Authors pre-press copy

Assembling bodies:
A new materialist approach to writing practice
PUBLISHED IN AXON: CREATIVE EXPLORATIONS, VOL 5, NO 2, NOVEMBER 2015

Kay Are (publishing as Kay Rozynski)

How might some recent philosophical critiques grouped under the rubric of a new
materialism be brought to bear productively on creative writing practice and pedagogy?
This article argues that the new materialisms particular and particularly intensified
awareness of the materiality of the writing process and of its textual products can be
useful for writers. I consider how the environment in which one creates might look on a
new materialist view, outlining what I propose to be one of its central features: the
clinamen. I describe how feminist physicist Karen Barads concept of intra-activity can
be used to view the writing environment as a posthuman assemblage of intra-acting
relata, before proposing the figure of the clinamen as able to describe the movement of
matter within this assemblage. My argument, ultimately, is that this movement is
conducive to the production of novelty in both writing experience and product: it is
through the unpredictability of the clinamens movement that new textual directions can
be brought about. I make reference to my own creative process on this score taking as
examples a collaborative writing workshop I led and an exhibited work of conceptual
writing in order to demonstrate some ways in which new materialisms can prove useful
for the proliferation of writing.

Keywords: new materialism, writing practice, environmental humanities, intra-action,

Karen Barad

Biographical note:

Kay Rozynski this year obtained a PhD from the Writing and Society Research Centre at
the University of Western Sydney. Her research/writing pursuits take in conceptual,
fictocritical, performative and site-responsive writing, and aspects of the environmental
humanities. She lives in Melbourne, Australia, and works teaching Creative Writing and
Hispanic Cultural Studies at the University of Melbourne. She is on the editorial board of
 Kay Rozynski

New Scholar: an International Journal of Humanities, Creative Arts and Social Sciences and is
founding editor of Sippy Cup: A Journal of Other Writing.

Introduction

For new materialisms concerned to account for the imbrication of human being within
modes of production, reproduction and consumption of material environments
renovating the notion of agency is an urgent project. One critical strategy that this
concern fosters is the identification of practices and epistemologies that continue to be
underwritten by the assumptions of classical physics a mode that, in contrast to
quantum physics, does not allow for the time-space entanglement of all matter nor the
possibility of matter having agency. The present article is tributary to this new materialist
project, reconceptualising the environments within which creative writing happens as
imbued with quantum vivacity. It asks what an intensified awareness of material
animation and of the materially animated writing process can nurture in a writers
practice. It is furthermore interested in how this pursuit might translate into new modes
of writing practice and new kinds of literary product. Here, I track the way new
materialisms re-figure the writing environment as intra-active rather than interactive
(that is, as an assemblage of material parts that in fact do not exist as distinct parts prior
to their encounter). I argue that the notion of the clinamen, with its attendant
commitments to accident and to failure, is indispensible for creativity: clinaminic action,
I will show, describes the material economy of the intra-active writing environment, and
explains how the production of novelty in both writing experience and product is
attributable to the movement of matter beyond rational anticipation. In order to suggest
this notions potential to diversify writing practice and garner literary novelty, this article
concludes by describing two recent writing projects one a collaborative writing
workshop, the other a text-based installation that capitalised on the movement at play
in my own writing process.

New Materialisms

Taking diverse positions and emerging from distinct disciplinary trajectories, new
materialist theories can nevertheless be aligned on the basis of a shared scepticism
towards the apparent poststructuralist tendency to subsume the place, role and power of
materiality [] under the rubric of discourse or to otherwise downplay the formative

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power of material instantiations (Barrett & Bolt 2013, xi). Agitating new materialisms
into existence, then, is the perception that scholarship, rather than being opened up by
inquisitiveness about the nature of what there is, has been corralled by a scepticism
towards what it is possible to know. In fact, this disgruntlement with positions granting
logos (as language, as human consciousness, as the symbolic order) a mediating function
at the cost of deferring an encounter with actual matter resonates with a wider cohort of
environmentally invested research that, since the turn of this century, has emerged into
what Diana Coole describes as the wake of a paradigm [i.e. poststructuralism] that
looks too limited in light of new challenges [issuing] from novel ways of understanding
matter, handling objects and interacting with nature (2013, 452).

