 39, 51, 61, 100, 116, 137, 138, fabulative writing 56–8
142–3, 146, 149–54, 157–9, 161–4, fiction 4, 39–46, 51–2, 59–60, 71
166–9, 173, 176–81, 183 fictioning 4–5, 51, 53, 56–7, 59,
affect ix, 8, 10–12, 125, 127, 173–7, 179, 194
181–5, 192 fire 86, 91, 100, 112–16, 118–19, 128,
anthropocene 9, 25, 36–8, 119, 137–9, 137–9, 141–2, 145–6
141–8, 191–2 footnotes 6, 78, 150, 153–7, 160
ash 109–18,
attention 6–7, 10, 15, 17, 27, 58, 62, 68, 77, geotrauma 25–6
80, 95, 99, 109, 111–5, 126, 128, 139,
142, 152, 162, 164–6, 170–1, 178 inner voice 126
Australian bushfires 9, 137 irritating 150
blackness 34, 67, 82 judgment 80, 174, 176, 179–80
captions 6, 62, 66–8, 70–2, 74–7, 80, 82–3 mythoplasia 53, 57–8
climate change 9, 30, 110, 137, 139, 144,
146–8 perspectivism 40–41
communication 3, 7, 17–20, 22–3, 37, 39, philo-fiction 41
49, 86–87, 89, 91, 123–4, 135, 140–1, photography 66, 77–8, 80–2
146
contemplative life 55 research 4, 10–11, 26–8, 30–31, 35, 37, 58,
contemporary art museum 85, 90–1, 86–7, 89, 98–100, 119, 125, 127–32, 147,
95–6 149–51, 153–4, 158–60, 177–9, 181,
contingent labor 8 184–5, 191–5
response vi, 33, 35, 54, 86–7, 89–90, 97,
dehiscence 32–4 109–11, 113, 115–7, 120, 125, 155, 157,
desktop criticism 89–90 163, 165, 170, 178, 188–9
device 39–46, 48–51, 61, 66, 132, 141, Royal Society 152–3, 159
153–4
disaster vi, 9, 44, 71, 74–5, 81, 137–41, scholarly practice 161, 166
145–6, 174 scholē 55, 57, 58
discourse 2–3, 7, 9, 15–16, 20, 25, 45, 93–4, science fiction 39–43, 51–2, 56–7, 59
97, 100, 147, 151, 157, 159–60, 167, 170, structure 3, 13, 15, 17, 23–4, 26, 28, 32–4,
181 111, 156, 183
subtitles 82–3, 91
educacene 4, 25–30, 32–4 system 3, 13, 16–9, 28, 55, 91, 141, 148,
erasure poetry8, 101, 129, 158 151, 157
197
198 Index of Subjects
text-image relationships 6 walking 25, 27–31, 33, 35–7, 43, 47, 61,
therapy of language 152 111, 142
tracker-app 91, 94–6 worlding 7, 99–100, 188
translation 7–8, 54, 62, 72–3, 76, 82–3, writing 1, 3–11, 13–16, 18–20, 22–3,
99–100, 108, 155–6, 183, 192 25–36, 39–41, 44, 46, 48, 51, 54, 57–8,
61, 67, 71, 74, 86–7, 92, 94, 100–101,
undercommons 128, 134–5, 177, 188, 190 109–12, 116–8, 121, 123–4, 126–9,
unwriting 3, 9, 13, 137–46 137–9, 141–6, 149–54, 157–9,
161–70, 173, 176–7, 179–83, 187–92,
video essay 6–7, 86, 90, 92, 96 194
virtual 55, 60, 113, 115–7, 124, 126, 132–4, writing-with 8, 109, 111, 117
Index of Names
Allado-McDowell, K. 48, 51 Hockney, David 170–1

Aristotle 55, 57, 59, 159 Hunt, Erica 45, 59, 100–1, 108, 148, 164, 192
Bacon, Francis 152–3, 160, la paperson 7–8, 11, 99–101, 108

Barad, Karen 11, 116–18, 180, 183 Lacan, Jacques 3, 15–17, 20, 24, 140, 148, 191
Bayle, Pierre 155–7, 159–60 Laruelle, Francois 26, 28, 32–3, 37, 41, 52
Benjamin, Walter 78, 80, 94–5, 142, 146, Latour, Bruno 1–2, 11–2, 127, 134, 173,
Berlant, Lauren 122, 134 181–2, 185
Bourdieu, Pierre 151–2, 159–60 Lazard, Carolyn vi, 74–5, 80–1
Braidotti, Rosi 56, 59, 118–9, 131 Luhmann, Niklas 3, 17–21, 24, 191
Brassier, Ray 27, 33, 36
Brinkema, Eugenie 10–11, 173, 184 Mandel, Mike vi, 66, 82, 90, 97
Butler, Octavia E. 47–8, 51–2, Moten, Fred 128, 134, 150, 188–90
Cage, John vii, 182, 185 O’Keefe, Angela 169–71

