Monstering: On Hybridizatioan and Care in Artistic Research

Nienke Scholts & Sabine Niederer Monstering: On Hybridization and Care in Artistic Research

The Monsters Who Monster

Artistic research practices create in-between zones where exceptions are the rule. These practices offer refuge to “monsters” that do not fit preconceived labels or categories. Such monsters might be understood as unsuited wild creatures or unruly machines about to spiral out of control. Monstrous artworks or research practices could also be regarded as exciting hybrids, undefinable and estranging sources of imagined possibility. As described by Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, such possibility grasps “the terrifying as well as the smiling” and requires “thinking and doing the actual and the virtual at once”.1 Monsters of artistic research similarly invite us to dance with the unknown, to doubt, pause, feel, and re-think.

Discussions on artistic research often centre around competing terminologies of multi-, inter-, trans-, or post-disciplinary research, or even propose a post-research condition.2 What if the furthering of artistic research merely leads to an academisation or institutionalisation of art? What if it ensnares artistic inquiry in the realms of academic and applied research?3 These are understandable and reasonable fears and pitfalls. However, instead of dreading the all-too-well-known, artistic research practices have the gifted ability to venture out into the unknown. This contribution looks at three such artistic research projects as “monstering” practices, exploring their hybridity and, relatedly, their practice of care.

Rachel Armstrong and Rolf Hughes, two experimental architecture scholars, describe artistic research as a pursuit of the specific knowledge (i.e., increased specialisation, reflection, and expertise)

that is needed to strengthen the artistic practice.4 They argue that artistic research also “develop[s] methods that link and integrate formerly discrete knowledge areas – provoking hybridization of thought and monstering of practices – catalysing a wider shift in research towards transdisciplinary method development.”5 Recognising the speculative and generative qualities that come into being when practices monster, or ‘hybridize’, we imagine the Hinterlands of artistic research as a landscape we can explore. A landscape does not have a beginning or end, it merely transforms. In the middle of this ever-changing landscape we find ourselves “being situated in-between”, which is where, according to Isabelle Stengers, things become literally interesting: “inter-esse - not to divide, but to relate.” A relational approach helps us to become aware of the monsters in the Hinterlands we traverse, and to understand “monstering” as a practice that actually suits our unstable world.

The first work we encounter quite literally explores becoming inter-esse, situated in between. In the triptych Pink Bestiaries, Brazilian choreographer Josefa Pereira explores through movement the relational space between three seemingly straightforward opposites: front and back, left and right, up and down. Throughout the piece, the viewer is drawn into the spaces in-between those opposites, where categories clearly defined at first unravel into a destabilising experience. In the first act, titled Hide Behind, Pereira reverses front and back by walking backwards in a circular movement for the entire duration of the piece (one hour). The audience is seated in a circle around her, so from their perspective the front and back sides of her body continuously change: “A female body moving against the stream, her backside goes ahead in an 136

ongoing urgent gesture of unraveling a particular story of progress. Is it unraveling, or resisting? Is she undoing a story or just telling another one? Or both at the same time?”6 The back of her body is painted in a bright pink, visually drawing attention and adding to the estranging play between sides. While she walks at a steady pace, her arms and hands perform a choreography of their own, blindly feeling their way across her neck and shoulders which have now become the front of her body. As the arms create different shapes, the human figure changes into headless, pink, monstrous forms. In the new continuum that is created where there used to be opposites, her reversed movements dissolve common ideas about linearity, order, and advancement.

Asked about her research method, Pereira explains: “I keep asking the same questions over and over until something ‘different’ appears.” In choreographic practice, repeatedly asking the same question is both a rational and physical activity: writing (graphy) the same movement (choreo) over and over again. Pereira opens up a space of inquiry at the heart of the performative work by posing questions through bodily gestures. By doing so, she can move through the ungraspable inter-esse of things - and share that experience with an audience simultaneously. To witness seemingly fixed opposites become fluid, spectators need to adopt a more radical form of attending the performance, in which their perceptions monster too. In choreographing a shift in seeing towards that which lives in-between dichotomies, Pereira takes care of making monsters matter.

