Abstract
Writing can be a (playful) practice that develops through techniques. To illustrate, I draw from the works of Erin Manning to describe how I take up techniques in both writing and dance. I then suggest several potential techniques for fostering a postqualitative writing practice: following creative impulses, situating writing within concepts, and finding time to not write. Discussions of these techniques are augmented by a series of play spaces in which readers might choose to experiment by folding, cutting together-apart, slowing, and more. The play spaces are designed to encourage readers to consider how they might invent techniques for their own practices. Significantly, writing techniques shape practices that emphasize how and why writing becomes. Without examining writing habits and how they might develop further through techniques, we risk holding scholarly writing in stasis and limiting its future only to what already has been done.
Writing is similar to dance in its emphasis upon technique. I practiced ballet for many years and was taught that technique is an essential component of ballet and other dance genres. In retrospect, I spent the majority of my time in ballet using the barre to practice pliés, slow tendus, fast tendus, dévelopeés, and other movements and positions. The second largest amount of time was spent practicing brief refrains of choreography in the studio. Not every movement found its way into the final performance, and only a fraction of the time I actually spent dancing involved performing in public. Each show was built from the invisible hours spent refining technique. The eventual products were evident, but the underlying preparations were not. Yet, I did not dance to perform, I danced because I enjoyed experimenting with different techniques, and I (mostly) liked how it felt to move. Dance was an ongoing practice.
I now approach writing as I once approached dance: as a practice animated by technique. Both involve preparation and play; mostly occur offstage; demand occasional performances; and offer modes of moving, thinking, and being. As such, the ways I experienced dance have become the ways I experience writing. When I sit in an audience and watch a dance performance, the event is not limited to visual or auditory sensations that involve watching choreography or listening to music. Even though I remain still, I also can feel myself moving along with the dancers on stage. Reading Erin Manning’s (2012, 2013, 2016) scholarship evokes the same reaction: I feel my body moving with her words. As she explains, “To be conscious of movement is to have known that movement moved you. Movement felt is available to consciousness only in terms of how it was left behind as a trace for the next movement moving” (Manning, 2012, p. 47). Dance left a trace that informs not only how I understand physical and scholarly movements, but how I enact them. For example, people often observe that I adopt ballet postures when I teach or present: This is unintentional. My body defaults to the habits in which it was trained years ago.
This is important, I suggest, because techniques carry over into writing like they do into bodily movement. We may not all have been dancers, but most of us have received at least some training in writing. Our training, then—whether of dance or writing—leaves a trace that sets our work in motion. This, of course, occurs over a wide range of possibilities. From conventional training in empirical research to the “untraining” for which St. Pierre (2016) calls, how we (un)train matters. This particularly is the case within postqualitative inquiry (Lather & St. Pierre, 2013; St. Pierre, 2011), which takes seriously the opportunity to rethink methodology. It is timely, then, to reconsider how and why we write. Without devoting the time to identify what our core writing commitments are and how they might develop through techniques, we risk placing scholarly writing in stasis and limiting its future only to what already has been done.
It is my former dance practice that raises concerns about the unchecked habits of writing. I used to wonder why the ways in which ballerinas danced centuries ago remain the ways in which ballerinas are supposed to dance today (e.g., Morris, 2015). Now, I ask parallel questions of writing when writers uncritically reproduce scholarly conventions. If writing is to be more than a ritual frozen in time, we might follow Manning in considering the distinction between what techniques and habits accomplish. She writes, “The difference between a technique and a habit is a question of degree. . . . Whereas habit’s technique is backgrounded and often lingers on the edge of the nonconscious, technique’s habit is often consciously honed” (Manning, 2016, p. 124). If habits are something that we do again and again without much thinking, then techniques are part of a more open, curious, and inventive practice. It is the shift from “habit’s technique” to “technique’s habit” that grounds how I now write and how I once danced.
It is perhaps unsurprising that, despite its continued hold upon me, classical ballet was not what I most enjoyed. I preferred modern, a diverse array of kinesthetic expressions exploring what movement might become. I found ballet offered peaceful forms of movement, but ones that ultimately restricted creative expression through the replication of norms and the embodiment of discipline, punishment, and pain (Pickard, 2015). I knew what to do, yet was supposed to do exactly and only that, even if it hurt. I soon gravitated toward the experimentations and openings found within modern dance, much as I do now within the context of postqualitative inquiry. Notwithstanding my ambivalence toward ballet, its insistence upon technique benefited my former dance practice and my current writing practice. I appreciate how, as Manning (2016) explains, “Dance technique involves the honing of repetitive moments, but it can also encourage the experimentation of what else those movements can do” (p. 40). Counterintuitively, repeating modern dance techniques was to imagine, “to draw something new from repetition, [and] to draw difference from it” (Deleuze, 1968/1994, p. 97). This is why I explore the repetitive yet generative spaces writing techniques provide. Repetitions shift into something different, something new.