But new materialist revaluations of matter do learn from deconstructionist

precedents, seeking not to privilege one term (nature) at the expense of the other
(culture), but rather to erase the question of their contrapuntal nature in toto. Matter
here includes manifestations of language language, which ineluctably is, after all, only to
the extent that it manifests; that is, to the extent that it is made apparent and perceptible.
New materialisms disclose an ongoing investment on the part of poststructuralisms in
the identity of the limit, a limit that separates human exceptionalism [] from the
substantive reality that it cant know and cant be (Kirby 2010, xi). Against such an
investment, these philosophies would encourage instead an appreciation of the fact that
our corporeal realities and their productive iterations are material reinventions (Kirby
2010, xi).

From this very basic sketch emerge some interesting implications for creative
writing. My own proposal is that the new materialist revaluation of matter promotes a
form of creativity that is attentive to the liveliness of the writing process. This is because a
working environment on a new materialist view is necessarily 1) posthuman and 2) intra-
active. I have elsewhere mapped these two terms onto the terrain of Creative Writing
(Rozynski 2015); here, I will briefly define them while focussing on the effect that a
posthuman, intra-active workspace can have on the event of writing. First, appreciating
the writers assemblage of spaces and materials as posthuman equates to a rejection of
the anthropocentrism that would position human being as isolatable from and equipped
to administer its surrounds, registering instead a more-than-human figure constituted
by, and constitutive of, a plethora of bodies, organic and nonorganic alike (Alaimo
2010). The writer situated within this environment has always already exceeded her
discernible human shape: she simultaneously merges with, fosters and finds sustenance
in the entities with which she intra-acts. Posthumanism, then, is a standpoint a way of
thinking about matters and matter but only at the same time as it is a lively practice, an

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ontological performance, in the way that identity for Judith Butler is an idea at the same
time as it is an embodied practice of iteration. But Barad (2007) in fact critiques Butlers
understanding of performativity precisely for its failure to imagine itself into a realm
beyond humanism: why, Barad asks, does Butlers understanding of identity stop at the
skin, as though skin were a water-tight boundary, as if the human body werent
entangled both internally and externally with a host of other organisms? Posthuman
performativity recognises the more-than-human nested within the writer, and the
existence of the writer as, in turn, a consciousness nested within a larger environment.

Second, these inter-systemic entanglements are always in fact intra-systemic:

always internal, always connections within always intra-actions. There can be no
external entity with which to interact on a monistic view of the universe (of which new
materialisms offer several versions). Illustrative of this is Astrida Neimaniss (2009)
concept of a political hydrocommons, which sees human and other bodies of water
cyclically churning through each other. Intra-relationality is also what allows Vicki Kirby
to talk about Derridas renowned aphorism as in actual fact meaning there is no outside
of Nature. If there is no externality nothing beyond the one substance then not only
is text the all-that-is, but the all-that-is is what we might call Nature or empirical reality.
Culture was Nature all along, Kirby would say, and language is but one of Natures
materialisations. Barad (2007) adds a further, temporal dimension to this spatial sense of
intra-connectedness. According to her interpretation of Niels Bohrs quantum physics,
entities that come into relationship were never discrete bodies pre-existing their union
but rather come into being only upon contact with each other. (The kooky temporalities
of quantum physics show up English grammar here: how linear and dependent upon
discrete subjects and objects it is). Again as per Butlers sense of performativity, it is only
through the act of nominating a body that that body is called into existence; but, what is
more, on Barads quantum physical view of intra-relatedness through time, the
nominator, through the act of nominating, declares itself retrospectively to have always
been a constituent of that body. In other words, which elements make up an assemblage
is a decision made not by an outsider but by a constituent element of that assemblage,
whose status as having been a constituent is only determined upon deciding which
elements constitute its assemblage. In the present context, we might say that a writer
facing a body of primary documentation on a colonial history, for instance, selects from
among the facts presented; her very act of selecting implicates her own facts into
assemblage with the selected facts. She is a part of the collection of facts that has always
been a part of her, in an assemblage that is defined by co-implication: without this writer,
this assemblage would not exist but be otherwise, another assemblage. The writer defines