Matters of Care

Such a relational inter-esse can also be sought in ways of working together across disciplines in artistic research. The hybridisation of disciplines raises questions of the conditions of such research practices. Especially regarding the intricate contexts of research carried out across various differences (in fields of study, methods, backgrounds, experience, lived knowledges, et cetera), we turn to the concept of care to inform and strengthen collaborative and transdisciplinary research practices. The concept of ‘care’ as it is used here builds on an intersectional feminist tradition that is very much alive, particularly in artistic and digital research. Interspecies and socio-technical feminist research practices by scholars and artists such as Catherine d’Ignazio, Lauren Klein, Maya Livio, and Maria Puig de la Bellacasa have taken up Haraway’s call to “stay with the trouble”, and have further developed relational research practices with an ethics of care.7 These care-driven practices are centred around values, making sure that the research is not extractive or exploitative, and that it welcomes many voices, perspectives, and ways of knowing, including the embodied and the experiential.8 Furthermore, such practices invite those who are affected by the work to participate, respond, analyse, and interpret.9

Our journey through the Hinterlands now leads us to the researcher, curator, and artist Maya Livio, who actively incorporates ethics of care into her transdisciplinary practice. In her “expanded non-fiction project about brown birds, queer ecologies, and data”, titled Salvaging Birds, she collaborates with ornithologists, a composer, and a media artist to critically examine the practice of bird conservation.10 Livio, describing her first visit 138

to a collection of dead animal bodies in a natural history museum, wrote: “[t]hough it may not have looked like a typical dataset, its rows and columns made of fragile, difficult-to-contain bodies, the collection made visible the logics of environmental datafication; the stakes for those both excluded from and included in data in a time of escalating climate crisis.”11 Bird conservation is severely biased towards male species, as was established in a study of natural history museums conducted in 2019.12 Male birds’ actual bodies (often colourful) are overrepresented in natural history collections, as is male birdsong. And what therefore remains underrepresented in bird conservation datasets are the bodies and birdsong recordings of female species (often in muted shades of brown) and intersex birds. Livio states: “Brown birds evade notice and in the process they evaded inclusion in this dataset of suspended death.”13 And, on the lack of female birdsong in conservation datasets: “Many female birds produce a rich array of vocal sounds but these have largely evaded scientific attention because they have not been characterized as songs.”14

Livio turned to A.I. and machine learning, a field similarly criticised for its biases. In a speculative queering of the dataset, Livio and her collaborators used A.I. trained on intersex and female birdsong to compose new missing birdsongs with composer J.P. Merz. Similarly, A.I. was used to produce accompanying generative artworks that illustrate the compositions with new media artist Cassie McQuater. The glitches in the A.I.-rendered birdsong were retained, and the faltering machine songs illustrate the imperfections of technology and the impossible effort of completing the collection.

Monstering with Care

The further development of research with an ethics of care may expand the focus from what is done to include how it is done. As Maria Puig de la Bellacasa, author of Matters of Care, puts it: “Our ways of studying (…) have world making effects.” In the arts and the cultural realm more broadly, a body of scholarly and artistic work explores and critiques how precarity looms over a professional life in the arts.15 Political scientist Isabell Lorey invites us to see that precariousness is a condition of life; that all living beings need one another to survive and that, despite the vulnerability and insecurity it brings, this given might as well be used as a strength. Could we change our ways of studying and doing research and consider forms of interdependency as a starting point for alternative ways of working together? Lorey opens up this thought while being aware, however, that: “... social interdependence can express itself both as concern or care and as violence.”16 It remains crucial to invite critical questions into research processes with regards to “what we talk about when we talk about care.”17 As argued by curator and author Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, care work may produce hierarchies (for example, between caregiver and caretaker), and it is always important to question the conditionality or unconditionality of care, especially in these times of deep environmental and social crises. An interdependent care-driven practice would entail fleshing out together, in every constellation anew, what this way of working means, and how to practice ways of relating in research that are not inspiring for some while draining others, but benefit all parties involved.

In a session of the ARIAS research group ‘Care Ecologies’18 in August 2021, Alexa Mardon, a DAS Choreography artist-in-residence, invited the interdisciplinary group of researchers into the studio. There, Mardon shared some of their practices, relating to and crossing over with movement workshops for frontline support workers in Vancouver (in healthcare, land defence and community mutual aid).20 Through dance and its potential for direct and adjacent intimacy, awareness, and transformation on an often imperceptible level, Mardon is interested in the ways in which our movements and actions touch upon and influence one another. Questions explored in her research revolve around ways of being together including choreographic and aesthetic concerns that have to do with access, cultural protocols and ethics: who is gathering, what unseen forces are summoned when we gather to dance, and who is absent?