Significantly, techniques enliven practice. Manning (2016) describes this as technicity, or “the outdoing of technique, the capacity to take technique to its limit, and then to go elsewhere” (p. 126). As she continues, “technicity is a set of enabling conditions that exact from technique the potential for the process to exceed its form . . . technicity moves the process toward a practice still to be defined” (p. 126). Moving toward undefinition is an important element of postqualitative inquiry, and is one that benefits from adopting practices and techniques that produce conditions for new inquiries (St. Pierre, 2015; St. Pierre, Jackson, & Mazzei, 2016). Because postqualitative techniques are more akin to the techniques of modern dance than the habits of classical ballet, they require similarly emergent approaches that catalyze rather than constrain movement. In the context of postqualitative inquiry, as I discuss in the next section, questions of technique ask us to consider what we feed into our writing practice, and why.
Composing Techniques
My writing practice is fed by playful techniques such as not writing, following creative impulses, and writing with concepts. I share these aspects of my daily practice to make visible what normally remains behind-the-scenes (Hughes & Bridges-Rhoads, 2013) in case it is helpful or sparks something generative for others. The goal is not to create a guide for what postqualitative writing is or how it should be done. Rather, I share techniques in ways that are immanent (Manning & Massumi, 2014) and sometimes involve doing less, if anything at all.
Not Writing
The technique of not writing is one of the most productive parts of my writing practice. This frequently involves shaping ideas or remixing materials into something I can think with: choreographies, photographic cartographies, or interactive sketchbooks with images and transparent overlays (in Ulmer, 2015, 2016; see also Koro-Ljungberg & Ulmer, 2015). The selection of photographs to use in a manuscript, for example, often is a precursor to determining the topic of the manuscript itself. This allows me to conceptualize writing through material engagements; I see the manuscript before I draft any text. Then, once I have made something, I wonder if it already might be a form of writing, broadly conceived. From there, I return to Derrida’s (1967/1976) Grammatology to encounter a passage I have read many times over. It begins, “To affirm in this way that the concept of writing exceeds and comprehends that of language, presupposes of course a certain definition of language and writing” (p. 8-9). He goes on to depict how writing can move beyond traditional inscriptions into pictorial, musical, sculptural, athletic, and political compositions. I like this passage because it reminds me that writing is something that does and that each reading produces something different. Yet, this approach to not writing—which emanates from materialist theory—could be recast as a broadened definition of writing.
A more literal approach to not writing involves moving away from writing altogether. Given that neoliberalism demands increased rates of productivity, not writing can appear to be a professional liability. (And if one truly does not write at all, it is.) Either extreme is unhealthy, as viable options do not include writing all of the time or writing none of the time. In this sense, not writing is more akin to a pause button. Setting aside time not to write and do something else provides for a change of setting, which can allow fresh ideas to emerge. For me, images from art galleries, museum archives, graffiti walls, and daily life stimulate thoughts that move through theory, methodology, and writing. Although the written products are what eventually become visible, without taking the time to play, I would write differently than I do. It is not that I plan these as alternative work activities. I do not think, “today I am going to go to the museum so that I can find writing inspiration.” Instead, I complete a manuscript and go to an artistic venue. The reward for finishing this article will be an exhibit at the nearby College for Creative Studies. I have never been, and I am ready to finish so that I can play. Inevitably, though, it is the escape from writing and the attempt to not write that somehow lead to more writing.
Writing Creative Impulses
As a result, I now follow creative impulses as another technique. I pull over the car to photograph something interesting. I forgo the faster interstate route to drive through the Heidelberg Project (an outdoor folk art installation), or to take back roads to observe how sticker art is slowly spreading across neighborhood stop signs and outdoor electrical boxes. I allow myself to be moved by interesting moments during mundane tasks, such as walking each week through the local farmer’s market to buy local produce and becoming “distracted” by street art (e.g., Ulmer, 2016). There are pockets of time that can be carved out in daily routines for play, and many have served as a form of not writing that spurs ideas and photographs and papers.
