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This contextualising essay is conceived in support of a wider research catalogue exposition called TEXTORIUM: Collaborative Writing-Reading with/in Public Space. Within this essay, we identify an anchor for our project in Georges Perec’s short book An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris (1975/2000) alongside his notion of the infraordinary, before drawing out the distinctiveness of our own enquiry through its emphasis on corporeality, collectivity, and on the performativity of language-based practices. First, our own enquiry places emphasis on a corporeal, sensorial and bodily approach to language, to writing and reading. Second, our practice of writing and reading is conceived as a collaborative undertaking rather than a solitary endeavour. Third, in addition to the writerly act of inventory, we attempt to write with and through different registers of language-based practices, including performative, poetic, and phenomenology-oriented approaches. Finally, we explore the interrelation of acts of writing and reading, the potentiality of emergent spaces (perhaps even of emergent temporalities, subjectivities and collectivities) produced through the interweaving of shared writing and reading practices. Through developing and testing various embodied, corporeal, sensorial and collaborative approaches, we advocate the transformative capacity of language-based artistic research for cultivating new “ecologies of attention” (Yves Citton, 2017). Through this share research process, we acknowledge the critical potentiality of our “linguistic bodies” (Di Paolo, Cuffari, and De Jaegher, 2018) as sites of both resistance and affirmation.

Introduction

TEXTORIUM: Collaborative Writing-Reading with/in Public Space is a language-based artistic research project by artist-writers Emma Cocker, Andrea Coyotzi Borja, Cordula Daus, Vidha Saumya and Lena Séraphin. Between 30 May - 4 June 2022, we met in Vaasa, Finland to engage in a process of score-based observational writing and reading with/in the market square. ^[1] Drawing on our different research interests around language-based (artistic research) practices, we developed and tested a series of experimental writing and reading ‘scores’ for exploring what emerges as the cyclical rhythms of writing and reading intermingle with the circulating movements, momentums and flows of public space. The focus of our research exposition (published in VIS: Nordic Journal for Artistic Research) is to share and show the ‘circulating practices’ emerging within the context of this specific iteration of our research collaboration. The exposition gathers the scores, documents and artefacts generated through a time-bound process of collaborative writing with/in the public space of Vaasa’s Market Square. Primarily, we conceive our project as an attempt to generate new practices and approaches to language-based artistic research, specifically for collaborative writing-reading with/in public space.^[2] Here, rather than reporting on or writing about practice, the central focus of our exposition is to show and share the ‘circulating practices’ themselves. Moreover, the various scores have the capacity to enter further circulatory flows — to be adopted and adapted for other contexts, to be re-activated and actively used by other researchers.

In our research catalogue exposition, we foreground the showing of our ‘circulating practices’ (through the scores and resulting artefacts), encouraged by Dieter Mersch for whom, “Art does not know because it speaks, instead it makes recognizable by showing”.^[3] For Mersch, by “ ‘showing’ and ‘manifestation’ we do not mean expression, but exhibition and exposition […]. We are dealing with ‘showings’ that in equal measure reveal something and show themselves while in showing, hold themselves back … their métier is not representation, but presence”.^[4] However, in parallel to our showing of the practices themselves, we attempt to situate or contextualise the specific time-bound iteration of our enquiry (which forms the basis of this exposition) within a wider frame of reference, alongside drawing out specific reflections and insights emerging from our collaborative project. Our shared research project in Vaasa forms part of an ongoing iterative enquiry for exploring collaborative writing and reading with/in public space in different contexts, beyond the specificity and singularity of any one market square. In this contextualising essay, we identify an anchor for our project in the writing of Georges Perec, before drawing out the distinctiveness of our own enquiry through its emphasis on corporeality, collectivity, and on the performativity and materiality of language. In so doing, we locate our own work in relation to a wider context of aesthetic- and language-based artistic research practices, drawing affinities with performative writing (Della Pollock), as well as aspects of phenomenological writing (Max van Manen). Though we acknowledge the wider debate on the relation of space and place within social anthropology and spatial theory, we elect not to focus our enquiry on or about public urban space as such, but rather on what is generated through the transformative potential of collaborative language-based practices activated with/in public spaces.^[5] Drawing on the four core scores presented within this exposition — What is Agreed Upon?; Acousmatic; What Resists? and Say it Again — we reflect on the transformative potential of corporeal, sensorial and embodied forms of languaging. We consider how shared writing practices might help cultivate new ecologies of joint attention (Yves Citton, 2017) within public space; in turn, fostering deeper awareness of oneself and others as “linguistic bodies” (Di Paolo, Cuffari, and De Jaegher, 2018). We reflect how collaborative writing-reading with/in public space has involved acknowledging the challenges and limitations of language for giving articulation to the complex circulatory flows of lived experience within existing public space, whilst concurrently creating the potential for newly emergent spaces of inhabitation, that is, within the space — or textorium — of writing-reading itself.

An Iterative and Evolving Enquiry

Collaborative Writing-Reading with/in Public Space is an ongoing research enquiry that has evolved over many years and in different geographical contexts involving some or all of the five artist-writers Emma Cocker, Andrea Coyotzi Borja, Cordula Daus, Vidha Saumya, and Lena Séraphin. This exposition, with its additional titular reference to Textorium, focuses on one specific time-bound iteration of this ongoing enquiry that took place in Vaasa’s Market Square in 2022. The broader enquiry, Collaborative Writing-Reading with/in Public Space, has its origins in shared research activities initiated by Cocker, Daus and Séraphin within the frame of the Research Pavilion #3 ‘Ecologies of Practice’ hosted by University of the Arts Helsinki (Venice, 2019). Specifically, it evolved through the meeting of two research projects: Writing in Public Space is an ongoing research practice initiated by Séraphin about the interchange connecting public space, inter/subjectivity and writing. Through a multilingual writerly practice, this project explores how we perceive while being in public space; how we respond to public space and notate what we observe when being simultaneously observed ourselves. Writing in Public Space reclaims sensorial and perceptual encounters with urban space and proposes collective writing as an affirmative countertext to the commodification of our corporeal selves.^[6] Reading on Reading is a series of experimental reading practices developed collaboratively by Cocker, Daus and Séraphin for exploring what alternative modes of sense-making are produced when reading is undertaken artistically, as a micro-political or ethico-aesthetic practice. Reading on Reading focuses on the poetic, affective and material dimensions of readerly experience, including exploring how aesthetic practices of reading might transform the solitary act of reading into a shared activity, alongside the different modes of sociality, solidarity and emergent ‘we’ that might unfold therein.^[7]