The practice session was an invitation for the Care Ecologies group to be together otherwise: to touch what is far away, to perceive what is always present, yet rarely felt. During the studio visit, Mardon led a warm-up on moving and speaking, before guiding the group into some of the underlying principles of these movements. The session explored touch, listening, speaking to imagery, moving, and witnessing one another. In a witnessing exercise, the participants were asked to couple up and focus on the other person’s body breathing. Each witnessing participant was asked to direct all their attention to the other person’s body lying before them and focus on a part of the body that was visibly moving with the breath. Then choosing a second body part to focus on, and then a third. Each time, carefully placing a hand there. After three placements, the other person was given some space while 142

attention was fully kept with their breathing, living body. The entirety of our attention being directed towards the wholeness of the breathing body was an important reminder to one of the participants, a researcher from the field of medical humanities who was about to re-enter medical school. The breathing body struck them as a metaphor to be reminded of when seeing patients. It strengthened them in their belief that each person, each breathing body, deserves such holistic and careful attention as was practiced here.

As small as the scale of this exchange was, a monstering of practices did take place, in which one researcher’s (medical) practice was touched, contaminated even,21 by the (artistic) practice of someone else. The particular experience of witnessing an embodied insight into a peer’s practice led the group to explore how an ethics of care could take shape and be felt through various performativities of exchange. The questions that have arisen in the research group include: What do care ecologies mean when we speak about research, and how can they be felt and performed between artists-researchers? What comes into view when we talk? What comes into view when we dance? And how do we come into view differently for each other in different settings and formats of exchange?

The monstering practices encountered so far on this ongoing journey provide glimpses of a Hinterland of hybrid research practices in which care can be a driving force: Pereira’s bodily monstering, turning dichotomies into fluid spaces in-between, Livio‘s interspecies and transdisciplinary approach, queering archives to reveal shortcomings in datasets and technologies, and Mardon’s collective movements, conjuring holistic and care-driven approaches

through dance. As Maria de la Bellacasa poignantly makes clear, an ethics of care is not about the application of predetermined solutions, but has to be constantly “rethought, contested and enriched.”22 The commitment lies in a situated and positioned approach to develop critical standpoints that are careful, in each context anew.23 Monstering with care deserves critical inquiry, reflection, and a willingness to learn. We might not always get it right the first time; the work of care is ever in progress.

1 De Vries, Patricia (2020). Algorithmic Anxiety in Contemporary Art: A Kierkegaardian Inquiry into the Imaginary of Possibility, Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures, p. 10 and p. 31. 2 See also the Postresearch Condition Conference, HKU, January 2021 and its proceedings, which were published as: Slager, H. & Balkema, A. (eds.) (2021) The Postresearch Condition’, Utrecht: Metropolis M. 3 Hito Steyerl is not the only one lost in the definitional discussion, and more interested in the practices of applied research. See also: Steyerl, H. (2021) ‘Response’, in Slager & Balkema (eds.) The Postresearch Condition, p. 13. 4 Armstrong, R. & Hughes, R, (2021) ‘Embodying Knowledge: On Trust, Recognition, Preferences’, in Slager & Balkema (eds.) The Postresearch Condition, p. 47. 5 Ibidem. 6 Scholts, Nienke (2021), personal correspondence with the artist. 7 See also: Niederer, S. & Colombo, G. (2021) ‘Feminist Data Practices: Conversations with Catherine D’Ignazio, Lauren Klein, and Maya Livio’, Diseña, (19). DOI: http://ojs.uc.cl/index.php/Disena/article/view/41545. 8 For example, in their book Data Feminism, Catherine D’Ignazio and Lauren Klein stipulate seven principles of data feminism, each explained through discussions of relevant works of art and research. D’Ignazio, C. & Klein, L. (2020) Data Feminism, Cambridge (MA): MIT Press. 9 These topics are also central to the ‘Ecologies of Care’ research theme of ARIAS. http://arias.amsterdam/ecologies-of-care/. 10 Livio, M. (2021) ‘Salvaging Birds’, Retrieved from: http://salvagingbirds.com. 11 Ibidem. 12 Cooper, N. et al. (2019) ‘Sex biases in bird and mammal natural history collections’ Proc. R. Soc., 286(1913), http:// doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2019.2025. 13 In her work, Livio also discusses bird conservation 144

