Poeticalization and Storying;www.mmm.com

Introducing www.mmm.com Action of Signs

We write about writing for well-being and a new language in/for work life partaking/participation

vulnerable successes perhaps and what it might (not) be

the lacks and wants we mourn

We write about governmentality, health discourses, and technologies of the self. About gender complexities perhaps . . .

and why are females on sick leave more often and for longer periods of time than men? and Why are we still so surprised?

And what is work/ing, word/ing, world/ing?

“Nonsense works? Blank words” (Deleuze, 1990, p. 79).

making matter our worlds, our works our words . . .

Writers performing new practices could be viewed as writing machines (Denzin, 2015).

Writers as writing machines performing new practices.

worlding/working/wording machines; www.

making/melding/mattering practices; mmm.

Sis/Merete/Anne; companionship, company, compassion

I/We/You/Our.com

our action of signs

Autoethnography is a form of self-reflecting and writing, exploring writers’ own experiences with/in wider cultural, political, and social contexts (Ellis, 2004). We add nature/bio/body/gender/life . . . auto-bio-ethno-graphical writing, and . . .

biopolitics of suppression?

Our aim is to speculate, philosophize, and fabulate about how to facilitate exploratory writing processes creating “safe spaces” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987), hopefully generating new understandings.

Good job! Good girl!

What critique is there in female sick leave? Is there?

What knowledge gaps are there in our data?

Dis –ease and wordmelding and/or queering concepts . . . Discoveries demanding new eyes . . . finding new languages . . . getting work to work . . . our worlds—and what we know are fractures

Living in therapeutic cultures—shaping–producing–mattering

Arc health and deconstruction—a sadness and despair over a life never returning . . .

We write about writing as method for well-being, for inquiry, research . . . : Poeticalization or fiction as action as method, our essays as forms of life.

.com Storying and Work and . . .

Being just halfway through life—I live life halfway . . . I became “Chaos” in the course of a few hours five years ago, and I still struggle to accept that I cannot find myself and my life like it used to be. Until then, I had been lucky to cope with whatever I wanted: a leader job through fifteen years, big house, three children, weekend cottage, exercising, parent representation, travelling housebound, projects, giving lectures, parties, friends, divorce, and establishment of a new relationship . . . you name it . . . Many of us—but not everybody manages to keep the capacity as long as we want to . . . I am one of those who in the end just had to let the body decide. After that my everyday has been marked by frustrations about the pathological picture in itself, frustration about where I am in life—or just a much: where I am not in life!

There are rough spaces and smooth spaces. I want safe-spaces for writing. Writing as this possibility for transgressive processes and learning about myself and others: Safe-spaces for my health: Safe-spaces for/at my workplace for my health. I am not ill. I want safe-space writing for well-being. No therapy my self-technology, but embodied knowing taking seriously the politics of sensing: producing empirical knowledge that comes from the senses and about emotions for producing knowledge.

I speak of a virtual type of empiricism including materiality and giving attention to other ways of knowing, other and new stories, to emotional responses; sensual responses; listening, seeing, responding to being spatially, bodily, temporally immersed and how this acts on subjectivities, ways of knowing and being in the world and the stories that are told of that confirming each other’s otherness only. It is a poeticalization of our practices ultimately fostering innovation in our narratives, thus our storying.

My story may be like those of many others’: the body did give signals over years, to tell the head that the tempo didn’t fit. Infections, stomach ulcer, food-intolerance, inflammation in arms, shoulders, rash, prolapse in the neck and back, fever and throat-infections etc etc. However, my head wanting to do so much—didn’t “understand.” The doctor’s and chiropractor’s recommendations of sick-leaves were ignored; high temperature and work were usually quite a good combination, no limits in creativity as to get around to “whatever life offered.” Strong will and great engagement kept the ship afloat, I had no tradition of being sick.

Suddenly, after days of ignoring the signs and doctor’s recommendation, my head “exploded” in pain . . . again and again and again. I thought I had a cerebral hemorrhage—and experienced this as very traumatic. The diagnosis was “burned out.” The next half year I do not remember much from, everything was chaos. I got up on an auto pilot to lay down on the sofa—like a dog without any conception of time. I just waited for the others in my family to come home.

