Performative Writing as a Method of Inquiry With the Material World: The Art of the Imperative

Abstract

Understanding writing as a performative material practice, this paper highlights the “imperative” as a strategy to enhance writing practices in our classrooms and academic workshops. Drawing on posthuman theories and intra-active relationships, it describes how performative arts-based writing can provide a way to engage with the human and nonhuman, the embodied, sensory elements of our writerly worlds. Employing a critical collaborative autoethnographic methodology, the two authors provide a narrative account of a year as two research Fellows in a university exploring writing as a method of inquiry through designing and implementing a series of performative arts-based writing activities.

Reaching across from here to there, in precarious times: Remote-teaching embodied creative practice through scores, instructions, and poetic invitations

“…The field of performance writing has a vast realm of resources to enable unconventional, sensorially rich, conceptually specific, open-ended, agile, relational modes of engagement, creation, feedback, and co-presence (Forti, 1974;Forsythe, 2010;Goulish, 2000). These include working with the possibilities of voice and sound as a kind of touch, atmosphere and world-ing, (Forti, 1974;Fernald, 2007); developing modes of somatic interaction where precise physical states can be shared through language, metaphor, kinesthetic cueing, and imaginative states; and performative score-based approaches to developing tasks for making and response (Longley and Fitzpatrick 2020). Differentiated from music scores, such scores tend to be open-ended, and present modes of interactive making and feedback that work in feedback loops between digital and analogue, on-line and off-line, material and discursive modes.…”

Reaching across from here to there, in precarious times: Remote-teaching embodied creative practice through scores, instructions, and poetic invitations

“…The field of performance writing has a vast realm of resources to enable unconventional, sensorially rich, conceptually specific, open-ended, agile, relational modes of engagement, creation, feedback, and co-presence (Forti, 1974;Forsythe, 2010;Goulish, 2000). These include working with the possibilities of voice and sound as a kind of touch, atmosphere and world-ing, (Forti, 1974;Fernald, 2007); developing modes of somatic interaction where precise physical states can be shared through language, metaphor, kinesthetic cueing, and imaginative states; and performative score-based approaches to developing tasks for making and response (Longley and Fitzpatrick 2020). Differentiated from music scores, such scores tend to be open-ended, and present modes of interactive making and feedback that work in feedback loops between digital and analogue, on-line and off-line, material and discursive modes.…”

#Plugging Into Hope

“…Plugging into performative writing through engaging deliberately and creatively with the human and non-human world is something I am keenly interested in as pedagogy and methodology (see Fitzpatrick & Longley, 2020 ). The Massive_Micro project enabled me to focus on the performance of writing, as bodies in intra-action through embodied, felt, sensory methods in response to my experiences in my bubble.…”