as an extractive effort in which animals are killed to become part of the collections. She points out that nowadays, museums mostly collected salvage specimens. “Salvage birds are found dead, often from window strikes, estimated to kill 600 million birds per year, or from other collisions such as with vehicles, communication towers, and other infrastructures. Though less deliberate, salvage bird deaths are still largely caused by humans, pointing to another flaw in the logics of environmental data.” (www.salvagingbirds.com). 14 Livio 2021. 15 See, for example, the writings of Bojana Kunst, Anna Dezeuze, and Silvio Lorusso, as well as projects like ‘Fair Practice Code’ (https://fairpracticecode.nl/nl), developed by Kunsten 92 & Platform BK; ‘The Fantastic Institution’ symposium at Buda Kortrijk in 2017; and the current work of, among others, the Institute of Network Cultures (INC) on “Post-Precarity”. 16 Lorey, I.(2012) State of Insecurity: Government of the Precarious. London/New York: Verso Books, p. 6. 17 Soh Bejeng Ndikung, B. (2021) The Delusions of Care, Berlin: Archive Books, p. 12. 18 In the interdisciplinary ‘Ecologies of Care’ research group, artists and scholars concerned with matters of care examine care from a variety of disciplinary positions, e.g. medical humanities, architecture, culture and media studies, and choreography. We regularly convene to discuss a wide range of topics, such as health injustice, loss and grief, and feminist finance. 19 DAS Choreography is an MA-programme of the DAS Graduate School of the Amsterdam University of the Arts. 20 These classes, hosted and led by Mardon in collaboration with Rianne Selvnis, centre around exercises on movement, play, grounding, and non-linear thinking and being. They are based on the idea that everyone has a multitude of responses available to them at any given moment, and that movement and dance can help access this responsive agility with greater ease and efficiency in one’s work. See: https:// www.alexasolveigmardon.com/ 21 The use of contamination in this context is taken from Anna Tsing: “Collaboration means working across difference, which leads to contamination. Without collaboration, we all die.” (...) Tsing thus makes contamination a necessity in precarious survival, relating it to mutual dependency as well: “We change through our collaborations both within and across species. The important stuff of life on earth happens in those transformations, not in the decision trees of self-contained individuals.” Tsing, A. (2015) The Mushroom at the End of the World, on Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins, Princeton: Princeton University Press, pp. 28-29. 22 de la Bellacasa, M.P. (2011) ‘Matters of Care in Technoscience: Assembling Neglected Things’, Social Studies of Science, 41(1), p.96. 23 Ibidem.

Ilse van Rijn Apples, or Writing and/as Transdisciplinary Practice, in 3 Exercises

Excercise 1 (Eating an apple and enjoying it)

“The lesson of apple: of peace. The acidulous taste of the word on the tongue. The one-hundred savours of the different peels: the tart apple of the being-sweet-on-thetongues, appelle apple apfel appeal a peal a-peel…”1

Referring to the work of Brazilian author Clarice Lispector, the French feminist novelist and philosopher Hélène Cixous insists that “we have to be transgrammatical”. This doesn’t imply “that we have to despise grammar,” Cixous adds, “but we are so used to obeying [grammar] absolutely, that some work has to be done in that direction. I find it important to work on foreign texts, precisely because they displace our relationship to grammar.”2 Cixous reads the French translation of Lispector’s Portuguese books, while collaboratively translating her own French works into English as well, most importantly Vivre L’orange – To Live the Orange, the novel-cum-theoretical reflection steeped in Lispector’s texts. In her cry for transgrammaticality and the encouragement to learn a foreign tongue, Cixous implicitly underlines both Lispector’s grammatical play, and what Cixous calls the “necessary inside of language”.3 In doing so, one learns to appreciate, thanks to Lispector’s writerly approach. Cixous is interested in Lispector’s poetical prose precisely because it showed an absolute departure from ordinary language within a language of her own. Lispector’s feminine writing turned away from a language defined by a masculine libidinal economy and patriarchal symbolic order. Her novels and stories both embodied and manifested as “encounter[s] with another – be it a body, a piece

of writing, a social dilemma, a moment of passion”, leading to an “undoing of the hierarchies and oppositions” that delimit life.4 Ecriture féminine should not be understood as an alternative to a masculine writing, which leave intact binary distinctions between man and woman, black and white, matter and meaning. In Cixous’s proposal, the inside of language implies the materiality of language, its letters and syllables; the body is doing the writing, and, in doing so, the body is inscribing itself.5 Lispector’s prose, Agua Viva most explicitly, performs this triple task.

