Signs to be developed: Experiments in writing

Abstract

In this chapter, I experiment with the possibilities of writing as a means of emitting signs to be developed by a reader as opposed to proposing gestures to be reproduced. I present stories written in and around research, but that are not of or about research per se. These are hybrid texts, monsters, part-academic-part-creative arrangements of words, almost-but-perhaps-not-quite recognisable as research. Stories that blur the lines between true and untrue, re-presentation and invention, with fiction being a necessary act of creation, a way of attending to the gaps that history was too careless to fill (Manguel in A reader on reading, New Haven, CT: Yale, 2010). Writing in this way seems to interfere with normative practices of an academic writing that expects well-defined research problems, methodologically collected data, rigorous analyses, clearly stated implications and considered recommendations. As such, it might be considered a minor writing: one that deterritorialises the language of academic writing, connects to its politics and is an expression of a collective assemblage of enunciation. This, then, is writing that hopes that something might happen in its reading, but that also acknowledges the contingency of the encounter between text and reader, and the impossibility of presuming to know what may be developed from its signs.