Fictocritical improv for a new author paradigm, or How to render the messiness of string figure research

Abstract

This paper explores the complexity of collaborative authorship in the humanities, proposing the string figure as a dexterous model with which to map connections amongst a broad network of contributors. Drawing on the recent work of Donna Haraway, in addition to post-structuralist thinkers like Roland Barthes, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, string figures (eg cat’s cradle) are rendered as adequately supple and striated to the diagramming of creative synergy. To this end the authors deploy fictocritical and experimental writing techniques, as well as images, probing the complexities of joint composition. Their text takes on the shape of a string game passed back and forth across a motley crew of agents and actors.

“Through the digits, through the fingers”: Variations on the string figure as imaginary digital medium

“…More recently, the string figure has also returned to humanities discourses. Initiated by Donna Haraway’s (2016) rich theoretical engagement in her book Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene , in addition to a preceding shorter text ( Haraway, 1994 ), there has been a burst of interest in the topic, which has now been probed from feminist, Indigenous, and discourse-analytical lenses ( Bell, 2010 ; De Line, 2018 ; Eastop, 2007 ; Egeland, 2004 ; Probert, 2004 ; Tolbert and Bazzul, 2020 ; Svec and Pearl, 2021 ).…”