Agua Viva confronts you with its multiple disorganisations (or “disharmonies”) of language.6 The book pivots around a central character and narrator “I”, a painter and writer like the author herself, who tries to capture the now, or, what she calls, the “instant-now”. It is a fragmented text, every new fragment an experiment, a reiteration of the narrator’s ferocious attempts to pin down the present, which, through its very form, is both a reflection on and enactment of language’s (in)capacity to grasp the “instant-now”. Agua Viva is a sensuous text: it tastes words, syllables, and sounds, thinking through relationships of language to life and death. The protagonist “I” intends to use writing to prepare for painting, but she gets swallowed up in words, handling terms like ‘bait’: “fishing for whatever is not word.”7 Explaining her process, “I” states “[w] hen this non-word – between the lines – takes the bait, something has been written”; the bait incorporates the word. “So what saves you is writing absentmindedly”, she comments. Here, writing with a distracted mind means a form of improvisation, “jazz in a fury”, pure expression, using words without a utilitarian meaning.8 It means to be free, a recurring word in Agua Viva: free from the word 148

as (masculine) code and law. Writing is presented as a form of resistance in vulnerability. It is a way to withstand and combat a limiting discourse that doesn’t allow you to approach and intimately know the world. In the story, however, the actual encounter between word and world never takes place. But the narrator persists, as mentioned before, continuing her trial to merge those which modernity had turned into each other’s antagonists; not only language and so-called ‘reality’, meaning and matter, and theory and practice, but also writing and painting, or literature and visual art. The repetitious first phrases of consecutive fragments emphasise the protagonist’s perseverance: “I’m writing you …”, “New instant …”, “I’m writing to you …”, “I came back…”.9 Lispector’s stuttering, fragmentary, insisting, and urgent prose formally develops the writer/painter’s painstaking quest to write as she breathes and capture the present moment. In which she almost succeeds.

Reading Agua Viva, it is the ‘almost’ of Lispector’s writing that causes her to gasp and catch her breath, as does the “I”. “I” participates in the ‘play’ of writing. The ‘almost’ reveals the potential of writ-ing. And it is this potential of writing Agua Viva: the endless testing of new forms of writing throughout, beginning again and again, that performs as fragmentary prose. One cannot avoid the “light discord”: the fragmentary writing both describes and puts in place.10 Its halting, processual writing allows the text to spill out and open up to the world, overflowing and reaching out to the spacetime in which it finds itself, allowing the reader to fill out its gaps. Meanwhile the “I” paradoxically names the impossibility of coming to terms with that same world in which a so-called ‘reality’ has to be named in a language that isn’t hers. The life that “I” desires to touch is rather a ‘beyond-life’: a secret, silent, and

expectant life that is neglected by “reality”: Cixous’s inside of language. A textual face-to-face encounter with this radical ‘Other’ of life is too frightening anyway. The fragmentary form could thus be read both as a mask, a veil that defaces the intimacy of life (necessarily so), and as an embrace of an interruption and suspension of life which the prose simultaneously modulates and embodies. 11

The simultaneous masking and making of life, both in and through Lispector’s prose, is what is needed to approach a world torn apart by dichotomies, according to Cixous: war and peace, man and woman, writing and painting, the old and the new, dark and light.12 For the French feminist, Lispector’s writing is like ‘spending’ and ‘joyous giving’, without wanting something in return; its libidinal relationship with the world articulates a place not reigned by a masculine economy based on possession and greed, instant profit and continuous progress.13 Accepting that the “now-instant” begins to end as soon as it starts, Lispector’s joyous prose “eats a fruit at its peak”, savouring the moment instead, while simultaneously acknowledging that it “live(s) to the side” of the event, in the words of Agua Viva’s protagonist.14 This ‘Other’ of life (or life as always other, one could add) might be “mysterious and bewitching”, but living it and simultaneously writing it is a form of insurgent writing, a writing without exclusions.15 Existing relationships are un-thought in this way.16 And, as such, writing/ living transforms a text into praxis and song.

Exercise 2 (Play: becoming-apple)

“Is it possible that I have thought no more of an apple since the beginning of the century? And that I have not seen an apple, not discovered, not observed an apple, when scarcely emerged from its element, still stirred, aerial, it changes its nature in alightening on the table? And becomes stone, or becomes egg?”17

Describing the relationship between writing and animal play, philosopher Brian Massumi observes how writing, while not always directly representing the world it describes, nevertheless possesses a potential for limitless ‘play’ with the world. As an abstraction of the world, writing denies the world, and, in commenting on its own failure to touch it, it therefore denies what it writes.18 In an attempt to understand it, Agua Viva’s “I” stages and observes the act of writing: “Before writing to you I perfume myself all over.” Localising writing in her hand, she follows the limb wherever it goes, promising that “I won’t fiddle with whatever it writes.” There shouldn’t be a lag between the gesture of her hand and her person, she notes, since “I act in the core of the instant.”19 And although writing and “I” seem indiscernible, they remain incompatible as well: “What am I doing in writing to you? trying to photograph perfume?”20 The “reflexive capacities of language”, as Massumi terms it, allow it to operate at several textual levels at once. Agua Viva makes ample use of this potential, one could say. Thus, its protagonist is both a character and the narrator of the story in which she acts, for the reader follows both voices. Being a writer, the reader has the tendency to substitute Agua Viva’s character with the author’s name as well: the protagonist performing

as an “I”, the reader herself easily blending the words she reads with the character.

