Abstract
The article is a palimpsest created as part of the project of collective autoethnographic writing. Its multiple forms formed the basis for the community and the intensification of friendly writing. After the assemblies, there were remnants. The remnants of practices from which one could crack meanings―but these are not the most important ones. This peculiar collection of artifacts is presented with a frail hope that the remnants still contain a messianic promise which will spread like plague. Maybe the text will revive in your hands—by reading it, you will write another version with our ghosts.
We are ghosts. In words. We haunt.
Keywords
The History of the Text (Best to Be Read at the End, If Anyone Wants to Read It)
The following text has been created for almost 2 years. It started spontaneously, as always. It started optimistically―this is not so frequent. Four people took up writing about the experiences of collective writing, the attempts to answer the question of what happened during our common autoethnographic projects. 1 The text swelled, spilled in various directions. It mutated into subsequent versions. The longest one had almost thirty pages without a bibliography. The next versions and their mutations were not so much closer to something, not so much more communicative, as if they were supposed to say something, but they were different. Different creations without reference to One, a norm, or a thing which they were supposed to represent.
During the writing as inquiry (Richardson, 2000; Speedy, 2005), it turned out that it was not possible to capture what was happening during co-writing. Words did not represent anything, words co-created; they were a blend of a friendly assembly, where each meeting was a unique event, a new stream in which we became together (Pławski et al., 2018). After finding out that it was impossible to capture the transformation in writing and to write about it another text, we returned to this article. Colette collected all our notes and ordered them into a 15-page article. We started discussions, amendments, and then . . . I had to focus on the book. Colette had a child. Marcin traveled around the world with his theater. Paulina was doing something too.
The text was forgotten. It even seemed to Paulina, and me too, that the text had already been finished, that only the footnotes and stylistic corrections were missing.
Now, we’re coming back. The text is unfinished, incoherent, imbrued with words. Not only the footnotes are missing. I’m reading it, it does not look good. Cut up, disjunctive—it went through a lot. Time did not act in its favor: It seems to me that books, texts, are written at once. They cannot be left to lie in. The text does not ripen, only decays. Its sense evaporates, escapes into the air. After a month of lying in, a thick duvet of mould covers it. When you get back to it, you start with time-consuming rescue work. (Żulczyk, 2018, p. 159)
The text became alien. It is not ours anymore. Just as there is no us. We watch, as other entities, 2 with other eyes. An object is ahead of us. Frozen.
We move doubtfully. In the margins, the discussions—stopped short, unanswered comments, suggestions that have not been heard.
Paulina asks,
- What did you want to say here in the passage you have marked as unclear?
- It’s not mine, you wrote that—I answer.
We were writing, at one time, some gathering. Now we, from the outside, are trying to collect traces, somehow to combine this, stick together with cheap glue from a kiosk, maybe even give a meaning. Overwrite the meaning over the text, which now appears as fragments that someone removed from a larger story. Now, at a different time, in a different composition, we are giving new meanings, new senses: . . . a text cannot have a stable meaning. Meanings and memory unfold over time and change shape in different contexts; though text presents a permanent trace of ideas and signs, our interpretations of that trace are inexhaustibly complex. (Colyar, 2009, p. 434)
We watch. Unsuccessful attempts. Attempts?
We edit. Our team is incomplete. Marcin cannot make it, he’s outside the university. Colette comes for a moment. She says she trusts us. 3
We edit. Sometimes we distinguish specific voices, assign names to them, sometimes leave them nameless, suggesting the collectivity of creation and/or other voices that sneak in—like mine, but not mine. Do I say, do I think? (Hein, 2017).
We watch. Edit. Unsuccessful attempts? From what I remember, it was some practices, a process of being from which a few fragments are left out. Words-gravestones. We arrange them, segregate and create collections. (You can create a different one, you can bring the text to life when you read it writing another version at the same time, and then our ghosts will visit you.)
Instead of a bonfire, fluorescent lamps glow in wide corridors with linoleum floors.
And, it started like that, listen.