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her identity in this intra-active moment as posthuman as inclusive of the technologies,

texts, affects and bodies selected for a given writing task. In the terms of experimental
science, the apparatus used to measure entity x does not pretend (as per classical physics)
to take an objective measure of entity x, but neither does it pretend (as per
poststructuralism) to take a measurement that it acknowledges to be an interference, and
therefore a construction, and therefore unreliable. In fact, on a quantum physical
understanding, the measuring apparatus reveals that there is never an entity x, only ever
entity-x-plus-apparatus. The object of investigation includes the subject to the extent
that their intra-relation rules out the divisibility of subject from object. An
investigation is always a self-investigation.

We can extrapolate from this scenario, then, that the new materialist writing
environment does not comprise a set of fixed entities with fixed purposes, as per a
materialist essentialism that would anchor each entity to a list of defining characteristics
and tendencies (Noel Castree, cited in Hawkins 2009, n. pag.). The classical physical
models materialist essentialism allows it to posit stable objectivity; the resulting faith in
the predictability of cause-and-effect (that is, in interaction between relata) overlooks the
internal and non-linear generativity of materials that is posited by quantum theories (for
instance, chaos theory and complexity theory). A quantum account of the writing
environment would rather posit an assemblage of entities that gain a kind of usefulness to
each other in the moment of engagement, in a reciprocal redrawing of the others
outlines that remakes subjects and objects, at their moment of union and not before. If
the writing environment the literal space of writing is a posthuman and intra-active
assemblage, it can be characterised as comprising a perhaps endless array of materials,
technologies, texts, affects and bodies, including those of the writer, and including these
as they change through time and across multiple places, engagements and sittings. The
field in which one writes is in fact an assemblage of possibilities: a swarm or active
substance whose seeming parts are continuously being conjoined, disbanded and re-
formed into novel configurations.

Several effects of this reconsideration of the writing environment promise to

foster a mode of creativity responsive to the liveliness of the writing process. Again, I
have elaborated on this promise elsewhere (Rozynski 2015), but a brief account is useful
here. First, it makes little sense for the writer to attempt to disarticulate herself from her
surroundings or seek subject matter that could be impersonal; in fact, it is investigating
her idiosyncratic entanglement with her environment that engenders new writing. As
noted, the writers act of noticing aspects of her material surrounds of observing them
and selecting them for engagement occasions the emergence of the observed, as well as

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the emergence of the observing writer. Second, in valuing materials as active or even as
having agency in the creation and transmission of meaning, new materialist thought
licences the writer to co-operate with these materials to calibrate the physical
dimensions of writing implements and surfaces in order to enrich or diversify the import
of the textual product. This is because co-operation is here understood in its most literal
sense, as a device operated by multiple actors: all materials in the environment within the
writerly assemblage whether human or non-human, organic, inorganic and/or
synthetic function as cogs in ongoing, mutual intra-action; thus, no element is
extraneous to writing, and any is available to the writer to use in composition. What is
more, it follows that the extra-linguistic components of a text acquire the capacity to
mean a function ordinarily attributed solely to the alphabetic elements that are literally
supported by extra-linguistic textual elements. In this way, new materialism bolsters an
argument for preserving the effects and affects of the writers process in the material
artefact produced, since to exclude them would be to minimise the texts potential to
communicate meaning. Evidence of the writing bodys sensorial encounters during
composition need not be extirpated from the works final presentation, as per publishing
conventions. Fourth, it becomes possible on this view to consider a wider scope of
existing practices as writing; for considering writing as a more complex object and event
in both theory and practice.

The Clinamen

The new materialist writing environment is by necessity non-linear, and foregoes the
atomic distance that would afford objectivity and the certainties of Newtownian cause-
and-effect. But how does such a space, comprised as it is of morphing intra-relationships,
carry out its self-investigation? The figure of the clinamen goes part way to responding to
this question. Emerging as an ontological principle from Epicurean materialism, the
clinamen is a phenomenon native to physics that has nevertheless been elaborated
persistently, though diversely, in the realm of writing, weaving a varied and complex
path through Western literature and critical approaches to it. My position is that the
figure should be understood literally to structure the physical environment in which
writerly (and other) novelty is generated but its use-value to writers even as a metaphor
does not stand or fall on its empirical accuracy. What I suggest is that attentiveness to the
materiality of the writers process constitutes a provocation to clinamina, from whose
unforeseeable bifurcations new writing results.