The amphibian complexity of writing consequently allows it to change shape according to your perspective. And vice versa, writing allows you to inhabit a radically different point of view. As such, writing is a ludic gesture, a playful act. Writing dramatises and unframes actions that are unseen, forgotten, or suppressed in normal life;21 it gives shape to thoughts that are “impossible and intangible” in a lived reality.22 Trying to find words for a future death she cannot express, Agua Viva’s protagonist becomes, for instance, a wounded tiger “with a deadly arrow buried in its flesh”. Even if the embedded arrow is pulled out and the animal freed from its excruciating pain, it cannot say thank you. “So I sluggishly walk back and forth … I lick one of my paws and then … I silently move off.”23 The pain remains, however, “There’s a thing inside me that hurts. Ah how it hurts and how it screams for help.” However, despite subsequently translating the pain caused by the arrow, the mechanism of the typewriter, “I”, lacks tears. She cannot obey the “demanding” object that the typewriter is, and consequently writes: “if I must be an object let it be an object that screams … What saves me is the scream. I protest in the name of whatever is inside the object beyond the thought-feeling. I am an urgent object.”24

“I” is both protagonist, writer, and narrator, once more; she is both tiger and writer; she is both object and scream. Writing allows “I” to follow their transformations throughout, acting out her becoming. What Massumi (after Deleuze and Guattari) would call her “becoming-tiger” (or “becomingtypewriter”, “becoming-scream” etc.) is absolute, opening “an escape hatch leading away from all 152

known areas of activity given in nature.”25 Writing gives expression to this movement towards the supernormal, tying together the formerly disparate protagonist and tiger (or typewriter, scream etc.), that mutually include each other nevertheless. The human and nonhuman animals, the objects and animals, life and death, spill out and over each other in Lispector’s prose. They give each other something extra (or what Massumi calls “-esqueness”) that defines the other’s singularity: the tiger licking its paw, transforming “I” into a typewriter, makes “the dry keys echo in the dark and humid hours.”26 The singularities of ‘tiger’, ‘typewriter’, and ‘scream’ are expressed and exchanged in writing; in writing, different singularities unfold. In that sense, writing, and Lispector’s writing specifically, could be considered to be not merely transgrammatical, but a transindividual realm as well, in Massumi’s words.

As a reader of Lispector’s transgrammatical and transindividual works, and writing about it in Vivre l’orange, Cixous pushes herself to become a “joy-apple”: to approach and appreciate, thinkingfeeling, thinking-doing language.27 She doesn’t “know exactly how to peel [herself] down enough,” Cixous admits; she doesn’t know how to “become as simple as an apple, just like the goodness of an apple.” But there’s a “tender light of an apple in the night to attract us towards it.”28 Walking without end “by the glow of the fruit”, writing for no one and anyone, giving forth “names, fruits, her hand, in the darkness”, and being “the world, including its memory, its ways, its voices”, Lispector’s prose guides the novice along.29 Its gestures and actions are dramatised and transduced in reading and writ-ing, instigating Cixous’s own expressive endeavors: reading and writing becomes an opportunity to learn. A writer about Lispector’s

transgrammatical transindividual works, Cixous is indebted to the Brazilian author, it is said.30 Vivre l’orange testifies to this specifically: “I owe a live apple to a woman. … I owe a work of apple to a woman. I owe: a birth to the nature of a woman: a book of apples.”31 Explicitly translating the apple into an orange, Cixous’s prose mingles and merges with the former author’s, to the point of them becoming indiscernible.32 No “anxiety of influence” here.33 Is it indebtedness on which their relationship is based, one feeding off the other?

