Generative Texts and Collaborative Creativity

• In Event: 30.065 - Productive Methodological Tensions: Intervening Through Creativity, Collaboration, and Critique

Abstract

Purpose: As frequent collaborators, we do inquiry in the middle--of lives, spaces, subjects, etc.–where things “pick up speed” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 23). However, the production of academic texts often necessitates that we simplify and disentangle. Given the need to create a science that is “more in touch with contingencies, relationalities, instabilities” and so on (Lather, 2016, p. 5), this paper draws upon our collaborative writing work to move toward experimentation with “what can be imagined out of what is already happening, embedded in an immanence of doing” (p. 5).

Perspective: We draw on Ulmer’s (2016) notion of Slow Ontology, which positions writing as a venue for creating alternatives to “hurried, mechanical, and assembly-line” practices of inquiry. Because writing is both “constituted in the entanglement of being, creating, and producing in qualitative research” and a “key metric” for measuring productivity in the academy (Ulmer, 2016, p. 1), creating “alternative rhythms of inquiry” (p. 2) through writing can open spaces for inquiry that is “not unproductive, but is differently productive” (p. 1). Our collaborative writing, then, becomes a site for experimentation with rhythms of inquiry aimed at being “responsible and responsive to the world’s patternings and murmurings” (Barad, 2012, p. 207) while also negotiating work in the academy.

Modes of inquiry and data: Our inquiry is a Baradian experiment in writing, which involves “opening to possibilities, straying, going out of bounds, off the beaten path...swerving and returning” (p. 208). Specifically, we create rhizomatic, messy, “generative text[s] [that do] not just transmit significations” but instead position “meaning [as] always in-the-making” (Massumi, 215, p. 61-62). Regardless of the project, then, we write with “the entire assemblage that is a life thinking and, and, and” (St. Pierre, 2011, p. 622)–including conversations with our children, dreams, walks in the park, quotes from scholars, and, and, and. For this paper, we draw upon multiple generative texts we have produced/are still producing (e.g., Google documents, comic strips, sculptures).

Results: Our ongoing production of generative texts creates a space of inquiry with no beginning or ending, where tensions and questions related to productivity proliferate. Rather than resolving those tensions once and for all, they drive our creation of enabling constraints (Massumi, 2009)-“specific conditions for creative interaction” without a “preconceived notion of exactly what the outcome will be or should be” (p. 15). Such constraints–anything from giving each other time to “walk away” when one of us can’t follow the other on a line of flight to limiting our reading to a certain philosopher–help us be “creatively ‘impolite’” while also “anticipat[ing] the roadblocks” of being with academic texts in conventional ways. As such, the only assured product is the process.

Significance: St. Pierre (2016) asserts that the ontological turn is not easy; indeed, “[o]ur ambitions seem to exceed our capacities” (p. 26). By describing the ongoing creation of enabling constraints, we hope that this paper will help scholars find new ways of thinking, doing, and being with writing and inquiry.

Authors

• Sarah Bridges-Rhoads, Georgia State University

• Jessica Van Cleave, Mars Hill University