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A clinamen (from the Latin clinare, to incline) was first proposed in the fourth
century BCE to describe the unpredictable swerving of falling atoms. The notion
originally contributed to a Hellenistic physical theory that sought to extrapolate on
Democrituss description of the universe as an ordered flow of atoms falling within a
void (Konstan 2014, n.pag.). Neither Democritus nor classical physics can abide an
incalculable deviation, resulting in linear causal patterns and thus a determinism that
fails to recognise the creative role of difference and deviation in and of itself. What
distinguishes the Epicurean school of thought from that of Democritus is the clinamens
role as the locus and guarantor of free will (Motte 1986, 263), and this is where the
usefulness of the Epicurean clinamen for philosophies that dispute a
Cartesian/Newtownian worldview becomes clear. The notion of clinamina suggests a
quirkier mechanics of productivity that, like quantum intra-activity, are at home with
physical incalculability: clinamina nomadic curvatures and break-away angles, in
Deleuze and Guattaris terms (1987, 361) swerve irrationally from their gravitationally
directed route to serve as ever-expanding probes, testing the (material) limits of the
encompassing void.

Extending the clinamens association with creativity into twentieth-century

criticism, the Oulipo are responsible for what is arguably its most recognizable
manifestation. But, for this group, rather than an ontological principle, the clinamen is a
metaphor that designates a creative device: the writers deliberate deviation for aesthetic
purposes from a pre-established set of compositional constraints (Thomas 2006, 118). For
prominent contemporary Oulipian Jacques Roubaud, such deviation represents the
promise of creative freedom (Thomas 2006, 118) because it suspends the absolute power
of the constraint, thereby offering the possibility of presenting a more intuitive, a
more disconcerting, a more esthetic way to deal with the controlled nature of the
Oulipian texts (Thomas 2006, 118-9). But the potential of the Oulipian clinamen to
explain the opportunities presented by a new materialist view of writing is limited
because the Oulipos vision continues to tie the writers relationship with her
environment to a traditional discourse of determinism/free will: the dominant Oulipian
thinking on the clinamen is that it is to be consciously generated and deployed to the ends
listed above accidental deviations from constraints are to be eradicated as impurities in
the composition of mathematically precise textual labyrinths (Roubaud 2005, 43-4). This
view discounts (or is at least silent on the value of) the unavoidable, unintended and non-
eliminable clinamina introduced by the volatile material circumstances of a texts
production. It seems to me to grant, on the one hand, too much power (or free will) to
the writer to control her swerve from constraints, and on the other, too much credit to

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the constraints ability to structure (or determine) compositional outcomes. Most

Oulipians undermine the usefulness of the writers misprision (Roubaud 2005, 44) or, as
Harold Bloom puts it, her intentional but involuntary departure from the norm (Bloom
1972, 391). But this implies the kind of authorial control over the variables of the writing
environment that a new materialist view must by the lights of its own philosophy reject.

In fact, perhaps surprisingly, Blooms use of the clinamen to describe precisely an