Beginning—NAIVE POEM
I. the interweaving of history merging diffluence in words differentiation and becoming multiplicity when our stories penetrate into one another spill and fill up showing more and more meanings routes understatements my story lonely is always incomplete it collapses in itself closes and fades away another word touch-opening our narratives make sense when they meet in tension they spark opportunities igniting the lands of the unthought our narratives when they meet when they intertwine they become a word intersecting what is social they are courage they do not collapse into silence only sometimes they turn into a whisper of underground conspiracy words-breaths II. words-shared cut, slit, weighed vetted, measured, locked turned against us in the hands of the administration of knowledge managers words-shared and we divided closure without a word deprivation of words isolated reclusive III. this talking this writing this is my resistance against being an entrepreneurial self of necrophilic academy this talking this writing this is my longing
Writing Machine
An autumn evening, Paulina writes to me with a proposal of cooperation on another joint autoethnographic text. This evokes my enthusiasm: before I go to bed, I write a fragment that is posted here as a “naive poem.” Writing together, writing autoethnography is like revival.
“I write autoethnography as direct resistance to counting, control, scrutiny, measurement” (Poulos, 2017, p. 315). . . . “writing to make a difference” (Pelias, 2017, p. 364) . . . . . . to write to be a difference . . . to write not to be controlled . . . to write to . . . to write to be . . . together . . . to write against: isolation, boredom, repetition copying words that are foreign, like the texts that are produced—in a small factory, somewhere on the periphery of the world, cheap products for an insignificant academic market to write against the factory . . . a frozen corridor with the cool glow of fluorescent lights I pass the closed door the next and next and next, and next, next rows of massive doors cold glow and silence I stand in front of my own door the same as all others only the content of the plaque next to it is different the computer and I the data pile to be processed for the next article I hit the keys mechanically me in my room you in your room good morning/ good bye - nly reviewers know what we’re writing about only they read us and they are the only ones who share with us the verdict-mark “We write collaboratively for our ghosts” (Gale & Wyatt, 2017, p. 358). Ghosts of renounced life, of impossible beings—haunting the non-existent. We write to become a ghost, haunting and blowing apart the entrepreneurial self (Herrmann, 2014).
We add two more people to our writing community—Marcin and Colette—who had co-created the previous autoethnographic projects with us. “Naive poem” has already been written. It welcomes the gathered people. I say that, in my opinion, the “naive rhyme” does not fully reflect the experience associated with collective autoethnography―besides, it repeats many statements urging people to practice collective autoethnography or collective writing as part of experimental writing (see Speedy, 2012). Shall we just make another call for collective writing? Or shall we note the experience down? Note? Present? As if experience was a thing, something beyond us, which should be represented? As if it was something that belongs to us (Grant, Short, & Turner, 2013, p. 10)?
Let us immerse ourselves once again in what was and what is happening in our experience of autoethnographic collective writing. “One step forward, two steps back. History and prophecy” (Henson, 2017, p. 222). Balancing among events, among an unspeakable multiplicity of previous meetings—opening both to the writing itself, like previous events, previous meetings. 4 Among illusions, dreams, desires, and disappointments.
Experimenting with previous experiments—eluding the royal science—and maybe even science as such.
***
I knew that there was something wrong with academic writing before I got to the texts that confirmed my intuitions. Their deadness, the intent to copy other people’s words, the separation from my experience, from my own self. Dead words arranged according to the formula of scientificity. Academic slang suggesting more, giving the apparent meaning. I wrote and I was bored. Academic “dead language” (Badley, 2020), which intensifies necrophilic academic tendencies. Academic writing, where it is important to quote the right people instead of caring about the social effect, creativity, or dialogue (Valentim, 2017). Academic writing, like a vampire, drains life—during writing and during reading. Hollow shells, bodies without spirit, dried publications, collecting dust in the international museum of global science.
It was not my writing. It was not the writing which got into reality, into the reader, tugging, biting, irritating, provoking. At the most, lulling to sleep. I wanted the writing which would be a provocative gesture. An act of resistance. A text of action, and not a report on social injustice, a dispassionate description of neoliberal destruction and capitalist crimes on people and the planet. I felt that we needed new forms of writing. As well as new forms of existence at university (D’Hoest & Lewis, 2015).