Instead of a parasitic liaison, the encounter of another body, another language, another passion, another life has resulted in one contaminating the other, varying on the other’s works, becoming the other (‘becoming-other’), and vice versa. Reading them through each other, a linear, recursive, and hierarchical perception of history in which the notion of indebtedness is grounded, seems hardly workable to understand the athletics of writing performed by Lispector and Cixous. Cixous doesn’t cite Lispector in Vivre l’orange like she does in her so-called ‘academic articles’ on the author: no quotation marks separating Lispector’s words from her own appear. The two authorial voices rather, one could say, co-constitute each other.34 Entering into an intimate dialogue, they respond to each other, reconfiguring each other. Reading writing, reading about writing, writing about reading writing, Cixous’s work isn’t merely a one-way street. How could one understand the dynamics of reading and writing in a non-linear fashion? How to perceive such a mutually inclusive writing (writing/reading, reading/writing) rapport? How could one understand writing as mutually inclusive rapport?

Exercise 3 (I love apples (too))

“Today, I know that I am without having. I have only my hunger to give; and an apple in the darkness. Knowing how to meet it, knowing it to be apple is all of my knowing.”35

Indebted. In her writing, Cixous is ‘indebted’ to Lispector’s prose. I continue to struggle with the word ‘debt’ included in the term. It presupposes guilt: a guilt the “Jewoman” Cixous actually feared, felt, and expressed in her writing. Debt suggests the need to balance the uneven distribution of means, including a “promise to match credit and debt again, debt and credit.”36 Credit runs “only one way”; the debtor is dependent on the creditor’s justice to recognise her rights.37 However, the relationship between the two authors surpasses the unilateral connection, as was mentioned before. Lispector’s open and instable writing allows it to be rewritten each time, time and again, depending on the reader’s position. This same openness of writing enabled “the world, including its memory, its ways, its voices” to trickle into writing’s spacious and highly sensuous realm.

Cixous walks the path Lispector has penciled in her works. Reading Lispector’s work, describing it as a voice that reached her “on the twelfth of October 1978”, she tries to renew her own embodied textual relations with a world from which she feels expelled.38 Through Lispector’s grammatically divergent prose, Cixous perceives and repairs previously “impossible and intangible” relationships between world and word, matter and meaning, subject and object, without forgetting the traditional separation between them. She narrates her

‘coming-to-life’ as a birth taking place through the reading of Lispector’s work, integrating the other in a fluid, non-hierarchical way. Cixous observes how, in Lispector’s prose, names are linked to all the senses, not merely to sight: terms forge liaisons with hearing and listening, with smell, taste, and touch.39 Thus, objects are conjured up with “ear-lips”, the “inner music” from thoughts is heard, while Lispector’s prose tastes like the “sweetness of limes and the tartness of passionfruits.”40 The body is written in Lispector’s prose, according to Cixous; it inscribes itself, as much as it writes. Cixous testifies to simultaneously enacting the écriture féminine she advocates.

The telling flesh of the body haunting the written work(s) leaves its traces in, on, and through the writing.41 Paying close attention to the finest details of the worlds it traverses, its prose can be confusing and contradictory, perhaps; the boundaries between Lispector’s prose and Cixous’s, like between orange and apple, as well as their respective concepts and themes, are redrawn each time and again. Playing in more worlds than one is the sine qua non of play, and the reason for potential textual confusion. Massumi calls this capacity of play to extend territories, to affect and be affected by more worlds than one, the different worlds modulating each other, its transsituational link.42 Play connects ‘us,’ as does writing. In play(ing), writing crafts worlds.

Transgrammatical, transindividual, transsituational writing is always already transdisciplinary, one could argue.43 Relating to writing in ever new and unexpected ways, I suggest transdisciplinary research enters the intimate, embodied dialogue with the environmental surrounds, joyously learning 156

from and delving into traditionally distinct worlds. Its process following writing, transdisciplinary research allows for matter to meet meaning in this way, as much as Cixous pleaded in écriture féminine. Cixous’s writing reformulates dichotomies underpinning a traditional exclusive and exclusionary textual regime. What if transdisciplinary research followed suit? Since writing and transdisciplinary research is an occasion to study and learn from another, “be it a body, a piece of writing, a social dilemma, a moment of passion”, to share knowledge and enjoy it, to notice tiny details and their differences, thus leading to an “undoing of the hierarchies and oppositions” that delimit life.

