Poetry as Productive of Persistent Multiplicities

Abstract

As I/we described in Chapter 2 there are many problems with the modern university. For example the proliferation of standardizations, an overbearing and extensive audit and accountability culture, and top down command and controlled decision-making. These conditions sit beside the requirement that academics be creative, innovative and free thinking. Frustrating and stressful contradictions are present at every turn. I/we have been a member of various committees and participation on these has been distressing and troubling and has generated significant negative and detrimental emotional effects. Difficult and taxing critical incidents frequently occur. The temptation in such circumstances and environments is to leave committee work and to carve out a safer space and retreat to this safe place and protect oneself. In this paper I/we argue, drawing on Nancy Fraser (1997), that while strategic retreat is a choice that is justifiable and understandable that this is not always possible, desirable or what people are able or want to do. There are occasions when people either have no choice but to stay and try to persist in problematic situations in the neoliberal university. In this paper we focus on a composite partially fictionalized triggering incident that I/we worked through where I/we felt that I/we had to engage. I/we outline the critical collective/auto/ethnographic and arts based techniques that assisted I/we to persist in this tense place. I/we also briefly consider why I/we think this approach was helpful.

Appendices

Interlude: Mobile Phone Ranting

This is a technique that is designed to support persistence by provoking multiplicity. We will demonstrate how to do this technique by yourself, but it is a technique that can be done with others, such as students. It requires that you have a mobile phone and that you are experiencing circular thoughts about a frustrating experience. For example, something happens at work such as being on a frustrating committee, and you get home and you are awake at 1am in the morning with circling thoughts about this frustrating experience.

How can we understand and interrupt these circling thoughts?

In Responsibility and Judgment Hanna Arendt argues that one reason to do the right thing is because the cost of doing the wrong thing (on account of the split subject) is that ‘I’ must live with the guilty ‘I’ (2003, p. 156). A helpful idea that Arendt identifies in this claim is the self is multiple, the subject is split, and this split nature enables the possibility of dialogue with self.

Arendt recognized that dialogue can take place with self and others, and that these others can be people, books and music (2003, p. 98).

Arendt argued that when dialogue takes place with another person, or with a book or music, there is a certain effect, in particular the possible split subject becomes one. When the subject is in dialogue with the other often there is a loss of the awareness of the split self in such moments (2003, pp. 90, 98).

In line with what Arendt argued we suggest that there is a linear quality present when we dialogue with an other. The image that comes to mind is a straightline, between speaker and listener, a straightline that words and thoughts travel along.

When we dialogue with ourselves however the sensation can be different. Dialogue with self, can have a circling, repetitive quality, repeating endlessly the same things over and over again.

So how might we transform these circling annoying thoughts into calmer linear thoughts?

We suggest that circling, frustrating and annoying thoughts can be turned into an easier and more comfortable linear moment, that is akin to engaging in dialogue with an other, by using a contemporary piece of technology—a mobile phone.

The mobile phone affords the opportunity of recording the story of an event and listening back to it—and by doing this, we suggest, circles may become lines.

Recording and listening back to a story that I have recorded transforms circling thoughts into lines because in listening to myself, I have moved from the dialogue of the split subject into an artificially produced dialogue with an other.

Ten minutes of listening to myself and I notice my headspace has changed, my affect has changed, I am no longer going over and over the frustrating experience in circles. Circles have become lines.

A dialogue is often constructed as an opportunity for different people to speak and be listened to, an opportunity for dialogic multiplicities and opportunities. Recording of self on a mobile phone similarly provides opportunities for dialogic multiplicities, for an individual, when stories are recorded onto mobile phones, speakers are listeners and listeners are speakers, and the self becomes an other who has listened and been spoken to.

Interlude Reference

• 1. Arendt, H. (2003). Responsibility and judgement. New York: Schocken Books.