One day, when I felt that I was becoming more and more dead, that I would not be able to reproduce the prevalent didactic and academic practices anymore, I took the action which I had not even considered thoroughly. With the new academic year, I started, together with a group of students, experiments with autoethnography, which is still not very popular in our peripheral country. It was a response to desires that could not be satisfied within the neoliberal university. This experiment, both scientific and didactic, turned out to be more dangerous than I had thought. Conflicts with the university authorities who demanded transmissive didactics. And who tried to stop the autoethnographic research on didactics at the university where I work. I understood then what political didactics meant. On the other hand, spaces opened, and relationships whose existence I had not even anticipated were established. Suddenly, students ceased to be an anonymous mass. The classes became a strange event, a process which I did not control, which surprised me. From the beginning, the writing machines worked differently from what I had assumed while drafting the project. Honestly, I do not know how they worked or work. They are mysterious machines from another world.
***
The Power of Collective Autoethnography
There were four of us writing, and—“there was already quite a crowd” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 3).
Marcin: Should students be told that it is worth doing what is enjoyable, what is passion, when you yourself are pilloried by external ratings, in continuous pseudo evaluation. In order . . . to become better, to re-create a better self, to give to others a piece of what I am not, and I would not like to be. Talking about the passion of getting points―and how to be honest with another person . . . different, strange . . . because what can I talk about with a clear conscience, with the conviction that what I say is not mush, ground, undigested―other people’s words, quotes, uniforms made not for you, but for the glory of pseudo science, pseudo teaching, training.
There are also doors to underground associations secret (anti)university associations in words? between words? “leaving some empty spaces between words between sentences” (Guttorm, 2012, p. 601). beyond numbers and time in the non-space of night study (Lewis, 2013)
Marcin: Maybe there is a chance―collective autoethnography, our Dead Poets Society. When I had the opportunity to take part in a joint DIY work, i.e., in the project titled “Autoethnography of studying,” it was something different than before. Firstly―it was nothing obligatory, nothing for a grade (unless that of reviewers, but then I did not think about it, and now I don’t give it a . . .); secondly—it was not academic (as commonly thought), and yet academic―from the perspective of qualitative research, which I feel close to, through the prism of looking at the world―human, humanistic.
And that was it!!!―I could write in my own language, quite metaphorical, without having to quote, to refer to, to imitate or to make carbon copies.
Colette: While describing my own reflections about studying, I allow my fears to come out. They are caused by the fact that the situation we describe using autoethnography is a situation made up of our thoughts, experiences, and observations to date. Well, it is a description of events based on our life so far. In my case, it is a twenty-five-year life, whose experience cannot match the life of forty or fifty years.
To what extent are our views permanent? We change throughout life, hence my doubts about the method of autoethnography: I would like my text to be for me, in a few years, an opportunity to evaluate myself and my development as a human being. However, when I read my text after a few years, I would not like to feel the way I do today while reading my diary from elementary school. And yet, the diary written by me in primary school was subjective; it presented my own opinions, represented my thinking and problems, but the world described in it is the world seen through the eyes of a child. This means that autoethnography is also presenting something exclusively from your own point of view, describing some events subjectively. However, our “subjectivity changes” over time, influenced by the objectivity in the evaluation which is gained with time. What about the text we wrote then? Will it be possible to introduce some amendment, “the second edition, revised?.”
My two conflicting opinions on autoethnography are explained by Philip Lopate describing autoethnography as “the mode of being. It’s not science; it’s not a philosophy. It is an existential struggle for honesty and expansion in an uncertain world” (Lopate, 1994, p. xliv as cited in Bochner, 2000, p. 271). This means that by using the autoethnography method we become somewhat torn between subjectivism, our own perception and objectivism of the described events. We are guided by our own emotions, and on the other hand, we are aware that there is some other, different side of the same events.