Collaborative Writing-Reading with/in Public Space fuses aspects from these two research projects evolving the enquiry further through the participation of other collaborators in various contexts [See Related Enquiries section of the exposition here —https://www.researchcatalogue.net/view/1842387/2145481]. However, in drawing attention to the genealogy of our current research project, our aim is not just to demonstrate how our shared practices and methods have evolved and been refined over time, but also to indicate that our enquiry is not ‘about’ any one public space, a single location, or any specific square as such. Our enquiry is not so much about how public space itself is produced. Rather, it is concerned with the embodied infraordinary of what remains unnoticed, moreover, how other ‘spaces’ (e.g. the space of attention, of collectivity, of the textorium) might emerge through collaborative writing with/in public space. Our enquiry has previously taken place in numerous and diverse public spaces: the square Campo de la Chiesa in Sacca Fisola, Venice, 2019 (concurrently to 34 different locations such as Málaga in Spain, Medellín in Colombia, Arco in Italy, Greenville in North Carolina, Marksjön in Sweden, Warsaw in Poland, Baden in Germany, Castlewarren in the County of Kilkenny, Ireland, Helsinki in Finland and Houston in Texas); simultaneously in various public spaces in Sheffield, Vienna, Edinburgh, Berlin, Vaasa and Helsinki (2021), and in Frauenplan Square in Weimar, Germany, as part of the Society for Artistic Research Conference (2022). Our interest is in public spaces inhabited by the ‘circulating practices’ of everyday activities: from people passing by on their way to somewhere else or meeting up with others for conversation. Though in principle our scores could be activated anywhere, we foreground the ‘square’ as a specific manifestation of open public space where people gather for various activities.^[8] Yet, our aim is not to generate new insights into these different public space(s), producing textual accounts about their histories, their architecture, their organisation, through collaborative writing/reading practices. Nor is our enquiry a comparative study of different squares, different public spaces, writing with and from diverse locations in search of commonalities and differences. The current iteration of our research takes place in the market square in Vaasa, yet it is not ‘about’ this square as such.^[9] Our intent is not to describe or document the market square on the basis of its concrete, material, architectural qualities and characteristics. So, what is the object of enquiry if not the square? What then is the focus of our shared research?

Attending to ‘the rest’

To help illuminate the specificity of our enquiry, we first turn to the writing of Georges Perec and his short book Tentative d'épuisement d'un lieu parisien or An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris (1975/2010).^[10] Perec’s writing (this specific text alongside his notion of the infraordinary more broadly) has undoubtedly influenced, as well been a point of departure for, our own enquiry.^[11] It is in his 1973 essay ‘Approaches to What?*’ that Perec introduces the term infraordinary [l’infra-ordinaire] for referring to what happens beneath the surface of the extra-ordinary, of what is habitually noticed or generally “what speaks to us”.^[12] He asks: “What’s really going on, what we’re experiencing, the rest, all the rest, where is it? How should we take account of, question, describe what happens every day and recurs every day; the banal, the quotidian, the obvious, the common, the ordinary, the infra-ordinary, the background noise, the habitual?”.^[13] Perec follows his call “to question the habitual”^[14], with the remark that:

We don’t question it, it doesn’t question us … we live it without thinking […]. This is no longer even conditioning, it’s anaesthesia. We sleep through our lives in a dreamless sleep. But where is our life? Where is our body? What is our space? How are we to speak of these ‘common things’ […] to give them meaning, a tongue, to let them, finally, speak of what is, of what we are.^[15]

Perec’s An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris (1975/2000) might be conceived as a response to his own challenge of finding a way of languaging the infraordinary. For three days in October 1974, Perec located himself in Place Saint-Sulpice in Paris, attempting to notate and make an inventory of the square. He was not interested in notating “many things in place Saint-Sulpice” such as the identifiable buildings, the cafés, theatres and churches; hotels and newsstands; fountains and statues; all those things that had perhaps already been “described, inventoried, photographed, talked about, or registered”.^[16] Rather, Perec’s self-declared intention was to, “describe the rest instead: that which is generally not taken note of, that which is not noticed, that which has no importance, what happens when nothing happens other than the weather, people, cars, and clouds”.^[17] Perec’s idea was to pay attention to the seemingly insignificant: he noted down the date, time of day, place and weather, and then went on to write a list of what was happening within his field of vision. At times, Perec’s inventory proceeds through specific nameable categories and classifications, or through the identification of “strictly visible things”^[18] (letters, slogans, the ground, trees, vehicles, people, colours). In other moments his attention turns to what he is eating, to his own fatigue, to his feeling of the cold, to pauses and lulls, to the movement of the wind in the trees, to various rhythms and circulating flows, to the passing of time, and “moments of emptiness”.^[19] Perec’s attempt at exhausting a place emerges as an increasingly futile, impossible pursuit. Rather than a static site or stable subject that might be inventoried and documented through (the illusion of) objective reportage, Place Saint-Sulpice unfolds as an ephemeral phenomenon, that is in turn shaped through the changing and changeable perceptual awareness that Perec brings to the task.

Perec’s enquiry is not that of an urban geographer, city planner or spatial theorist — rather it is a literary enquiry into the languaging of the infraordinary: it is a language-based research practice. Likewise, we conceive our own enquiry as a language-based artistic research practice, which draws on Perec’s model whilst developing it (or deviating from it) in specific ways. First, our own enquiry places emphasis on a corporeal, sensorial and bodily approach to language and writing. Second, our practice of writing is a collaborative undertaking rather than a solitary endeavour. Third, in addition to the writerly act of inventory, we have attempted to write with and through different registers of language-based practices, including performative, poetic, and phenomenology-oriented approaches. Finally, we explore the interrelation of acts of writing and reading, the potentiality of emergent spaces (perhaps even of emergent temporalities, subjectivities and collectivities) produced through the interweaving of shared writing and reading practices. We will now elaborate on the corporeal, linguistic and collective emphasis of our enquiry, before introducing some of the specific ‘scores’ activated therein. 

A Corporeal Approach — Embodied Practices

Our research enquiry foregrounds the corporeal dimension of writing-reading with/in public space. It places emphasis on the intertwining of embodied perspectives developed through observational writing underpinned by bodily awareness and perceptual engagement with and through the senses. We attempt to register the situated and affective reverberations of a space, as it is engaged in the present, through an approach to writing in touch with heightened bodily, sensorial and corporeal awareness. Perec’s observational writing appears informed by a specifically ocular focus — attending to what is seen and see-able. Our enquiry expands towards a multi-sensorial engagement with writing, embracing the potential of an approach shaped by heightened attention to listening, feeling, sensing. Towards a tactile mode of writing, a writing that is in touch with. This listening, haptic attitude enlarges the attentional and perceptual field of the writer. Writing that privileges the visual and visible can at times appear with an almost lens-like photographic focus or directionality, however an expanded multi-sensorial approach has the capacity to be simultaneously multi-directional.^[20] It might give way to a writerly attitude that is receptive to rather than intent on trying to grasp, to somehow penetrate or otherwise know. In one sense, our corporeal emphasis aims to transform writing from a cerebral and analytical act (where the writer is somehow disembodied, distanced or separated from their object of enquiry) towards an embodied, embedded experience where the writer is present to and part of the circulatory flows and forces of the milieu. In these terms, we conceive of writing as a ‘circulating practice’. We foreground a sense of both presence (the state of being in a certain place and not some other — being there together at the same time, in the same place writing), and of the present (the present tense of writing, the live moment of engaging with/in site, writing with the immediate, instant, temporal unfolding of ‘now’). Ours is a spatial and temporal enquiry. We attend to a durationally unfolding embodied experience through writing together with/in a specific public space.

