Writing From the Ashes, the (Im)Permanency of Paper

• In Event: (Im)Possibilities of Alternative Representation of Reality, Memory, and Research in the Crisis of Representation

Abstract

Purpose
The purpose of this presentation within the proposed symposium is to explore ‘momenting’ within representation and what happens when the visual, written, and spoken word intertwine in experience? When a presentation interlaces the aural through a read aloud and the visual-textual through a slideshow of photographs and written text, the participants are invited to engage with questions regarding representation, and the (im)permanency of the written word.

Theoretical Framework and Method of Inquiry
I seek to explore the discursive and recursive processes of autobiographical writing as inquiry. Using autobiography (Pinar, 1998; Miller 2005), I explore the impermanence of memory and experience. Jacques Rancière (2009/2001) posits: “Everything is trace, vestige, or fossil. Every sensible form, beginning from the stone or the shell, tells a story. In their striations and ridges they all bear the traces of their history and the mark of their destination” (p. 34.) There are threads of stories within each narrative told, reflective of particular times, particular people, and particular settings. As Pinar (1988) emphasizes, stories are reflective of not only the authors, but also the contexts in which the story is told. Contextual memory is enacted with every story told. Smith and Watson (2001) note that the autobiographical writer “actively creates the meaning of the past in the act of remembering” (p. 16). Often the recollection of memories is in response to a spur (Derrida, 1978/1979) that may be anything, including a scent, a sound, a site, a circumstance, story, or even dream (Smith & Watson, 2001). Each act of remembering is distinguished, separate; the nuances of the memory may shift with each remembering.

Data Sources
Influenced by Richardson’s (1997) notion of poetic writing as data, my data sources consist of autobiographical writing, and photography.

Point of View
In presenting multiple forms of media interwoven, I ponder the active quality of the presentation, its movement and the ‘momenting’ with which the participants are asked to engage. Cixous (1993/1990) contemplates the active quality of writing in considering the thoughts of the poet Mandelstram: “I wonder what kind of poet doesn’t wear out their shoes, writes with their head…Poetry is about traveling on foot and all its substitutes, all forms of transportation”(p. 64). Through this presentation I seek to explore an active representation of ‘traveling on foot’.

Scholarly Significance
When a presentation offers participants multiple forms of representation simultaneously, as a narrative is read aloud and the slide show played, the participants are invited to immerse in acts of memory – exploring the narratives, perhaps grasping at the lost words, images, and sound. As this exploration is a live event, with an audience, and me seated reading, as visually other forms of representation, words and images, pass over my shoulder, I ponder the (im)permanency of paper: What is made (im)possible when an exploration in the crisis of representation is unfettered by the weight of permanence on paper?

Author

• Heather J. Pinedo-Burns, Teachers College, Columbia University