Robert Coles asks, “How to encompass in our minds the complexity of some lived moments in life?” His answer: “You don’t do that with theories. You don’t do that with a system of ideas. You do it with a story.” “How to include in our mind the complexity of some moments experienced in our lives? This is not done with theories. This is not done with a list of ideas. This is done with a story (Coles, 1989 as cited in Bochner, 2000, p. 271).” So there is no other way of conveying our own point of view, our own experiences than by describing them and revealing them to the world.
Paulina: We are sick. Collective autoethnography is a kind of therapy. Self-healing and co-treatment.
This page is not just a piece of paper. It is a place of meeting, dialogue and contemplation.
When shall we be healthy?
Collective autoethnography appears somewhere on the side . . . you have to survive. You have to write good academic texts.
I’m young. I do not know much yet. It seemed to me, however, that every word in the text had power; that when it appeared, it began to change us and the world.
In fact . . . “the voice loses its origin, the author enters his own death, writing begins” (Barthes, 1977, p. 142).
Death, however, does not absolve us from the responsibility for words.
Collective autoethnography is not only a method, it is a meeting of people who for some reason decided to share (with themselves, with others) their own internal world. It is the writing of people connected by some invisible thread. When we write something (in particular, so openly subjectively), we practically always (in our eyes) write the truth. Well, unless we deliberately lie (we bend reality), not allowing some ideas-thoughts to get a word in edgeways.
Paulina:
After the meetings
There is roar, noise, thunder—and silence.
To the battle! Bangarang! . . . home.
It seems that after some time
something imperceptibly dies in us.
In
(after? or maybe in? we die as some self—to be born again? Not for death, but for life?—writing-resurrection without immortality)
Where . . . is the prayer of the apostle? (Block, 2017) . . . whose words and deeds go hand in hand.
What we write about is an act of struggle. Sabotage? We are . . . someone for sure.
We throw stones at our own—unwanted—house.
We can end up on the pavement.
Shall we then hold hands shouting joyfully—we made it! They heard us—those who did not want to hear (or were not supposed to hear us) . . .
Shhh . . .
Collective autoethnography means . . .
liberating “knowledge” from its shackles.
Autoethnography and collective autoethnography give the greatest expression of freedom, and you cannot look for truth anywhere but in freedom.
The world has closed a part of humanity in its square meters—offices, rooms, studies. They are rooms-cages that absorb the voices of their prisoners. They hear, “Why am I sitting here? Is this really my place? Didn’t I come here by accident . . . You can go mad. The constant audits, checking, spying . . .” (Szwabowski, 2016, p. 153). We have separated ourselves from others.
Autoethnography and collective autoethnography. I was seduced by the idea that resounds from these two methods, the idea that there is still some hope for the university, and maybe hope for the world—as a place of true community. Such a stupid dream that we may finally get along somehow.
Marcin: To get lost in order to find myself―to return to the starting point. This is what the modern generation has forgotten about, perhaps because of the previous system’s accretions, hidden in the stories of our close and distant acquaintances. Everywhere ME―it’s just like buying a Christmas present for oneself. To be glad that one has bought a gift―best not to show it to anyone, play with it by oneself and die holding it in one’s arms. Where is the joy of sharing, giving, reciprocity. Because this reciprocity is the most pleasant and very important. I really like giving gifts (without thinking about being given one in return), but I also like to be given presents. Unidirectionality is not good, and even leads to anomalies and disharmony.
Just like in an alternative theater, here too―in our collective writing, context and relationships are important to me―getting to know each other, even in a space between words. Something more than just points, “scientificity” or prestige. And, it is worth speaking out about it and being part of it. For me―a new quality in the musty world of rote-learned litanies, giving a pass to the Babel hotel.
Paulina: Marcin, you write “getting to know each other” is important. When you “recuperate,” I invite you to coffee.
After half a year, no one came to coffee.
Political Power
Change?―a friend shakes his head in disbelief―the one in the form of therapy, maybe. In total, you are somehow matched. Whether in virtual reality, huddled in front of the screen, or during meetings, locked up in a room, sitting, writing, and the university gains points; there are publications. You know, everything is fine. Just as it should be. And, the authorities do not read your texts anyway.