Certainly, all writing is implicitly embodied, yet to emphasise its bodily basis engages explicitly with the potential of writing with the body; or else perhaps even, with our potential as “linguistic bodies”.^[21] To write with the body pays attention to how one’s limits of perception are enabled and inhibited by the body and its proprioceptive capacities. In one sense, our foregrounding of bodily perceptions and sensations locates our research approach within a broader ‘corporeal turn’ ^[22] or even ‘embodied turn’. In Embodied Research Methods (2019), Torkild Thanem and David Knights observe how, “It is the body, then, and the perceptual nature of the body, which involves us in things and puts us in contact with the world, with other people and with ourselves”.^[23] Based on the work of phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty, they formulate a description of embodiment:

‘embodiment’ denotes the lived, sensorial, perceptual, experiential and active nature of the body, a body which incorporates the mind, and which is embedded and incorporated in the world […]. It is a sensual and perceiving body, which constitutes our first and primary contact with ourselves and the outside world; it is that material fabric through which we experience and know the world and ourselves in the world; and it is the medium through which we make sense of, think about, talk about, and enact the world whilst being embedded in it and shaped by it […] this embodiment connects a body which is both subject and object.^[24]

Thanem and Knights draw on Merleau-Ponty’s writing on the “perceptual, social and intersensorial dimensions of the body”^[25] and his metaphorical concept of ‘flesh’ to support their fleshing out of an embodied methodology. They argue that for Merleau-Ponty, “ ‘Flesh’ is the united fabric which joins the flesh of the body and the flesh of the world and embeds our bodies in the world by connecting the subjective and objective dimensions of the body as perceiving and perceived”.^[26] In The Visible and the Invisible (1968), Merleau-Ponty observes that, “Between the alleged colors and visibles, we would find anew the tissue that lines them, sustains them, nourishes them, and which for its part is not a thing, but a possibility, a latency, and a flesh of things”.^[27] Might this between-ness, this possibility, this latency or flesh of things, also be another way of conceiving of the infraordinary? Merleau-Ponty continues, “Where are we to put the limit between the body and the world, since the world is flesh? […] The world seen is not ‘in’ my body, and my body is not ‘in’ the visible world ultimately: as flesh applied to a flesh, the world neither surrounds it nor is surrounded by it”.^[28] Circulation of flesh and body, as in the continuous movement of blood in the body, of fluids, and of breath. Writing as a circulatory practice. Towards writing incarnate — fleshy writing; a breathing, living writing; a writing of the body, writing the body.^[29]

Writing the Body

In parallel to invoking a phenomenological basis for embodied research practices, Thanem and Knights acknowledge the influence of écriture feminine or ‘feminine writing’, specifically the writing of French feminist philosophers such as Hélène Cixous and Luce Irigaray. Here, writing the body not only reflects an attempt towards an embodied approach, but rather, a subversive orientation to writing deviating from a phallocentric language marked by its linearity and assumed authority.^[30] It is an approach to writing that might seem at times eccentric, incomprehensible or inconsistent; a fragmentary writing replete with breaks, gaps, and pauses; a writing that privileges the non-linear and cyclical possibilities of writing. Our interest in the observational approach of Perec resonates with both phenomenological and Cixousian (or even Cixaldian^[31]) influences, which we draw out further as this essay evolves. In one sense, the attempt to find linguistic means for communicating the lived reality of embodiment echoes with aspects of Perec’s own project of attending to ‘the rest’; to “what is really happening”; to the infraordinary of what is habitually taken-for-granted, to that which often remains unnoticed or unseen. Through what other kinds of practices might we engage with ‘the rest’? In their quest for embodied research methods, Thanem and Knights ask: “what techniques and practices may we draw on to investigate the bodily expressions, practices and felt experiences that make up the lived reality of embodiment”, advocating that “lived embodiment should be investigated by observing and describing bodily actions, movements, gestures and appearances”.^[32] We wonder: how might our own ‘circulating practices’ contribute new techniques or approaches for investigating the lived reality of embodiment, specifically the felt sense of being a body writing with other bodies with/in public space? We approach the public space of the market square as a milieu — the setting or conditions of one’s surroundings, etymologically meaning a ‘middle’ or ‘medial place’ —within which to activate a specific embodied practice that in turn attends to its own embodiment: to the delicate imbrication or involvement of self, others and the environment; to the encounter between “the flesh of the body and the flesh of the world”.^[33] Yet, how is our shared practice related to — also perhaps differentiable from — “sensory ethnography”^[34] and other embodied research methods and approaches? Specifically, we conceive our approach as language-based artistic research. Moreover, we emphasise the aesthetic, situated, collective, and performative dimensions of our ‘circulating practices’.

An Aesthetic Enquiry

We conceive of writing, reading and listening as aesthetic research practices, caring for their inter-subjective potential. Here, we adopt the term aesthetic in a way that draws on its etymological origins in the Greek aisthesis, meaning understanding based on the engagement of the senses, related to sensation or perception.^[35] Artistic researcher Alex Arteaga also invokes this etymological basis for an understanding of aesthetics, arguing that, “This form of understanding can provide a foundation for a possible ‘sensuous knowledge’ and/or a ‘sensuous thought’ or ‘sensuous thinking’ ”.^[36] For Arteaga, aesthetic practices “actualize and mobilize the epistemic power of the sensuous”, they are “in themselves processes of thinking”, that is, aesthetic thinking.^[37] He further proposes: “Aesthetic thinking … enables alternative understandings through an actualization and mobilization of the intrinsic epistemic potentialities of the most fundamental forms of relationship between our bodies and their surroundings. Aesthetic thinking is sensuous thinking and develops according to the logic of the sensuous”.^[38] In Sensorium: Aesthetics, Art, Life (2007) Barbara Bolt et al use the term ‘sensorial aesthetics’ for describing a mode of sensible engagement with the world: “Sensorial aesthetics speaks to the question of life through the subversion of the privileged positioning of the intelligible over the sensible”, by attempting to “take account of, and find value in, becoming, duration, transiency, and the evanescent flux of material and affective sensations”.^[39] For Bolt et al, “a sensorial aesthetics calls us back to the neglected but intractable material dimension of life”, to “what it means to be alive, to be human, and to engage ethically and politically in the world”.^[40] Our own practice of collaborative writing-reading with/in public spaces is conceived as a sensible act, an attempt to cultivate sensitivity to the “neglected and intractable material dimension of life”.^[41] We situate ourselves in a specific space to write, in turn, it is through and from this very situatedness that writing happens.