Oftentimes, however, the ways in which these impulses matter are not immediately clear. In other words, I often play even though I am not certain what will happen. In fact, I play precisely because I am uncertain of what will happen, of what will be produced in any particular moment. For instance, I had gathered dead leaves, fallen flower blossoms, and other cuttings from the indoor plants to make them appear more aesthetic. When I paused to examine what I had collected (and to reconsider why), I realized that I was holding onto something that was not unaesthetic, but was differently aesthetic. I then placed the plant matter on a piece of blank paper and proceeded to take several pictures (see Figure 1). This was an unexpected moment that may be methodological, or may one day become methodological, or may become nothing at all.
Creative impulses.
Such creative practices are methodologies without methodology (Koro-Ljungberg, 2016). When methodologies have the ability to exist anywhere at any time, there is always potential for methodological surprise, provocation, and creative experimentation. As Koro-Ljungberg writes, it is possible that the “uncertainty, rawness, and creative chaos prompted by doing, engaging, collaborating, and reflecting through failure and unfinishedness (without constant and continual purification and ‘cleaning’ efforts) is conceptually stirring and theoretically life changing” (p. 103). For me, it has been. Methodologies without methodology have been a wonderful form of (un)training—one in which I did not have to unlearn or leave the comfort of normative habits. Instead, I could begin with techniques that cultivated rather than diminished creative impulses—research was an affirmative and generative practice from the beginning (Koro-Ljungberg, 2012). This has informed an inquiry stance that asks speculative questions such as: What might [that] do? What else might [that] become? Why? Those are the questions I ask of writing, particularly in the turn toward concepts.
Composing Concepts
A third technique considers how concepts might be situated in writing amid growing interests in concept as method. As St. Pierre (2014) explains in the context of her own work, concept as method is a move away from identifying and implementing “prescriptive step-by-step procedure[s]” in advance of a study. In contrast to guidance that offers recipes for research, concepts create methodological openings through which researchers can craft contingent inquiries that not only think with theory (Jackson & Mazzei, 2012), but rethink inquiry itself. In lieu of prescriptive formulae, then, I take up concepts as method here alongside similar suggestions to “read and read and read and attend to the encounters in our experiences that demand our attention” (St. Pierre et al., 2016, p. 106; see also Stengers, 2002/2011).
As such, I take inspiration from my readings of Manning and Massumi (2014), who aim to compose concepts in writing. When this reading encounter caught my attention, I wondered how composing concepts might become a technique within my writing practice. Their advice was captivating: “Don’t just write about dance. As William Forsythe says, dance that thought around. Dance that choreographic thought around in philosophy’s act of writing” (p. viii, emphasis in original). I wondered what might happen if I were to compose concepts, too. This is what I attempt to do here: take concepts and—through writing—dance them around.
To illustrate, I have crafted playful writing activities for several theoretical concepts: folding (Deleuze, 1988/1993), cutting (Barad, 2014), and another concept at the end of the article. I shall describe each in turn. Before I do, though, it is perhaps helpful to explain why I chose certain concepts and offer suggestions regarding how they might be playfully enacted (or not) within the spaces that follow.
Although there are many rich concepts, I start with cutting and folding for several reasons. First, both can be put to work in theoretical, material, and arts-based ways. The question of what a concept can do in/with/to/through writing seemed especially intriguing if there already were actions associated with a particular concept. Second, I used concepts that have been established in the theoretical and methodological literature (including in the writings of Manning and those who draw from her work). Alongside the introduction of postqualitative research, moves toward thinking with theory (Jackson & Mazzei, 2012) have inspired a growing body of scholarship that explores the role of concepts in inquiry. The availability of theoretical and methodological texts may be helpful for those who want to learn more about one or both concepts, including how they have sparked other creative research practices. Third, in acknowledging that some readers will have more experience with these concepts than others, I have attempted to select concepts that might provide access points for readers across the theoretical spectrum. Even though the concepts will be more familiar to those who have read the works of Giles Deleuze, Karen Barad, and postqualitative scholars, my hope is that these are inclusive spaces for play.
Thus, the next section is an invitation for anyone and everyone who wants to play. The spaces ahead invite readers to play and experiment with the technique of composing concepts. Readers also may want to utilize other techniques such as following their own creative impulses or composing nothing at all; in the alternative, they may invent, reinvent, and connect concepts themselves (per Massumi, 2002). Each play space encourages active engagements with the text. This is why the play spaces remain unfinished: they depend upon readers to complete, or, in some cases, to initiate. All are partial openings that aim to gently provoke and unsettle habits. Although I hesitate to provide directions for use, I would suggest that readers consider printing a personal copy of the article on which to write, cut, fold, draw, and otherwise encounter the text.