Our writing as a pedagogy of asylum (Włodarczyk, 2016)? A space and an association where one can develop the language of hope, a space for combating capitalism in everyday relationships, and for creating community, friendship (Giroux, 2013)? Is it just a shelter? A form of withdrawal in the guise of commitment? But do we not exist in words and through words? Are we not instituted by them to be the subject, injured by them, repressed (Butler, 1997)?
Well, I say it’s a therapy―a friend speaks again. This is not enough in the face of the pressing problems of pedagogy. The devastation of the natural environment is not just words. The violence of power is not just words. You know, even discourses are not just words, but also a material organization. Writing cannot replace street action. Writing can improve your well-being, but it does not change the world. It may create new meanings, understandings, but it’s a game of intellectuals, not translating into real changes. I know, it’s a nice illusion that what you do is important, that it is the creation of life forms (see Moe & Reinertsen, 2019). May you create a form that can breathe smog:
Then close the door tightly and buy an air purifier―says a friend when he leaves.
Power, political power―rescue, creating space for democracy―in a room full of smog.
Writing as “ the possibility of redemption, of seeing writing as an act of hope, of exposing wrongs, as defending the oppressed, of speaking for others” (Badley, 2020, p. 2).
Our writing as a challenge for domination, for existing, hegemonic forms (Gale, 2016, 304). Producing new life forms (Gale & Wyatt, 2017).
And, although we may not change the world, our co-writing is a way to overcome neoliberal loneliness, the gloomy isolation within the educational factory. The co-writing as a meeting lets you rekindle a hope that blossoms with faith in other people, in relationships other than those of the market―it is the indication of another world that might inspire. Relationships that make us bolder, and we know for whom and for what we have to take risks, undertake activities other than those related to survival and the repayment of the loan.
Our Problem of Power, Not Power, Order and Disorder
Paulina: We chose our “chief” of the tribe. The hero of the people. We became his disciples and he became our teacher. Everything happened voluntarily. However, we did not manage to eradicate (not entirely) the statement we kept hearing in the head like a mantra: the one who has knowledge has power. . . In this case, Author2 has the greatest knowledge, so he also has the greatest power. Someone had to propel the whole “project,” control it, someone had to set a tone . . . undertake the initiative. This is not like a typical academic text. Here, nothing is completely settled. Everything is “happening” suddenly and continuously. Collective autoethnography, it is not co-producing but rather co-creating. And, it may be also about trust . . .
Oskar: Power is not logical. Can’t we just free knowledge from power, from the belief that the one who decides and directs is the one who has read more?―we are renewing the academic hierarchy, and we were supposed to create a university. 7
my power the power of the institution the power in which the institution operates the power which appoints us as individuals the power of the journal to which we want to send it secretive reviewers we try to guess their tastes power-fossils (Deleuze, 1988) blocking (Foucault, 1995) writing my power, it is being able to give up power if I did not trust . . . maybe more I would fight . . . with the power—of Oskar Who does this story belong to? Who says “us”? “multivocal methods, reflexivity and a politics of hope could lead us to a democratic praxis of social justice but I can’t say us” (Lapadat, 2018, p. 176) the whispered definition of us, the underground creation of identities, or maybe reproducing them
Colette: Oskar’s “power” is also due to the fact that he wrote the first words, sentences, pages of the text. Willy-nilly, I refer to those first words, I try to adjust to create a whole. Reading the poem, I feel as if I was entering the locked house, cautiously and timidly. I look around, make sure that no one is in. I hear the silence, I relax, and only now can I begin to walk around all the rooms. And, I still walk hesitantly.
I open a file with “our” text. 10 pages. I read. I feel that two people wrote it all. Later, it turns out that the text was written by one person, Oskar, who enters into polemics with himself. So, I tell him recently that maybe he does not need us in this text? That maybe he will write the whole text himself? I do not express my maliciousness here, but only my admiration for the art of writing. For the fact that the text is written by one person, and yet as if by many. However, it’s hard to make head or tail of this. Because if someone disputes with him—or herself, which one should we have a dialogue with? Which of them to identify with?