Cixous, Helène 5, 56–9, 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, Pollock, Jackson 10, 161–71
Deleuze, Gilles 2, 9–10, 20, 26, 30–1, 35, 37, Preciado, Paul B. 54–6, 60
55, 57, 59–60, 101, 122–3, 134, 137–44,
147, 150, 174–85, 191–4 Riley, Denise 125–6, 135
Derrida, Jacques 20, 22–3, 90, 97, 127, 134,
139, 148, 173, 183–4 Sexton, Jared 29, 32–7
Didion, Joan 164–5, 167–71 Sharpe, Christina 67–8, 70–1, 78, 82
Dillon, Brian 162, 164, 166, 167, 171 Smith, Linda Tuhiwai 149, 158, 160, 167,
171, 184, 193
Farocki, Harun vi, 62, 72, 74, 76, 79–81, Stanitzek, Georg 92, 97
85–97 Steffensen, Victor 112
Sterne, Jonathan 93, 97
Gagliano, Monica 111, 117, 119 Stewart, Kathleen 122, 134–5
Galloway, Alexander 28–30, 32, 37–9 Sultan, Larry vi, 66, 82
Guattari, Felix 9, 26, 30–1, 35, 37, 60, 101,
123, 125–6, 134, 137, 140–4, 147, 174–5, Tsing, Anna 110, 115, 117
177, 181, 184–5, 191–3 Tuck, Eve 7, 10, 12, 48, 52, 67–8, 74, 78, 87,
99–101, 108, 138, 141
Haraway, Donna 27, 37, 40, 56–60, 110,
112, 117, 119, 131, 160 Wallace, David Foster 87, 98
Harney, Stefano 128, 134, 188–90 Wittig, Monique 45–7, 52
Heraclitus 139, 147
Hoban, Russell 43–5, 52 Yang, K. Wayne 7, 12, 99–101, 108
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New Perspectives on Academic Writing

Alternative | Education shows how education could be reimagined so as to have its

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edited by Bernd Herzogenrath

BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of

First published in Great Britain 2023

Copyright © Bernd Herzogenrath and contributors, 2023

For legal purposes the Acknowledgments on p. ix constitute an extension

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Introduction: The Thing That Wouldn’t Die Bernd Herzogenrath 1

1 The Structure and System of Academic Writing Levi R. Bryant 13

List of Contributors 191

5.1 Screenshot of Word document / submission “Seeing Crisis in Harry Piel’s

Bernd Herzogenrath and Tim Ingold

“Educacene,” that standard mode of writing a wilderness of planetary materiality into

broader questions about the epistemology, ontology, and aesthetics of academic

variations of knowledge and the importance of the “personal signature” in research,

The Structure and System of Academic Writing

What is it that makes an utterance or writing academic? What is it that distinguishes an

The Structure of Academic Writing

transcendental objects belonging to a discipline. Academic objects are the a priori of a

Normal Academic Writing

In each discourse we have an agent addressing an other driven by an unconscious or

In the position of the agent, we have “knowledge” addressing “surplus jouissance”

Strategies of Academic Communication and Their Vicissitudes

In an amusing passage, Niklas Luhmann writes:

More properly, Luhmann argues that communication systems are autopoietic

. . . the entire world of social communication is set up so that monotony is excluded

Writing (in) the Educacene

Walking (and Writing) to the Max

decentralization to distribution—now populate theoretical discussions, marking a

Where purported innovations in educational writing proceed through an ampliﬁcation

is conscripted to forms of liberation that are always-already wedded to transcendent

Laruelle (2013) proposes that non-philosophical or non-standard inquiry is committed

philosophical decision. Non-philosophical processes, as Laruelle insists, do not aim to

reproducing, while nevertheless obscuring, the various “wound separations” through

negation enabled through dehiscent writing insists on an occulted relationality wherein

Science Fiction Devices

Introduction: A Discussion with an Academic

We say, “There is no such thing as academic writing.”

lighthouse keepers, sending signals—illuminations—in vain hope of making visible

anything considered alive is conceived of as having personhood and a perspective; a

Dhalgren by Samuel Delany

Riddley Walker by Russell Hoban

A little later, Lorna remarks:

similarly reﬂect on whether something—the stories they hold dear—may be playing

Les Guérillères by Monique Wittig

Adult Rites by Octavia E. Butler

Human beings fear diﬀerence [. . .] Oankali crave diﬀerence. Humans persecute

alien–human reproduction. We try to imagine ﬁnding all intimate encounters between

“Then what are these words here in the air?”

Flatland by Edwin A. Abbot

Conclusion: Report to the Academy

Mythoplasia and Fictioning in Academic

The Academy Is Dead—Long Live the Academy1