Bringing Monsters to Life Through Encounters with Writing

Abstract

As researchers, much of our time is spent in the act of ‘writing ’. The production of research as writing is considered an essential part of our research outputs, which are measured and policed by citation metrics and ranked journal and publisher lists. For writing to be recognised and counted as research, it must appear in certain outlets, each of which makes its own certain demands of what is judged to be research. This, we fear, feeds a nonsensical academic apparatus, much like a Goldberg machine that has taken on a life of its own, existing only to perpetuate its own complicated systems of connections and cogs and wheels, arbitrary to the originary desire to write and to become-writer. And this academic publishing apparatus privileges its internal machinery, ossifying its peculiar set of connections, trapping our writing production rather than seeking out and augmenting new and different forms of connection between writer and text and reader. We fear that this arrangement of parts produces us as academic writers who are inert, dead, coded, ranked and listless numbers. And so we ask what if we were to put these nonsenses aside and instead undertake experiments and different encounters with writing , where the writing itself becomes our method of inquiry? Following in the pathway created by Laurel Richardson, we investigate what monstrous creations, full of vitality and fervour, might be made possible if we were to bypass the dead and dismembered assemblage and instead plug ourselves directly into the spark? Would such experiments with writing bring us to life or would our monsters simply offer us torment rather than succour?