A Situated Practice — from ‘to’ to ‘with’

In Site-Writing (2010), architectural theorist Jane Rendell examines the act and site of writing itself as a ‘situated practice’.^[42] She offers a perspective on forms of situated writing that draws on “ ‘situated knowledge’ and ‘standpoint theory’ for examining the relationship between the construction of subjects and the politics of location”.^[43] Her exploration of situatedness involves rethinking the use of prepositions for describing the act of writing (indeed of criticism), requiring a shift from “speaking ‘about’ to speaking ‘to’ ”, followed in turn, by a further transition of preposition from “to” into “with”.^[44] For Rendell this “shift in preposition allows a different dynamic of power to be articulated”.^[45] Echoing Rendell’s prepositional reorientation, we write with/in public space not on/about it. With/in. With-in. With and in.^[46] Drawing on Donna Haraway’s writing on the “situatedness of knowledge”, María Puig de la Bellacasa develops a speculative ethics of thinking-with: “A relational way of thinking [which] creates new patterns out of previous multiplicities, intervening by adding layers of meaning rather than merely deconstructing or conforming to ready-made categories”.^[47] Looking towards the possibilities of a “writing that performs the collective”^[48], she states:

Thinking-with makes the work of thought stronger: it both supports singularity by the situated contingencies it draws upon and fosters contagious potential with its reaching out, its acknowledgment of always more-than-one interdependencies. Writing-with is a practical technology that reveals itself as both descriptive (it inscribes) and speculative (it connects). It builds relation and community, that is: possibility.^[49]

Our own acts of writing-reading acknowledge the situatedness and singularity of our individual perspectives, whilst exploring the common of writing together, of writing-with. Our shared practice transforms the solitary act of writing into a situated practice, introducing collaborative live-writing with/in public space as a specific manifestation of language-based artistic research. We wonder: what does the collective act of writing together open or enable? Writing in the proximity of others (in the same space, at the same time, in response to the same ‘score’) has a multi-directional effect, prompting the individual writer to attend more closely to the matter of “how do I write?”, simultaneously inviting them to consider, “how do you write?”, moreover, “how do we write?”. Accordingly, it draws to the surface latent decisions and habits present within one’s own writing tendencies, alongside inviting consideration of “how else?”.

Circulation — in alchemy, a ‘process of changing.’ To write within a collaborative context one enters into circulation with other writers — it is to open one’s own practice to the influence of other practices. Influence — from in (into, in) and fluere (to flow). To flow into. To circulate — to pass about freely, pass from place to place or person to person. Circulating practices involve the willingness to share one’s practices and for them to be changed, moreover, to be changed oneself by the practices and practising of another. Circulating practices involve transformation.

Towards an Emergent We

Yet how might writing-with — writing as a collective undertaking — have the capacity to also transform the solo writer towards the potential of an emergent we? How might artistic research practices present opportunities for emergent subjectivities, collectivities and cultural identities beyond the reach and limitations of habitually designated social configurations or groupings; in turn, questioning what it means to take part in culture beyond the roles that we are typically assigned? In one sense, our own collaborative writing might operate as a countertext to the commodification of our corporeal selves, the ways in which our bodies are organised in public spaces. The term countertext refers to a form of text that opposes or resists another, or that offers a different perspective. We conceive both our act of writing and the resulting texts themselves as operating in a countertextual key to the dominant text of the market square.^[50] Our quiet act of writing resists many of the usual activities undertaken in and around the square: we do not consume; do not buy; do not talk; do not meet up for coffee, nor wait for a bus —we remain attentive only to the acts of observing and writing. Within this essay, we further elaborate some of the countertextual qualities of our collaborative writing-reading with/in public space: attentive writing as a countertext to the slogans and corporate branding that relentlessly ‘call for attention’ or ‘call for distraction’; the marked stillness of our writing offset against the incessant rhythms of consumerism; our focus on a multisensorial dimension of lived experience that lies beyond or beneath the ocular-centric scrutiny of urban surveillance technologies; indeed, our insistence on an approach to writing that resists to the notion of overview. Our collaborative writing with/in public space does not describe, rather to follow de la Bellacasa it is “speculative (it connects). It builds relation and community, that is: possibility”.^[51] In this sense, the act of collaborative writing might support the emergence of a nascent counterpublic.^[52]

Contemporary art theory focusing on those models of collectivity specifically produced in and through art practice often challenges the idea of community as a fixed and definitive marker of social identification and belonging, re-conceiving it as a time-bound, constructed and highly contingent social assemblage. In One Place After Another: Site-Specific Art and Locational Identity (2004), Miwon Kwon attempts to articulate a shift from site to community within new genre public art. Kwon coins the term “temporary invented community” to describe the social configurations that are “newly constituted and rendered operational through the coordination of the art-work itself”.^[53] In New Communities (2009), Nina Möntmann discusses how various artists are rethinking the (mal)function of a conventional notion of community whilst creating conditions (through the constitutive activity of collaborative practice) for the possibility of newly emergent formulations of collectivity and togetherness. She points to how, “The distinctive quality of new communities is a processual openness based on temporarily shared interests, or simply on a fortuitous moment of being there at the same time”.^[54] For Möntmann, the emergence of these new communities in turn demand “a transformation of the self”.^[55] She states, “Thinking about notions of community assumes a relational conception of self. Singularities can only gain their subjectivity by confronting the other or a multiplicity of others; before one can construct any immanent selfhood, one has already been called into question by the existence of others”.^[56] Within our own examples of collaborative writing, there are moments when the act of naming inaugurates specific communities engaged in a shared action or activity including standing bodies, “watchers, stalkers, observers, pedestrians, sitters, drinkers, writers, eaters, chatters, laughers, movers, reflectors, visitors, passers, slowers, hustlers, planners, cautioners, groupers, shoppers, returners”.^[57] At other times, shared action further reveals the gulf of what cannot be shared nor sharable: “I cannot know how you are feeling now, what is holding your attention? […] We are sharing this action together, but I can never of know the experience for you. Some things are never able to be fully shared”.^[58]

In WE: Collectivities, Mutualities, Participations (2002), Irit Rogoff points to how an ‘emergent collectivity’ or “performative collectivity, one that is produced in the very act of being together in the same space and compelled by similar edicts, might just alert us to a form of mutuality which cannot be recognized in the normative modes of shared beliefs, interests or kinship”.^[59] Rogoff draws on the writing of philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy in order to explore the “circulation of meaning which passes between us and constitutes a ‘we’ ”, where “meaning is never produced in isolation or through isolating processes, rather through intricate webs of connectiveness”.^[60] For Nancy, “ ‘Being itself’, the phenomenon of ‘being’ is meaning that is in turn its own circulation — and we are this circulation”.^[61] The process of thinking-with (indeed, listening-with) this constellation of references helps in opening up our understanding of what might emerge through the circulating relations and feedback loops between practices of writing and reading, between site and subjectivity. We wonder: how is the intersubjective potential of the we emerging in and through our shared commitment to writing and reading together with/in public space, through the interplay and circulation of our different voices — indeed our different languages — and our wider milieu? Moreover, how might our practising together and its insights be shared? Rather than processes of data gathering needing to be subjected to thematic analysis and reflection, we advocate for the performativity of our practices.^[62] For Rogoff, “in a reflective shift from the analytical to the performative function of observation and of participation we can agree that meaning is not excavated for but that it ‘Takes Place’ in the present”.^[63] In the exposition itself, we share our texts as the evidential record of a process of live writing, a writing that ‘Takes Place’ in the present — our texts remain as they were written (albeit transcribed as digital versions of the original handwritten notes) without editing or revision. Likewise, rather than seeking to ‘excavate for’ meaning, our act of reading together in situ (and in turn listening to the recorded readings within the exposition) foregrounds the vocal, vocative and performative experience of language.