accidental deviation corresponds much more readily with new materialist thought than
does the Oulipos. Speaking from a different context (he is addressing the poets
nonconformity with literary precedents as a major factor in the establishment of her own
creative style), Blooms reading is nevertheless instructive. He diffracts the Epicurean
clinamen through the discourse of poetic influence for which he is well known,
rhetorically linking the two concepts by resuscitating inflow as the etymological root of
the word influence. If inflow was to receive an ethereal fluid flowing in upon one from
the stars, a fluid that affected ones character and destiny (1972, 378), then influence is
the mark left on the poet by a flow of predecessors; the clinamen is the poets
unforeseeable break from the flow in establishing her own style or voice. Bloom laments
(as would Barad in a different context) the dominance of an epistemology that doesnt
recognise the entanglement intrinsic to poetic influence, and that instead structures the
relationship between poet and forebears according to a foundational atomic separation.
The clinaminic figure is a means for Bloom to put forward a new poetics of critical
reading one that spurns the imperative to produce accurate interpretations (Bloom
1972, 390). This is of course a point of crossover with the deconstructive practices of his
Yale colleagues, where such a hermeneutics merely serves to engender an effaced and
respectful doubling of commentary (Derrida 1997, 158; see Bloom 389-90). But Blooms
project differs markedly from that of Derrida. The latters strategy asserts the failure of
critical commentary to reproduce the conscious, voluntary, intentional relationship that
the writer institutes with her historical context (Derrida 1997, 158) and thus seeks to
highlight the writers isolation from readers and text. Blooms method instead invites an
appreciation of cross-generational, textual co-implication: it consists in performing a
critical reading that seeks to identify a poems clinamina, that is, the points in the poem
at which a poets creative decisions testify to her unintentional self-differentiation from
precedents.

What interests me about this use of the clinamen is the fact that a critics reading
for a poems departures must simultaneously involve identifying the poems inexorable
imbrication in a literary context its being cut from the same cloth. What is more, it
implies the critics recognition of herself as part of that context, since her reading, as any,

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is necessarily a misreading (Bloom 1972, 390) in which the trace of the critics own
clinamina is planted for discovery in turn by her anticipated readers. It seems useful to
describe the new materialist writers strategy by analogy with Blooms proposal as a
strategy of responsiveness to environment: the writer must, in intra-actively engaging
with her environment, read the relationships with physical matter with which she
discovers herself to always already have been embroiled. She identifies the way in which
the new assemblage of elements that she creates diverges from other assemblages in
other words, she notices its clinamina. At the same time, her elaboration of text from
within this assemblage alters her environment, generating further clinamina that are then
made available to later collaborations.

Intra-active Texts

The figure of the clinamen points to the event of writing as made up of assemblages of
matter whose propensity for accidental movement and whose unanticipated failures of
cause-and-effect are indispensible for the production of novelty. My own writing practice
increasingly attends to the materiality of the creative process and the unpredictable
nature of material animation; for the purposes of demonstration, I outline here two
examples of the practical processes of intra-action. The first is a collaborative writing
workshop I led during an academic conference in 2012; the second is a work of
conceptual writing I developed over several months and finally exhibited in 2015.

De/generation: a reverb (2012)

This exhibition of texts resulted from a writing workshop of the same name in which
participants attempted collaboratively to construct a textual version of Alvin Luciers I
am sitting in a room (1969). In this performance, Lucier uses a tape recorder to record
himself reading a text; this recording he then plays back into the same room, while
recording the sound of its playback. This new recording is played back, re-recorded, and
so on, for 45 minutes. The effect is a building synthesis of sounds into complete tonal
harmony. Since the particularities of the chosen room its dimensions and occupation
by an idiosyncratic configuration of objects allow some frequencies to reverberate and
others to be repressed, the resulting overlaid patterns of resonance might be described as
the rooms unique aural signature.

The workshop I led responded primarily to the way Luciers performance

pursued sound as a physical thing whose material dimensions came into being precisely

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at the time of their traversal by vibration. The sound signature both disclosed and was
constructed by the materiality of the environment in which sound happened. Luciers
performance figured sound as pure vibration in matter, thus acknowledging that sound is
never immaterial but rather is always already transmuted by the peculiarities of the
substances within which it vibrates. An underlying premise for my workshop was the
idea that this process is analogous for expression in writing: that the expression of
thought is entirely dependent upon the materials that convey it; or, to phrase this another
way, that when we ask someone to write ones thoughts down we overlook the fact that
one does not write thoughts, one writes writing it is a materially contingent event and
one whose physical particularities modulate what one is able to write.