Theorizing and Poetry

Foucault challenged some unquestioned truths in modern society: “one needs to draw out a singularity and show that it really was not all that obvious . . . that the causes of illness should be sought in an individual body” (Foucault, 1994, p. 23). Our perspectives always depend on which particular discourse we are caught in. Language and discourses are created and work simultaneously at creating groups (also with bodily effects). Discourses “are practices that systematically form the objects (and subjects) of which they speak” (Foucault, 1972, p. 49).

Governmentality is about individualization as well as normalization. This is macro-politics: regulation of the population as well as micro-politics; regulation of the body, as constitution of the subjects. We are governed by the norms and goals. The norms are internalized and the thoughts about being watched, can, together with the fear to stand out, be enough to follow the norms. The power of normalization is a sneaking form of social control; we are governed in the endless struggle to be normal. Governmentality is a technology for the state of governing the economy and population as objects. Governmentality acts to promote, form, and stimulate specific subjects or objects. Governmentality makes individuals and populations act in specific ways.

I didn’t have the energy to do anything; showered twice a week—and used all my energy to get through the time when my close family members were around. I actually couldn’t lie on the back of my head for more than a year. I couldn’t bear much light of day, sounds, wind, movement. I couldn’t use computer/tv. It was difficult to have a conversation, because I couldn’t concentrate—and because my short-time memory was bad.

Aristotle argued that poetry is truer than history, and ever since writers have been using poetry to depict life as we experience it. Building on Janesick (2016), poetry may capture the miraculous, the monstrous, the surprising, and the essence of a moment of everyday life, and we can use poetry to represent data, enhance and strengthen our analysis of data and the stories we tell from and with our data. Poetry allows participation in ideas, feelings, as moments of reality and thoughts on so called values. Poetry invites to engagement and activism. It challenges traditional ways of thinking and is able to jar us into new directions just as any art form will. Through a minimum number of clear words poetry maximizes meaning. Telling someone’s story, we create a poetic sense. Poetry shuts out the excess and the noise. It inspires respect and awareness of other person’s stories. Poetry is a way to empower qualitative researchers and our participants. It may illuminate a situation, a context, and a series of positive or negative events. Poetry has an elegant history first through spoken word then written word then both.

Restrictions, and all the things I cannot do anymore, make me feel very frightened of the future—and even more worn out. In a way I have lost freedom of actions and decisions for my own life. All is now about planning activities, about saving the energy by not doing anything for days before I am having to do something.

In a Deleuze and Guattarian way, unleashing “mad elements” in language through poeticalization is a political and ethical imperative. Resisting dominant narratives, and what thinking other – new onthologizations - would take - mean - and make future – work life matter . . . Seeing differently . . . Nonsensical words . . . A Body without Organs rizomatic attuning to adult a-grammatical sense making capacities; escaping the other face of order and patterns and . . . Becoming more attentive to troublesome moments as indicators of the potential for creation: “Rebel becomings” perhaps that insist in language, opening it onto the new (Deleuze & Guattari 2004, p. 4). Deleuzoguattarian noology and/or nonsensical words opening up new looks. Going places we have never been before through rizomatic reterritorialization deterritorialization explorations; mappings and tracings of alternative trajectories . . . Sense/nonsense, distance/closeness, inside/outside, body/mind complexities . . . Forming provisional and partial taxonomies always subjected to change, transformation, and metamorphosis. New connections sparking among words, bodies, objects, and ideas . . .

Poetry can be found. Poetry can be created. Found data poetry is poetry found in, for example, interview transcripts, in documents from the research site, in performances, and in any text relevant to the research project. Found data poetry to capture theory, content, conclusions, and recommendations for research. Found data poetry to explore, create, and fabulate. It can become a habit (Janesick, 2016).

Finding/creating/fabulating poetry in Sis’s story:

Putting wings on a stone

trying to follow the traces after a bird in the air.

Dipping my finger in heaven writing worlds

I work hard to fill all days with meaning, believe me—it is no fun to lie on the sofa several hours in a row, day after day, without being able to sleep, and in addition with free sight to a home “screaming” for care. After a bad period, I often go straight down “in the basement,” because the disappointment about not coping is too big. Then it is hard to find the good thoughts. Generally, I have a bad appetite, combined with no energy to cook. The body weakens slowly because of too little motion. At the same time, I am full of adrenalin, making it impossible to sleep. This implies that on bad days I can feel a mix of “body boiling” and exhaustion, pain and un-wellness– combined with total resignation. To sleep at night, I need drugs.