Performative Writing is Subjective (not Subject-Centred)

In ‘Performing Writing’ (1998) Della Pollock outlines the possibilities of performative writing through six excursions into its evocative, metonymic, subjective, nervous, citational, and consequential characteristics.^[64] Attending to the notion of performative writing as subjective, Pollock argues that this is not a ‘subject-centred’^[65] approach to writing but rather refers to:

a more specific sense of the performative self or subjectivity as the performed relation between or among subjects, the dynamic engagement of a contingent and contiguous (rather than continuous) relation between the writer and his/her subject(s) … This process is performative precisely to the extent to which it defines the subject-self in/as the effect of a contingent, corporeal, shifting, situated relation.^[66]

She explores how the reworking of the self that occurs through performative acts of enunciation requires a dual-fold movement: firstly, “shifting from positioning the self to … shaping relations among selves in an ongoing process of (self-) production, and second, shifting from documenting ‘me’ to reconstituting an operative, possible ‘we’ ”.^[67] For Pollock, “The self that emerges from these shifting perspectives is, then, a possibility rather than a fact, a figure of relation emerging from between lines of difference, moving inexorably ‘from her experience to mine, and mine to hers,’ reconstituting each in turn”.^[68] We recognise this in the performativity of our own writing experience — this shift from me to we, in the shift from the self-containment of our individual writing practices towards the collective experience of writing together. This ‘we’ is not a homogenous group and certainly the five writers in this project come from different backgrounds, different social and cultural contexts. Collective writing as a multilingual group offers the potential to become aware of one’s cultural disposition and tendencies; how one’s senses and sensitivities have been culturally conditioned. However, we are not interested in writing from our individual identities as given, as if there was already a perspective to be found in advance of the act of writing. The subjectivity of writing is emergent, performative — it takes place. We do not write from who we are, but rather from how we are in the very act of writing. Writing-reading-listening between the lines of different languages — between English, German, Hindi and Swedish — what new perspectives might emerge in and through the performative act of collaborative writing? We ask: how can the first-person perspective of writing become plural, intersubjective? How can collaborative writing-reading together with/in public space expand the individual I of the writer-reader, towards being-with? Indeed, how might our shared practice attend to such shifts and slippages, to the very performativity of performative writing, even to what unexpected and unimagined experiences and encounters might emerge therein? How might we activate a language for attending to situated embodiment of daily life through our own writerly processes with/in public space?

Performative Research

Whilst our enquiry retains its reference to Perec’s project of observational writing for attending to ‘the rest’, we are curious how to expand this through bringing together diverse writerly approaches, that foreground the embodied, corporeal, collective and performative.By invoking these different frames of reference our intent is not to suggest their equivalence, rendering them somehow the same. Rather, we attempt to map a constellation of references for thinking-with, or rather, for helping us to weave together the contextual milieu for our own language-based artistic research enquiry. Context: con-text. From com ‘with, together; and texere ‘to weave, to make’. We understand this contextual milieu not as a pre-existing given into which our own enquiry intervenes, but rather as it emerges and is (inter)woven with and through the process of enquiry itself. For Gilles Deleuze:

… a milieu is made up of qualities, substances, powers, and events: the street for example, with its materials (paving stones), its noises (the cries of merchants) … its dramas […]. The trajectory merges not only with the subjectivity those who travel through a milieu, but also with the subjectivity of the milieu itself, insofar as it is reflected in those who travel through it.^[69]

Likewise, we understand the milieu of the square itself not as a stable entity of which a clear reading might be obtained or discerned, but rather as an emergent phenomenon that appears or becomes constituted in and through various trajectories.

Our project is not only engaged with performative (writing-reading) practices, but with the act of writing-reading as research. In his ‘Manifesto of Performative Research’ (2006) artist-academic Brad Haseman focuses on the specific characteristics of a ‘performative’ approach to research. He states that firstly such researchers begin from “an enthusiasm of practice”, they “construct experiential starting points from which practice follows. They tend to ‘dive in’, to commence practising to see what emerges. They acknowledge that what emerges is individualistic and idiosyncratic. […] (T)hey eschew the constraints of narrow problem-setting and rigid methodological requirements at the outset of a project”.^[70] The second characteristic of performative research that Haseman identifies is the “insistence that research outputs and claims to knowing must be made through the symbolic language and forms of their practice”, rather than, “trying to translate the findings and understandings of practice into the numbers (quantitative) and words (qualitative) preferred by traditional research paradigms”.^[71] Drawing on Haseman’s model, curator-researcher Vytautus Michelkevičius states that the results “are not expressed through discursive text, but rather through richer, or material forms of practice — still and moving image, live action (performance) etc”.^[72] Likewise, we argue for the centrality of material forms of practice within this exposition, for findings embedded, embodied and enacted in the practices themselves.^[73] We approach the research catalogue as a unique platform for a multi-modal practice sharing, for showing expanded textual forms as artistic research practice, alongside sound and image. Still, before turning to the practices themselves, we wish to further attend to the notion of performativity.

Expanded Notions of Performativity

Haseman’s concept of performative research is influenced by J. L. Austin, who coined the term ‘performative’ in his lecture series, How to Do Things with Words (1955).^[74] In contrast to a mere description that is either true or false, Austin argued that a performative utterance does what it says. Additionally, beyond simply enacting what it says, performative language actively creates: it brings something into existence. In The Transformative Power of Performance: A New Aesthetics (2008) Erika Fischer-Lichte reflects how the performative utterance has transformative effects: “these utterances create an entirely new social reality … Performative utterances are self-referential and constitutive in so far as they bring forth the social reality they are referring to”.^[75] Fischer-Lichte expands on the notion of the performative with reference to Judith Butler’s writing on gender and identity constitution and the phenomenal conditions of embodiment stating: “Performative acts (as bodily acts) are ‘non-referential’ because they do not refer to pre-existing conditions. […] (N)o fixed, stable identity exists that they could express. Expressivity thus stands in an oppositional relation to performativity. Bodily, performative acts do not express a pre-existing identity but engender identity through these very acts”. ^[76] Fischer-Lichte unfolds a notion of performativity approached through ideas of embodiment, eventhood and cocreation. She elaborates the idea of an “aesthetics of the performative” and the transformative potential therein to address the performativity of performance as one of autopoiesis: the self-producing operations of a living system.^[77] For Fischer-Lichte, the “continually operating feedback loop provided in any performance event by the ongoing interactions of performers and audiences” offers an exemplary system of autopoiesis.^[78] The “self-organizing system” that Fischer-Lichte identifies within performance-as-event is marked by a sense of contingency.^[79]