1 Cixous, H. (1979) Vivre l’orange = To live the Orange. Paris: Des Femmes, p. 64. 2 Cixous, H. (1991) Readings: The Poetics of Blanchot, Joyce, Kafka, Kleist, Lispector, and Tsvetayeva. Translated by V. Andermatt Conley. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, p. 3. 3 Cixous, H. (1976) ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’, Signs, 1(4), Translated by K. Cohen and P. Cohen. pp. 882. 4 Andermatt Conley, V. (1990) ‘Introduction’ in Cixous, H., Reading with Lispector. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, pp. vii. 5 See also Kaiser, B.M. (2018) ‘So Many Tongues: Cixous and the Matter of Meaning’, Comparative Literature, 70:3. 6 Lispector, C. (2014) Agua Viva. Translated by S. Todler. London: Penguin Books, p. 6. 7 Ibid 15. 8 Ibid 16. 9 Ibid 48. 10 Ibid 63. 11 Cixous 1979, 50. 12 Cixous 1976, 875, 878. 13 See also Cixous 1976, 888. 14 Lispector 2014, 63. 15 Critics have referred to Cixous’s as a ‘neotenic style’, “that is, a half-born, willfully premature writing that allows the genesis of its articulation to be part of its at once aesthetic, social, and corporeal beauty.” Andermatt 1990, xi. See also Cixous 1976, 893. 16 Cixous 1976, 882. 17 Cixous 1979, 80. 18 Massumi, B. (2014) What Animals Teach Us About Politics, Durham and London: Duke UP, pp. 6-7.

19 Lispector 2014, 46. 20 Ibid 47. 21 Massumi 2014, 56 22 Lispector 2014, 77. 23 Ibid 78. 24 Ibid 79. 25 Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. (1986) Kafka: Towards a Minor Literature. Translated by D. Polan. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, p. 35; Massumi 2014, 57. 26 Massumi 2014, 59; Lispector 2014, 79. 27 Cixous 1979, 64. 28 Ibid 40. 29 Ibid 42. 30 Fitz, E.E. (1990) ‘Hélène Cixous’s Debt to Clarice Lispector: The Case of Vivre L’orange and “L’écriture féminine”’, Revue de Littérature Comparée, 64(1), pp. 235-249. 31 Cixous 1979, 64. 32 “In the translation of the apple (into the orange) I try to denounce myself. A way of owning. My part. Of the fruit. Of the enjoyment.” Cixous 1979, 40. The indiscernibility is part and parcel of what Cixous understands “women’s enjoyment” to be: “All that must not be forgotten in order to arrive in time at the side of a living orange before she is reveiled: the richnesses, the poverties, the good fortunes, the possibilities, the risks. The condition of life, the price, the price, of the fruit, the price of freedom of apples, of women’s enjoyment.” Cixous 1979, 74. 33 The reference is to Harold Bloom’s classic The Anxiety of Influence. A Theory of Poetry (1997, 1973, Oxford: Oxford University Press), in which the author sketches a history of poetry based on the intra-poetic relationships between “strong poets, major figures” and their predominantly white, male and heterosexual “strong precursors” (p. 15), resulting in a linear perception of time. 34 Barad, K. (2007) Meeting the Universe Halfway, Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning, Durham and London: Duke University Press. On the relationships between Cixous’s and more recent materialist feminist understandings language, see Kaiser, B.M. (2018) ‘So Many Tongues: Cixous and the Matter of Writing’, Comparative Literature, 70 (3), pp. 278-294. 35 Cixous 1979, 38. 36 Harney, S. & Moten, F. (2013) The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study, Durham and London: Duke University Press, p. 61. 37 Ibid 61. 38 Cixous 1979, 10. 39 “Their names of coming, their presence-names, their face-names, without which they do not appear. Their names full of presence, their living heavy, audible, names.” Ibid 72-74. 40 Ibid 62, 72.

41 I’m referring to the title of Vicky Kirby’s 1997 bookTelling Flesh. The Substance of the Corporeal. New York and London: Routledge. 42 Massumi 2014, 27. 43 Referring to the materialist feminist perspective of Rosemary Hennessy, Karen Barad defines a transdisciplinary approach as “inquir(ing) into the histories of the organization of knowledges and their function in the formation of subjectivities … mak(ing) visible and put(ting) into crisis the structural links between the disciplining of knowledge and larger social arrangements (Hennessy, R. (1993) Materialist Feminism and the Politics of Discourse, London/New York: Routledge).” Barad 2007, 93. Similarly, media theorist Katie King describes transdisciplinarities as “work(ing) out among urgent, ranging, and competing forms of authority and assessment, under terms of current global restructuring, academic and otherwise.” (King, K. (2012) ‘A Naturalcultural Collection of Affections: Transdisciplinary Stories of Transmedia Ecologies Learning’, s&f online, 10.3. Accessed: 4 June 2021). Like Massumi, King relies on anthropologist Gregory Bateson’s work to think through the ‘double consciousness’ needed to understand and play with the “system of layered contradictions” generated by different worlds.