Anna Gibbs

Writing and the flesh of others

Prologue: Feminism and Fictocriticism in Australia The article that follows makes use of a selection of psychoanalytic writings to explore what theoretical writing on intertextuality so often occludes: that is, the dynamics of the passionate dimension of intertextual practices, by which I mean the fantasies of writers (and readers) that attend the actual practices of literary borrowings, in.uences, apprenticeships, and hauntings—by other writers, by the music of words, by memories. For the author may be dead, but writing subjects are very much alive and embodied—capable of moving and being moved, of remembering and forgetting, of relationships both real and imaginary with other writers living or dead, of love and of murder.

Writing as Method: Attunement, Resonance, and Rhythm

‘We do not lack communication. On the contrary, we have too much of it. We lack creation. We lack resistance to the present’, writes Gilles Deleuze (1994, p. 108). This is an assertion that runs counter to dominant discourses about academic writing, yet I will argue here that writing is a critical form of resistance to important aspects of the present, including the injunction to communicate in ways codified by the academy. Method, I aim to show, refers not only to the process of research but also to the process of making sense of that research in and through a writing that does not come afterward as a ‘writing up’ of what has previously been discovered, but is actually continuous with it, and, in large part, produces it. Writing in the Humanities, and increasingly in the Social Sciences, does not comprise an aftereffect of research, but forms its very fabric. Writing is not a transparent medium, nor something that comes somehow after the event, a simple ‘outcome’ of research that always takes place elsewhere, in the archive, in the field or the focus group, on the Web, but is a mode of inquiry in its own right. Thinking about the idea of writing as research in the late 1980s and early ‘90s, Australian theorists used the term ‘fictocriticism’ to describe ‘a way of writing for which there is no blueprint and which must be constantly invented anew in the face of the singular problems that arise in the course of engagement with what is researched’ (Gibbs, 2005). On the one hand this was thought by feminist theorists as an attempt to surprise the paternalistic voices of theory in action, to unveil them and reveal them for the partial rather than the universal view they in fact represent (Gibbs, 2005).

Digitising Ariadne’s Thread: feminism, exscryption, and the unfolding of memory in digital spaces

Working against the instantaneity of the hyperlink, new forms of feminist praxis work with movement and the unfolding of new networked and digital spaces which remake histories of women’s work. In this paper we introduce the concept of feminist exscryption to characterise the kind of performativity which refuses the evaporation of sexual difference and which draws on the lived materiality of bodies and their insertion back into the network.

Language as a Life Form

This chapter addresses the work of non-digital text-based art in the age of digital media through a discussion of an installation by Australian artist Lynne Barwick. It highlights the animation of both viewer and space and considers text as simultaneously writing and image. Key to the discussion is the animating power of the word and the ways in which entangled bodies depend on media as a data-driven life-form with its own kind of (non-human) consciousness. Referencing writers such as Craig Dworkin and Marjorie Perloff, Gibbs explores the language of text as an assemblage that we cannot stand apart from, operating beyond a necessity for strategic communication. Accordingly, the focus is not about the individual ego but about language itself as a conduit or collaborator.

Mimesis as a mode of knowing : vision and movement in the Aesthetic Practice of Jean Painlevé

Abstract: This paper explores a form of corporeal copying which it terms mimetic communication, and explores the way it is not limited to human communication but can and does operates across species. Focusing on the way movement and vision can be seen to be at work in this kind of mimetic communication, the paper argues that it constitutes an important form of affective knowledge about both human and non-human others. Taking the work of early twentieth-century documentary filmmaker Jean Painlevé, who worked extensively with marine creatures, as a case in point, it explores the way in which certain technologies – in this case, cinema – can make use of mimesis as a communicational strategy which comprises the key feature of an aesthetic practice. It examines the implications of this for the way we conceive of affective spectatorship in cinema and for the way we understand our relations with animals, especially as we seek to study them.

At the time of writing : Sedgwick's queer temporalities

This essay, written ‘after Sedgwick’, in no way attempts to imitate her inimitable writing, but operates, rather, in the wake of her work, drawing together some of the concerns that animated it—queer theory, affect theory, and literary performativity—and drawing on it, perhaps obliquely, to address an unlikely text, Jane DeLynn’s Don Juan in the Village. It’s an unlikely text because it is seems in many ways too obvious (since it deals explicitly with lesbian sexuality and with the affects of shame and disgust and therefore can’t possibly require ‘queering’), and it’s unlikely, too, because specifically lesbian fiction is so rarely taken to make present and palpable something of the politics of queer, never mind the politics of the literary tout court. On the other hand, though, Sedgwick’s work amply legitimates such a perverse textual choice.