I read on. I come across a poem! I’m completely unable to express myself in a poetic way. Shall I try? Shall I imitate? How to create a “co-” in a poetic tone that is not mine? I feel that it (the tone) is blocking my way of expressing myself. It is precisely in this “imposition” of poetry that I find the discourse of power in our collective autoethnographic text.
The first person who began to write the text imposed a certain style of writing in which subsequent participants have to find themselves. In addition, it was Oskar, the most knowledgeable person of us all, the most well-read, with the greatest experience in writing texts, the person we turn to when we have doubts. On the other hand, when he asked me about the manifestation of power in our text, he said: “I am thinking about the discourse of power in our text, but I would not like to impose anything.” It means that he is aware of some of his authority over the project, but he does not want us to be guided by his suggestions, conclusions and practices. However, I think that all this happens naturally. Accidentally. It is not self-proclaimed power, but the one which we (the others) have chosen, which we have decided upon and which we accept.
I read on. Chaos. Different fonts. Different styles. Different people. Still the same person. Another again. Different punctuation. First a poem. Then prose. First Courier New, then Times New Roman, another time Verdana. Large, small, medium letters, first ellipsis, then no full stop. Where is the end of the sentence? I do not find myself in chaos. I’d rather put everything in order first. I would unify the font. I would mark who writes what. First, he speaks with his head down and then he stands tall. Who is he actually? Chaos. Untidiness. Mess. Disorder. Is autoethnography so chaotic? Shall I find myself in this? Being lost among words among people mine, yours, our . . . I do not know myself which fragment was mine common? not completely being lost, uncertainty the fragility of being together, the risk of getting hurt the traumaticality of assessment, instead of understanding
Community
In the neoliberal academy, “we become transparent but empty, unrecognizable to ourselves” (Ball, 2012, p. 19). The neoliberal epidemic generates subjectivities, infiltrates relationships, destroying forms of solidarity and creating a continuous system of assessments and comparisons, an alienated world where we succumb to slow destruction by dominant forms of management (Ball, 2003). Alienated, isolated, overworked, tormented by diseases (Shaw, 2014; Shaw & Ward, 2014). Longing for community and friendship (Rutkowiak, 2010), in a bureaucratic enterprise of control and depersonalization of relationships (T. Bauman & Jendza, 2016), in a toxic place where we are deprived of our voice (Jovanovic, 2017; Pelias, 2017).
Collective - there is no you or I, or I isolated, autonomous, or I ideologized―there are connections, circulations, precarious us in the words―I becomes a connection―I is removed from the text every now and then, introduced into other relationships, subordinated to the regimes of academic production, non-academic production, family production―the written we is constantly disintegrating and creating
The message from Oskar to everyone: and yet such a random thought came to me: . . . because I wonder if joint voices require joint bodies (it sounds strange, but you know what I mean).
I think: The bodies are so authentic. Real. You can see everything. Every face grimace. Movement, impatience, joy . . . anger. A voice recorded on paper―what does it actually say about the real “You”? And Oskar, I think you’ll answer that question yourself in what you write below:
divided in reality, united in the virtual 8 ―each time we wrote in an on-line editor (for online collective writing see Sakellariadis et al., 2008).
(indeed, even our meetings in the real world, always hasty, momentary busy with our issues focused on survival—at least I think about projects in this way― as an action against survival, as an intensification and recognition of cracks of life) absence of the body, absence of the face absence of another flashing cursor loneliness in real life, loneliness in the virtual when after writing my passage there is silence when you do not log in when you do not write nervousness, uncertainty did I write too much? did I get it wrong? did I set up wrong narratives? I went the lonely way, where you do not go the text became unfamiliar to you? there is no place in it for you? the desire to erase the text the desire to continue writing nervous writing on to awaken a multiplicity in myself the remains of the machine to put them together set them in motion in its shadowy shape no longer a war machine but its memory grave machine one day Paulina writes the sentence: “I’m glad we are here”―and silence no one answers for a few days, a week the lonely sentence in cold white Author1 deletes it an empty gap is left
Author3: In the end, collective autoethnography contains a part of the community. The community that we are creating right now. But are you sure? This common writing of ours takes place in different times and on different planes, so can we still call it co-writing? Or, maybe it would be more appropriate to name this process as an exchange sentences, paragraphs? It’s a bit like writing it on a piece of paper and passing it on. Like in this game “finish the story,” when one person begins to write a story on a piece of paper, then folds the top of the page so that the next participant does not see what is written there and passes it on. The next player must add the next part of the story without knowing what is hidden under the folded paper. At the end, when the paper has made a round among all participants, the last person unfolds it and reads it. The most common result is nonsense stories.