Participants were each given a piece of carbon paper; each brought along a source
text of their own or found writing. The donated texts were passed around and, using a
variety of implements found in the room or brought in for the purpose, were traced onto
the carbon paper. As the texts continued to be passed between writers, each sheet of
carbon paper accumulated and retained remnants of others texts. The placement of
tracings on the page was the prerogative of the participant, but any smudgy carbon-
related accident, handwriting quirk and/or unintended aberration introduced by any of
the circumstances or tools of composition were allowed to influence the development of
the carbon texts. There is an obvious sense, then, in which this workshop scenario mined
the material assemblage afforded by the event of writing: we were attentive to the
clinaminic mechanics of the writing environment, which were harnessed and directed
toward the construction of literary novelty. But the workshop was also a posthuman
performance, harnessing awareness of the specificities of the writers entanglement with
matter in order to suggest a renovated understanding of agency or, at the very least, to
point to the shortcomings of agency as a concept. The act of production, reproduction
and consumption that the workshop entailed was not only expressive of the imbrication of
human being within a material environment, it was moreover only possible because of this
imbrication. In this sense and in this case, then, the new materialist writing act disclosed
the concept of agency defined as a property of intentional actors as being deeply
inadequate to the task of describing co-operation between beings and forces that exceed
human shape. It would be overly simplistic to suggest either that agency eluded the
human actors in the workshop or that said human actors were not alone in possessing it.
But, at the least, the difficulty in ascribing agency in the collaborative event related here
indicates the workshops capacity to open the term to re-signification.

The De/generation workshop process might have behaved like performance art,
but it is important that the post-representational text that resulted from my workshop is

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classified as a piece of writing in its own right. While the process took advantage of a
posthuman environment, equally important is the posthuman space the resultant texts
put forward. These texts (image of one example below) evidence a dissipation of the
boundaries between subjects and objects enabled by the workshops carbon-paper device.
This device enabled a kind of mutual mimicry, where the pre-collaborative texts were
allowed to overlap until the point of their camouflage. This is not a question of a
nihilistic willed dissolution of subjectivity not a withdrawal into objectivity but of the
generation of a third space where the objectification that would result from an act of
representation ceases to be a coherent concern. In texts such as these, subjects and
objects become elided in space (Bishop 84) as the boundaries that would permit
representational hierarchy are dispersed.

Print cultures: the microbial colony as feral writing technology (2015)

This work of conceptual writing was sole authored, but sought to trouble the idea of sole
authorship by considering the influence of the microbially contaminated writing

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environment on creativity. The project began as 16 pages of an altered text, but evolved
over the three months of its composition into an installation featuring multiple texts,
whose unforeseeable conceptual directions returned to question the works initial
premises.

The initial text was Hlne Cixouss 'The laugh of the Medusa' in which all
references to woman were systematically replaced by references to nature. The text had
been printed on blank pages torn from second-hand books, then covered in agar and
positioned as page-sized petri dishes, left to collect microbial matter from the spaces of
writing the internal and external dimensions of the writing body, the desk, the
apparatuses of inscription, the writing studios climactic phenomena, dust, and so on. The
microbial organisms that ordinarily, though clandestinely, impregnate the spaces of
composition were thus invited to more explicitly assert their influence on what is typically
considered the purely human act of writing. The pages were to be exhibited, over which
time bacterial cultures would colonise the pages, de/composing and editing the texts that
dis/appeared in real time live, as it were. The project sought to locate the feral in a very
physical sense within human being, and suggest the cultural as an articulation of the
natural, addressing three discursive oppositions: the cultural and the natural, the
immateriality of thought and the materiality of its written expression, and the colony and
the uncultivated wild. The microbes behaviour as an organised, colonising force would
upset it was thought the clarity of these dyads distinctions.

Preparing the pages to hang, however, it became clear that their impregnation
with microbes had failed to produce even a blip of discernible results. With an exhibition
date approaching, I simply reprinted more second-hand pages with the altered text, and
bacterial colonies were imported from found dairy mould and manipulated by hand
directly onto the pages. The organic composition and self-government of the colonies was
thus radically interfered with, and though the resulting text appeared to make the same
point, it was in reality a farce of the intended result. Despite wanting to playfully suggest
the more-than-humans aptitude for writing, the work in fact represented my own
underestimation of the truculence of matter, my not guessing at matters wanting not to
speak. The initial enquiry had thus failed to intra-act with the assemblage of materials it
drew into its construction or, more accurately, I had failed to recognise myself as part of
that assemblage: I had allowed my thinking to extend into activity with materials but I
had not allowed my thinking and activity to be extended by and extensions of them.