Referring to the example of performance within a theatre context, Fischer-Lichte emphasises the importance of bodily copresence (for example, between performer and audience as well as between spectators themselves), as a way of enabling a feedback loop of coproduction. For Fischer-Lichte, this feedback loop is the marker of autopoietic liveness within performance. Though we conceive of our own acts of collaborative writing-reading with/in public space as performative rather than as performances as such,^[80] Fischer-Lichte’s articulation of feedback loops within the performativity of performance (and of shared bodies, shared spaces) still helps us to understand the coproductive or coemergent dimension of our own research collaboration.^[81] Whilst some of our ‘scores’ activated specific movement choreographies (for example, moving from the periphery to the centre of the square during the process of writing), it was often the very stillness of our writing that created unexpected disturbance of the regular circulatory rhythms and patterns of the square. Here perhaps, the collective stillness of writing with/in a public space might produce an affect that both reveals and disrupts habitual patterns of behaviour, simultaneously creating a space into which to imagine — or even produce — the experience of something new or different.^[82]

We recognise a “continually operating feedback loop” between each other; with and between the ongoing interactions of the environment with/in which we write, alongside the continual feedback of the emerging writing itself. Considering these various feedback loops helps us to better understand the collaborating agencies within our research process. Or rather, as cognitive archaeologist Lambros Malafouris asserts, “There are no fixed agential roles … Agency is the relational and emergent product of material engagement. It is not something given but something realised”.^[83] For Malafouris, “Agency is in constant flux … Agency is a temporal and interactively emergent property of activity not an innate and fixed attribute of the human condition … it is the flow of activity itself”.^[84] When collaboratively writing-reading with/in public space we simultaneously witness (or even with-ness) and are witnessed; we are both observers and observed.^[85] We recognise this too in Perec’s writing — how through his repeated act of writing (and being witnessed writing) he becomes gradually one of the recurrent figures in the square. His writing work, in turn, successively altered what he was observing: the square becomes a text, a written rendition of a public space. Rather than attempting to adopt the position of a neutral observer independent of what is observed, we recognise our own involvement in the emerging phenomenon that we seek to notate. Moreover, our emphasis on the embodied and perceptual dimension of writing — and its phenomenal basis — places this involvement somehow at the centre of the enquiry.

We are curious how our actions of observation and with-nessing not only impact on our writing, but also bring a sense of heightened awareness to how the bodily senses might guide us in public space more broadly.^[86] The experience of entanglement with our milieu, in turn, expands the sense of collaborating agents — or the agency of “flow of activity itself” — within our artistic research process. Karen Barad proposes “a specifically posthuman notion of performativity — one that incorporates important material and discursive, social and scientific, human and nonhuman, and natural and cultural factors. A posthumanist account calls into question the givenness of the differential categories of ‘human’ and ‘nonhuman,’ examining the practices through which these differential boundaries are stabilized and destabilized”.^[87] Barad argues for relational coconstitutive intra-actions between humans and nonhumans, stating that “on an agential realist account, agency is cut loose from its traditional humanist orbit. Agency is not aligned with human intentionality or subjectivity… Agency is the enactment of iterative changes to particular practices through the dynamics of intra-activity”.^[88] Attending to these different perspectives on performativity has helped us to better understand the collaborative dimension of our enquiry, its feedback loops of circulation, the intermingling of different forces and agencies. We return to the co-emergent, co-constitutive potential of collaborative writing-reading with/in public space later in this essay, attending to the collaborative agencies, perception of temporalities and nascent spatialities emerging therein. First though, we outline our ‘circulating practices’, and the specificity of the ‘scores’ activated for collaborative writing-reading with/in public space.

Circulating Practices

See https://www.researchcatalogue.net/view/1842387/1842388

Textorium: Collaborative Writing-Reading with/in Public Space attends to Vaasa’s Market Square as an ever-changing phenomenon, engaging in acts of writing and rewriting, alongside reading and re-reading, through the lens of different prompts and ‘scores’.^[89] There was always a temporal contour, a time score, or a time period when we were going to write together. Our scores/prompts were time-bound, measured in minutes — 30 minutes, 20 minutes: the writing that they generated attests to a moment in time in the temporal unfolding of experience within the market square. We respond to the journal call for ‘Circulating Practices’ with and through our specific ‘circulating practices’, interested in how we might show the practices themselves through scores and their resulting artefacts.^[90] The showing of our own circulating practices is the central component of this research exposition, where we outline the various ‘scores’ that we approached as prompts for writing, reading (as well as for continuing a dialogue together) alongside resulting writings and readings. Our unfolding enquiry comprised a process of interwoven writing and reading practices as follows.

PHASE 1: [June 2022]

A series of writing-reading practices were activated in Vaasa, in June 2022.

[See SCORE/ARTEFACT pages in the exposition]

- Writing in situ: score-based writing together in the market square itself over a period of days.

- Reading in situ: after writing and whilst still in the market square, gathering back together to read aloud the writing just generated — reading to each other, perhaps even reading our texts back to the square itself.

- Re-reading off-site (in a ‘black box’ rehearsal studio): reading again the texts together aloud, reading in a shared space, a shared time.

- Re-reading off-site (in a recording studio): each reading (and recording) our texts individually.

PART 2: [April – June 2023]

[See RE-TURNING pages in the exposition]

A series of circulating reading-listening-speaking-writing practices were activated one year after our time in Vaasa, where the act of re-turning itself comprises three specific practices:

- Re-reading: re-turning one year after our shared time together in Vaasa, coming (back) together (this time on zoom) to re-read our texts aloud, reading in a shared time, but in different spaces.

- Speaking/Listening Circle: we wondered how we might re-turn to our experience of writing-reading together, as a collaborative practice in-and-of itself. What new insights might be gleaned therein? Coming back together online, we have developed a practice of re-turning involving the dual act of re-reading our original texts, alongside engaging in conversation (Speaking / Listening Circle), where we take turns to reflect on our shared experience of collaborative writing-reading with/in public space.^[91] The Circle is modelled on Nancy Kline’s ‘thinking environment’, involving a practice of turn-taking where each person has uninterrupted time to speak while the others actively listen.^[92] In our model, we cover/tape over our cameras throughout the conversation disrupting the ocular-centric habits of online face-to-face meeting, and further amplifying the act of listening. Our conversation is subsequently transcribed.

- Distillation: we then each took time to highlight those parts of the conversational transcript that we each find resonant, adding further annotations for extending the dialogue, indeed, as a further model of collaborative writing.