Play Space 1: Folding
“A fold is always folded within a fold” (p. 6);
“Unfolding is thus not the contrary of folding, but follows the fold up to the following fold” (p. 6);
“. . . movement does not simply go from one greater or smaller part to another, but from fold to fold” (p. 9);
“. . . organic folds have their own specificity” (p. 6);
“The fold is inseparable from wind” (p. 31);
“How to fold the text so that it can be enveloped in music?” (p. 136);
“Where is the fold moving?” (p. 119, emphasis in original).
Play Space 2: Cutting Together-Apart
Cutting concepts together-apart.
My example list of concepts and words:
against
anti
art
as
choreography
concepts
critical
eco
ecology
geo
graphy
human
humanism
images
is
material
materialism
materiality
method
methodology
more than
non
onto
ontology
philosophy
photo
play
post
qualitative
representation
slow
techniques
think
thinking
trans
visual
with
without
work
writing
______________________
______________________
______________________
______________________
______________________
______________________
______________________
______________________
______________________
______________________
______________________
______________________
______________________
______________________
______________________
______________________
______________________
_______________________________________________
_______________________________________________
_______________________________________________
Choreographing (Playful) Practice
If you know where you will end up when you begin, nothing has happened in the meantime. You have to be willing to surprise yourself writing things you didn’t think you thought.
(Massumi, 2002, p. 17, emphasis added)
Creating a playful writing practice continues to be generative, productive, and surprising. Perhaps this is why I return to it every day—to find out what might happen next. For me, writing is choreography that remains in motion as it spills over and unfolds in multiple directions at once. Writing is something that has the ability to move, and as it moves, I move with it (Ulmer, 2015). Manning (2016) might describe this as choreographic thinking, or an “everyday activity that tunes habits and invents techniques” (p. 127). Our practices are set into motion by the techniques we invent as we move through daily life—which, in my case, has involved writing and dance. These are the incipient choreographies of which I am a part, and to which I cannot help return.
Implications
Yet, this is not to suggest that choreographing a playful practice is some sort of panacea or magical elixir that will cure what ails our writing practices, methodologies, or broader society. Romanticizing notions of “writing things you didn’t think you thought” without mentioning ensuing challenges might make for a more appealing or satisfying conclusion to this article, but would be to gloss over the potential for unpleasant side effects like uncertainty and frustration. For example, I wish that some of my writing impulses would leave me alone, such as the play spaces in this article that kept asking me to write them. However much I approach writing as a serious task, there are times like this when my words continue to play—they keep dancing, keep escaping, keep moving around. This causes me angst, for if I could write more often like a “good scholar” is expected to write, I would. I would conform and write within the lines if something else did not happen in the meantime. I try to ignore it. “If I just exorcise this writing demon,” I think, “if I just write down this one idea, this one last idea that keeps pulling at me, get it out of my system, I can get back to writing.” So I write it. I then open a blank page, ready to be good. Ready to discover the rewards of normativity. The cursor blinks. | | | | | | | | | | | | | | But my words will not stay still. They remain in motion, at play. Possibly this is because,
A choreographic encounter is never wholly what it seems. You can’t really choreograph movement. Movement slips through the grid . . . I can train you to move-toward a sense of space, toward a quality of speed, of extension. I can offer you openings for the creations of experiential space-times. But I can’t choreograph your landing sites. (Manning, 2012, p. 210)
Those, Manning suggests, choose us.
A landing site that seems to have chosen me is a playful writing practice, even as I resist. Lately, I do not feel like playing. The world is a serious place, and I feel serious, too. Play seems like an unnecessary luxury in so many regards, and maybe it is. As I debate the value of play, however, I think about how satire and comedy foreground critical issues in ways that can be as, if not more, insightful and influential than grim commentaries. And then I think about how play is able to not only communicate differently through writing, but to advance different modes of thinking. Writing is thinking (Richardson & St. Pierre, 2005). This, in turn, makes me consider the significance of fostering difference in contemporary society, which makes me suspect that play has something significant to offer after all. As I reflect on my practice and ask how I should be spending my time, the immediate answer usually involves working toward a more inclusive, equitable, and peaceful world. There are, at any given moment, urgent issues, and it is easy to want to engage on every front at once. I find that playful writing can be helpful when it provides the time and space to distill what is important and is at stake. Play can be serious.