Governmentality is about subjectivity and self-technologies, about how we are watched and normalized by others and ourselves. And as Franchi (2004) states,

It is true that Foucault tries to establish a common ground between the ethical project of the care of the self, and the social and political dimension of subject domination in the notion of governmentality. Both sets of techniques and practices can be seen as different elements of a more general framework: the western attempt to develop procedures to govern behavior: one’s own and that of others. (p. 3)

Modern western management through this mainly being about increasing the opportunity for specific types of subjects to arise: self-technologies responding to risks and security. For example, the state wanting to secure the population; truth, welfare, health, and happiness. The active side of liberalism thought of as creating active, competent, and self-responsible citizens. The goal is to install the goal and aims of management in the individual body, governing by managing the free acts. Forces inscribing bodies; territorializing, deterritorializing and reterritorializing the body/bodies/our bodies . . . Our bodies’ capacities for engaging with the world around us

—and protection . . .

Territorializing Sis’s body: We ask: Is it possible to detach oneself from being governed?

Can we liberate the gaze and the thoughts? We try to think with the concepts and implications of: conduct of conduct . . . or “conduire la conduite” (Foucault, 1994, p. 237). We are happy that Foucault wrote “experience books, not truth books” (Masschelein, 2007). This implies invitations . . . inviting us . . . to/and an exploratory poetic writing and thought exercises . . .

It enables us to think differently and view philosophical activity as a “work on the self” (p. 148). To investigate oneself is a certain care for oneself . . . a care for one’s identity, related to what Foucault calls “loosing ones face” (Masschelein, 2007, p. 158). Performing research for well-being.

I don’t like to talk about my illness

I dislike showing the sick side of myself—

I so much want to get some kind of a “normal” life.

I feel injured

I don’t have energy to defend my condition.

I struggle with bad conscience for all the people I cannot follow up, even in the simplest ways.

And the worst thing is the lack of capacity for those nearest (to) me . . .

Sciencepoetry Going on Asking Other

Poetry as method as research can be found, can be created. There is no limit to understanding and the many forms of understandings available to us. Poetry can strengthen any part of the research process in any field. Poetry and science: Sciencepoetry to enhance research (Reinertsen & Rossholt, 2016). Asking more and again—asking other . . . What produces sickness? What workplaces produce sickness? How and why? How do we frame or conceptualize work and well-being, health, and success?

Resisting/Creating poetry in Sis’s narrative:

 Let it sink in . . . in- phenomenon/s

 Expectations

 Intentions-non-intentions

 Hierarchies

 Blind spots

 And what surprises . . .

 Agents . . .

 Never did a bird write a song

about the stars and the wind

 Desires put wings of fire

 on the mountain in the sunset

 Learning to love wait

Five years of illness has been/is demanding. It has been a long and hard journey to an unknown universe with many dead ends, crooked paths and pitfalls. On good days, however, and luckily there are more of them now—I manage to see that I am better than last year at the same time. But for my impatient soul, the progress is experienced as not satisfactory. I find it is hard to see everything in a positive light, and I dislike being “the sick one.” This makes me try to compensate to a large degree—by performing more than I (frankly) am able to, and again this is making me even more ill.

My filter doesn’t work, so I take it all in and create stress from every and any encounter. And I have no off button. When I am on, I am on, the adrenalin takes over and wears me out totally. I have really worked me through these years, to get to understand why the body says stop when I myself still think I have (the) capacity. Maybe there are other maps to navigate from, but my GPS seems to be out of order . . .

Every word is a poem.

In every word there is poetry if you want to.

Writing poems with the data: datapoems, analysispoems, representation poems

Writing love letters. (Guttorm, 2016)

Luckily I have come some way in the process of finding back to the everyday; I have fewer sofa-hours and may recover from cautious exercise from time to time. I am more capable of seeing that my reaction patterns are different from before I became ill—now however I am getting worn out before the line of thought is finished. But often there is so much chaos in the head, that I cannot complete one single thought. It hurts physically to think. So my still reduced capacity is a source of great frustration, as I have to minimize my engagement in areas I really want to contribute to. But luckily the experience is continuously more situational, so much is now about protecting me . . .

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