To remedy this and not to play the game, we decided to bring a voice recorder and a computer with the content of our text for the next meeting. We will talk and record, and then we’ll write it all down in the text. During the meeting, one person will try to record the most interesting observations. Listening to the conversation will give us the opportunity to find a hidden agenda, a suggestion inaudible at first peek, a fleeting thought which we might not have heard or considered the first time:
After half a year no one came to coffee.
Oscar: Words were supposed to be a lure, something that connects elements and creates a community, thanks to which the community is in constant becoming without the need to create the identity of members, or its own definitions. Finally, in our writing, words ceased to represent anything: experiences, fossilized projects, and they became embedded in the practice of coexisting. I thought so. That’s probably what we thought. However, when I look at the made-up mugs of coffee in a made-up cafe at a time that was not still, I know, I already know that words are a curtain for me. Not a lure, but a cocoon. As if friendly writing (Pławski et al., 2018) filled in for friendship entirely. Words, being in words, creating alternative realities on paper—a substitute for real action and being. I create images when I write. As I write, the world becomes―divine power, which is paper power.
No, I did not go to coffee because we wrote about that. This had already happened when we wrote about it. And probably it was better that it happened among words rather than in a real cafe, with real coffee. Besides, we exist as a writing machine—many we within many machines. In this stream of words that bypass existing institutions, our daily lives, duties, worries, joys. I sit in front of the screen and find myself in a different reality. Words are an escape, from what there is. And from you.
It’s good that you are here.
Non(sense) of Writing
Let us not lock up in the room: the room of meanings, word streams, thoughts rebounding off the walls and heads, read and unread pages, letters blurring the panes in the windows.
Let us not look through this window and watch anxiously the fire consuming everything. Watch and calmly say here is a bucket and there is water. The water should be poured to the bucket and used to extinguish the fire.
Then let us not sit calmly. . .
And wait. . .
Let us not find out unwittingly that the fire had spread (and paraphrasing the poet’s words), it has come dangerously close to our windows.
And now it is just—a moment
On our graves it will be written:
Anonymous Authors.
Writing till they dropped dead.
In Front of the Gate
I speak with my head down:
I wonder what is new in what we do here. I read literature, heaps of articles and books—and I say, it’s just us, nothing more. I am sorry.
I speak with my head raised:
Everything has already been written, about our experience too—but not about our experience of our experience. Even if what we do was written about—collective writing, collective autoethnography, nomadism, writing as inquiry, poetry as inquiry—the event itself has not been described. And, this is always an event, some event, some sort of it―a multiplicity of singularities, events in an indescribable event.
I speak with a multi-headed:
This thing of ours, does it have to be something new? Is this not market thinking?―New products all the time, smaller phones, more and more sophisticated software―7, 8, 10, 11―requiring faster and faster computers (lasting two years—after which they end up in a dump). Deleuze will also be there soon. But for now—Guattari 9 !!! . . . Let’s share stories, but always new . . . new posts and new -isms. . . Prestige and quotes.
are we saying something new are we talking scientifically are we talking at the global level - The ways of taking away our voice we are local, backward we are children― we play with words (Gurevitch, 2000) we have nothing of our own nothing belongs to us outside this assembly temporary There is a road. A campsite. A fire. And the story.
And, what if the road ends. The campsite falls apart. The fire burns out. And, the story ends suddenly . . .
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