Play simultaneously can be problematic, even within a productive practice. Earlier in this article, I described how the more I play, the more I write. To clarify, the suggestion that playing feeds writing is one that makes me hesitate. In writing this article, I have drawn several possible conclusions about my own writing practice: I am bad at not working, I am good at playing, I cannot stop thinking, and/or maybe all of these things have become true at the same time. Writing this has led me to realize that there is another, less innocent, possibility: My own playful activities have been co-opted by modern systems of production, which, in turn, have co-opted me. This is an uncomfortable thought. The suggestion that because I play more, I work more and think more (and, therefore, produce more) is worth reconsidering. Even though many of the activities I claim as productive would not be considered as such (yoga, indoor cycling, outdoor walking, museum visits, photography), they risk becoming playful habits that catalyze the methodological thinking and work that neoliberalism rewards. Play can become the thing it was designed to circumvent. Perhaps, then, the goal should not be to play harder, but to play better to work, think, write, and live better. In other words, rather than play more to produce more, perhaps a practice might be choreographed that involves a Slow sense of being—a Slow ontology—and attempts to produce in more sustainable and generative ways (Ulmer, 2017). The invention and reinvention of techniques potentially has a role in making this happen.
Interventions (and a Third Potential Play Space)
I close, therefore, by discussing the potential of Slow techniques to intervene toward the practices we desire. A philosophy of Slowness encourages us to move at different speeds at different times. As Honoré (2004) explains, a Fast philosophy of life is busy, controlling, and hurried. Slowness, in contrast, is “calm, careful, receptive, still, intuitive, unhurried, patient, reflective, quality-over-quantity. It is about making real and meaningful connections—with people, culture, work, food, everything” (p. 14-15). By occupying Slowness as a writing technique, we might begin to find ourselves disrupting our writing habits to make more progress toward our personal and professional commitments. And we might recalibrate our practices by finding unhurried time to experiment with different techniques for Slowing.
To interrupt our travels through daily life, some street artists intervene through stickering, which is also known as sticker bombing, and visual cultural jamming, among other terms. This is a method of fast art that Slows (Lindner & Meissner, 2015) in which street artists mark nearby public surfaces with “pre-made mailing labels, name tags, appropriated stickers, purchased pre-made stickers, and/or multiples of original designs” (Keys, 2008, p. 98). As Figure 3 shows, their aim is to jam the (visual) cultural signals that we uncritically consume while working toward engagement and action (Harold, 2004; Ulmer, 2016). Stickering, I would suggest, is a technique for Slowing that we might consider adapting through micro bits of writing. To be clear, I am not advocating that anyone vandalize property or misuse shipping labels from governmental entities. (Both are prosecutable, and the latter is a federal offense.) Instead, I am suggesting that—like street artists—we similarly encounter our surroundings, allow ourselves to be disrupted, choose to play, use writing to jam production, and envision what it is that we could and would be generating in our respective writing practices. It is within these veins that we might take up stickering as a creative exercise and use a name-tag sticker or printable 1-inch by 3-inch mailing address label (or many at once) to respond to the following questions:
How would you jam?
How would you practice?
How would you write?
Stickering.
The act of putting limited amounts of text and/or illustration on a small surface area might clarify some of the ideas that drive our practice. Thus, before returning to the ways in which we (re)produce ourselves through longer pieces of writing—to how we name and label and export ourselves (Koro-Ljungberg, 2016)—we might pause to consider how it is that we want to be. And then, perhaps, we might begin to Slowly engage work through these and other writing techniques. This should not be a static process, however, for as Manning (2016) cautions, “techniques must be reinvented at every turn and thought must always leap” (p. 45).
It is through the confluence of techniques that an overall practice is built. This is not something that just happens, but something that we create and contribute to every day—even within the broader contexts and forces that shape our work. As I have shared here, my writing practice is choreographed through Slow techniques and (reluctant, imperfect) techniques of play. Parts of this practice may be helpful to others. Or not. What I hope is that others will pause to examine their unconscious habits and consider what techniques might be useful, what writing and research practices might be desirable, and what other supports and interventions are needed along the way. Although the techniques we write with today may not be the same ones we write with tomorrow, taken together, they can work toward writing and research practices that will continue to move.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
Innumerable thanks are due to the dance instructors, scholars, and chorographers with whom I have had the privilege of practicing, as well as to Mirka Koro-Ljungberg for sharing her own creativity, expertise, and methodological jams.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.