Rather than detail the practices in this essay, we invite the reader to engage with them, in as much as they can be communicated via the scores and resulting artefacts within the exposition itself. Within the RE-TURNING pages of the research exposition, we share our process of reflecting on our experiential engagement with specific scores (through fragments of conversational transcripts and accompanying annotations), making demonstrable a further ‘circulating practice’ of collaborative writing. In what follows within this essay, we continue to think-with the specific scores, alongside elaborating further on some of the wider implications of our overall project.

Thinking-with the Scores

Our project involves cultivating the ‘circulating practices’ of collaborative writing-reading with/in public space through the development and testing of specific scores or prompts. We activate these scores as ways for attending to the experiential aspects of situated embodiment, and in turn, to what emerges unexpectedly through this emphasis on corporeal, collective, performative, and phenomenal, modes of experiential engagement. Our enquiry has involved the activation of many different scores. Within this exposition (and essay) we focus on four of them: What is Agreed Upon?; Acousmatic; What Resists? and Say it Again.

What is Agreed Upon?

Score/Artefacts: see https://www.researchcatalogue.net/view/1842387/2018802

Here you can engage with the textual artefacts and readings generated in response to the score/prompt What is Agreed Upon?

- Re-turning I: see https://www.researchcatalogue.net/view/1842387/2018156

Here we present a further reading of the texts, alongside fragments of conversational transcripts and annotations where we re-turn to and re-engage with the experience of writing-with this specific score/prompt.

The score What is Agreed Upon? has helped us consider how to define and situate our research collaboration; how to conceive of the shared act of writing together in public space, and the implications of the emergent collectivity therein. Nina Möntmann asks:

What defines a community — certain qualities, common interests, a shared location? What do we expect from being part of a community? Which communities are freely chosen, which are imposed? Who’s in and who’s out? […] What are the differences between a community and a collective? What does being part of a collective add to or subtract from the subjectivity of the individual? ^[93]

Through our act of collaborative writing with/in public space, ‘we’ appears as an emergent phenomenon, created in and through an act of agreement, a commitment made to practise together. We are interested in the emergent ‘we’ that comes to life in-and-through the circulatory dynamic of shared practices. We have not agreed in advance, few prior decisions were made — rather agreement becomes explored in and through the practice itself. Still, what is at stake in the act of making a commitment without fully knowing to what one commits? In ‘Giving an Account of Oneself’ (2001), gender theorist and philosopher Judith Butler discusses whether a subject that is not fully aware of itself can be accountable.^[94] Butler states,

To know the limits of acknowledgment is a self-limiting act and, as a result, to experience the limits of knowing itself. This can, by the way, constitute a disposition of humility, and of generosity, since I will need to be forgiven for what I cannot fully know, what I could not have fully known, and I will be under a similar obligation to offer forgiveness to others who are also constituted in partial opacity to themselves.^[95]

The score What is Agreed Upon? amplifies our realisation of how little we had formally agreed upon, specifically through explicit verbalised agreement prior to working together. By asking What is Agreed Upon? this score foregrounds the role of trust and indeed vulnerability within artistic research collaboration. We are invited to consider what it means to make a commitment (to someone else, to a research process, to writing, indeed, to living) in advance of fully knowing the implications of that commitment. It highlights the generosity of committing oneself without ulterior motive; in turn, rescuing the notion of agreement from the contractual bond of exchange. The score explores a mode of agreement (indeed, of an emergent ‘we’) that allows for inconsistences and incompatibilities, that is, for difference.

Acousmatic

Score/Artefacts: see https://www.researchcatalogue.net/view/1842387/2018890

Here you can engage with the textual artefacts and readings generated in response to the score/prompt Acousmatic.

- Re-turning II: see https://www.researchcatalogue.net/view/1842387/2021184

Here we present a further reading of the texts, alongside fragments of conversational transcripts and annotations where we re-turn to and re-engage with the experience of writing-with this specific score/prompt.

Our overall enquiry has foregrounded a corporeal, bodily and multisensorial approach to writing, however the score Acousmatic attempts to shift from an ocular register — from a mode of writing informed by seeing and what is seen — towards writing as an act of listening.^[96] Musicologist and acoustician Pierre Schaeffer defines the adjective acousmatic as “referring to a sound that one hears without seeing the causes behind it”.^[97] As a phenomenology-inspired composer, Schaeffer was fascinated by the acousmatic experience as it enables a move away from the physical object that seemingly causes an auditory perception. According to Schaeffer, this allows us to understand what is at stake when we hear at all, where “Often surprised, often uncertain, we discover that much of what we thought we were hearing, was in reality only seen, and explained, by the context”.^[98] Beyond the visual, how can we write with/in public space as a form of training for the ears, as a practice for enhanced listening? In conceiving scores such as Acousmatic as potential ‘training exercises’ for the ears, we identify a connection with composer Pauline Oliveros’ extensive process training of Deep Listening practices. Oliveros differentiates between two ‘ways of listening’ informed by two forms of attention: “Focal attention, like a lens, produces clear detail limited to the object of attention. Global attention is diffuse and continually expanding to take in the whole of the space/time continuum of sound”.^[99] She observes that “Inclusive listening is impartial, open and receiving and employs global attention”, while “Attention narrows for exclusive listening. Exclusive listening gathers details and employs focal attention. Focal attention is necessarily limited and specific”.^[100] For Oliveros, the practice of Deep Listening “encourages the balancing of these two forms of attention so that one can flexibly employ both forms and recognize the difference between these two forms of listening”.^[101] We wonder — how might the practice of collaborative writing with/in public space contribute to this training of listening, and of the attention?

Towards becoming listener-writers: within our own enquiry the attempt to write in-touch with the experience of listening — specifically by attending to the acousmatic dimension of sound — raises a further challenge. The score Acousmatic confronts us with the very medium that we are — as “linguistic bodies” we are endlessly confronted with the limits of language. Engaging with this score, we recognise the tendency of language for naming, indeed, for noun-ing. We notice how it can be easier to find words for naming things (the sources of sound) than for languaging acousmatic sound itself. The score highlights how certain habits of perception are conditioned by language, by a certain kind of languaging. It also invites an exploration of language in other ways that changes how we experience our surroundings when we endeavour to let go of nouns, of names. Our textual responses to the score Acousmatic make demonstrable our wrestling with this very challenge — our attempts to resist naming (nouning) through writing with attention on the verbal (verbing); to emulate the acousmatic through the sounding of letters rather than through their semantic sense; or else, in those moments when the linguistic dimension of language gives way to the temptation of slipping into another medium, other ways for marking and notating sound.