Noticing the clinamina that emerged during my creative process, however, I could
now understand myself not to be critiquing colonialism from a disinterested standpoint,
but instead to have been always already implicated in colonialisms trajectory and,

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moreover, in its perpetuation. The project began to accumulate other questions. Having
correlated woman and nature through Cixouss discussion of the silencing of woman
became a provocative metaphor for the very question of a posthuman writing itself. What
does it mean that the way new materialists speak about nature can be made
interchangeable with the way this landmark feminist text speaks about woman? Do new
materialisms, in identifying nature and culture as natureculture, as one and the same
substance, risk reiterating the colonizing gesture that certain feminisms (Cixous among
them) were widely accused of being complicit with in speaking for woman which is to
say, is having nature speak not also speaking for? These questions brought other texts into
the projects orbit. From Kirbys 2011 text, Quantum anthropologies, I selected a passage
that ascribes natures role, and inserted it as an epigraph to Cixouss 1975 text, wanting
with this temporal disjuncture to suggest in fact a disconcerting temporal continuity.
Photocopies from Trinh T. Minh-has Woman, native, other, in which Minh-ha questions
second-wave feminisms tacit demand that third-world women liberate themselves on a
white-built stage, were added to the exhibition. Also added were the illustrated plates
from A little Rhodesian, a childrens book published by Oxford University Press in 1925
that narrates the adventures of a white Southern Rhodesian child as she plays with the
domestic animals she is gifted by the colonys other, black children, who otherwise form a
backdrop to the action. Since I had been troubled by the fact that substituting nature for
woman in Cixous text compelled me to also alter personal and relative pronouns, I
included lessons on these grammatical elements in the exhibition, sourced from a 1950s
French-language textbook from my own bookshelves. Of course, French is a language of
colonisation, and I was struck by the way this textbooks sexist presumptions (Le cabinet
de travail de M. Vincent; La cuisine de Mme. Vincent) intertwine with its colonial
intent. Chance then introduced me to a PDF of Roger Caillois 1935 essay Mimicry and
legendary psychasthenia. This essay, whose translation was published in October in 1984,
observes the phenomenon of mimicry as it occurs in the insect world and has been
repeatedly extended by scholars of mimesis to analogy with human artistic practice. The
photographic images featured in the article become almost comical when printed in black
and white, since the in situ insects they intend to depict are camouflaged by the
imprecision of inkjet. The deployment of animal life as a figurative device within
academic literature, as well as the ease with which I could access these documents
through online university archives, raised further, related questions: how does academia
the circulation of whose discourses is dependent on its publication fetish continue to
benefit from a long history of the print medium as colonising vehicle?

Such questions continued to arise as a consequence of my interaction not only

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with texts but, vitally, with the modes and materials of their delivery. Being attentive to
the clinaminic directions these questions stimulated in real time (live, as it were) meant
that my pre-determined objective was displaced from the centre of my work, and replaced
by a twinned concern: the unpredictable nature of the writing process, and the implicated
nature of my position within it. All collected texts were ultimately displayed together,
accompanied by a brief explanation of the turns taken during its development.

Conclusion

I have argued that re-figuring the place in which one writes as an assemblage of lively,
volatile and agential relata can explain the mechanics of the production of novelty within
such places. But perhaps the potential of what I have described as a new materialist or
quantum poetics is located primarily in the permissions it grants to writers wishing to
construct new writing environments and processes, the characteristics of which can offer
an alternative to the stable subject and object positions that distinguish classical physical
environments. The argument supports the construction of new kinds of writing, but it
also instrumentalises the event of writing in renovating the notion of agency per se. To
the extent that creative writing as a discipline continues to be underwritten by the
assumptions of classical physics, with its commitment to subject-object hierarchies and,
accordingly, to representation, the contemporary, urgent interest in the entanglement of
human and more-than-human being will find this discipline ripe for exploration.

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 Kay Rozynski

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