Writing-with the score, we wrestle with what cannot be grasped through language. We attempt to shift from a register of writing (and of understanding) underscored by grasping, to embrace the possibilities of a more receptive approach. In The Other Side of Language: A Philosophy of Listening (1990), philosopher Gemma Corradi Fiumara explores how the notion and capacity of listening appears largely absent within the tradition of Western thought: “we are thus faced with a system of knowledge that tends to ignore listening processes”.^[102] She observes how the logocentric bias of this tradition leads to “A thinking primarily anchored to saying-without-listening”^[103] moreover, where the “mechanism of ‘saying without listening’ has multiplied and spread, to finally constitute itself as a generalized form of domination and control”.^[104] We wonder — how can our own approach to language unsettle those forms of domination and control that operate through this act of  ‘saying without listening’?. How can we foreground the act of listening within writing? The score Acousmatic is thus more than just an invitation to write what one hears (complex as this challenge might be). To echo Corradi Fiumara, it is also part of a wider “search for a listening perspective”.^[105] This score shifts attention from the eye to the ear; from grasping to receiving; from ‘saying-without-listening’ towards writing as listening. Indeed, how might it shift attention towards listening as a form of radical resistance, for affirming that which remains invisible within the logos tradition of Western thought. This sense of what resists, what escapes, what remains beyond the grasp of saying is taken up again as the basis for the next score.

What Resists?

Score/Artefacts: see https://www.researchcatalogue.net/view/1842387/2020817

Here you can engage with the textual artefacts and readings generated in response to the score/prompt What Resists?

- Re-turning III: see https://www.researchcatalogue.net/view/1842387/2021196

Here we present a further reading of the texts, alongside fragments of conversational transcripts and annotations where we re-turn to and re-engage with the experience of writing-with this specific score/prompt.

The score What Resists? engages with the challenge inherent within Perec’s own attempt to attend to ‘the rest’; or else, (following Bolt et al) to attend “to the neglected but intractable material dimension of life […], what it means to be alive, to be human”.^[106] We approach Perec’s example as the conceptual anchor for our collaborative writing-reading with/in public space whilst recognising parallel quests. For example, as Cixous states, “I would like to write to what is living in life”.^[107] Phenomenological writing also attempts to give linguistic expression to the living instant of ‘now’, exploring (in van Manen’s terms) “what is given in moments of prereflective, prepredicative experiences — experiences as we live through them”.^[108] Yet, herein lies the dilemma — for writing is always too late. As van Manen states, “phenomenology is always aware that when we try to capture the ‘now’ of the living present in an oral or written description, then we are already too late”.^[109] Or else for Cixous: “Writing is far behind”.^[110] She observes how, “Life is so rapid […] We who write are so slow”.^[111] We attempt to write with our bodies, yet the experience of our bodies exceeds writing. As Thanem and Knights highlight, “The body lives, and the mind is a living organ within the body, yet the living body exceeds our capacity to fully sense it and understand it”.^[112] We attempt to attend to ‘the rest’ — to lived and living experience, this passing of life — which is not to be found in the constancy of the architecture, or the buildings, or the neon signs of the square. We attempt to attend to that which is endlessly animating the square, yet remains liquid and mercurial. 

In attempting to write with our body, to attend to the living instant of the present, we are confronted with the impossibility of this task. The very act of writing makes it impossible to fully attend to the unfolding of ‘now’. The act of writing shines the light of attention, yet so much remains in shadow. The pen is always too slow — our notations are only ever partial. Perec’s An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris highlights the impossibility of writing a complete inventory, of trying to write ‘the rest’. As Marc Lowenthal states,“It is almost in what it doesn’t say that this short text, this noble exercise in futility, conveys such a sense of melancholy […]. The attempt to communicate everything, to describe everything — to exhaust everything — is always a sympathetic effort, however doomed to failure it may be”.^[113] What then is at stake in committing oneself to something that cannot be fully accomplished? We find our clue in Perec’s choice of the term ‘attempt’ in his An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris. Perec’s ‘attempt’ can be conceived as training or rehearsal for his later work, La Vie mode d’emploi (Life: A User’s Manual) (1978), as an exercise in connecting the writing hand and observing eye; of what is possible to observe and notate when the object of study is a live event, a public place.^[114]

We recognise a resonance between the words attempt and essay.^[115] To attempt — to try, to trial, to make some effort towards. Essay (from assay, essai) — meaning to try; to trial; to attempt or endeavour; an experiment or rehearsal, from ex- (out) and agere (to set in motion). For Michelle Boulous Walker, an essayistic attitude, “resists the desires for absolute comprehension, for the certainty and security of knowledge that accompanies the anxiety of needing, at all costs, to know”.^[116] Drawing on Theodor W. Adorno’s ‘The Essay as Form’ (1958)^[117], Boulous Walker argues that the essay, “is characterised by a form that resists form … the essay resists all attempts to pre-structure and predetermine thought, to orient and domesticate it towards predetermined ends”.^[118] She observes how “Adorno sees the essay as a kind of unmethodical method that resists the demand (and delusion) of completeness”.^[119] Against the demand for completeness, Boulous Walker argues for the value of the essay as a slow and open-ended rumination, unfolding through unhurried engagement and patient attention, through a receptive attitude towards the world. Echoing this essayistic attitude, Perec’s attempt at inventory — and in turn our own attempt at collaborative writing-reading with/in public space — does not so much fail, as resists completeness, resists overview. Within our own enquiry, we further resist the imperative of an overall view through a multilingual practice that eschews translation, that resists being fully grasped. In turn, we aim to practise a mode of writing that seeks not to grasp, but rather to hold a writing space open to whatever comes. We attempt to shift from a mode of attention (and of writing) that seeks to hold, to keep possession of, to control, towards a more tender attention: attend — to wait upon, to be present for.

A Tender Attention

In Radical Attention (2020), novelist and poet Julia Bell quotes writer Iris Murdoch: “We need a new vocabulary of attention”.^[120] We wonder what practices of attention might be developed for enabling, heightening, deepening, widening, and nuancing our individual and collective sensitivities? For Bell, “Sometimes the best way to glimpse meaning is to start small, to pay attention to detail and give your deliberate attention to what is in front of you. To try and notice what happens. To make time. To choose to look”.^[121] Our attempt to write with the body, to write with each other, to write with/in public space, is a practice of training the attention.^[122] Moreover, the attention that we seek to cultivate is open, receptive, slow. For Cixous, “We must save the approach that opens and leaves space for the other”.^[123] She writes, “To allow a thing to enter in its strangeness,” involves a patience that pays attention, “An attention that is terse, active, discreet, warm, almost imperceptible …”.^[124] This mode of practice necessarily takes time. For philosopher, mystic, and political activist Simone Weil, “attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity”.^[125] For Weil, the critical question is how we might teach the creative faculty of attention — how to activate the ‘gymnastics of the attention’. Reflecting on the notion of ‘creative attention’ or even intuitive attention, she writes, “In such a work all that I call ‘I’ has to be passive. Attention alone — that attention which is so full that the ‘I’ disappears is required of me. I have to deprive all that I call ‘I’ in the light of my attention and turn it on to that which cannot be conceived”.^[126] We witness something of this dissolution of the self in our own practice, the sense of ‘I’ becoming writing, of ‘I’ becoming we (or rather the ‘I’ disappearing and appearing) — our own acts of collaborative writing with/in public space conceived as an ‘attempt’ at decentring the self and its habits of perception towards the potential of an inter-subjective perspective. Indeed, for psychologist Daniel Stern, the specific ‘vitality affects’ generated through being-in-relation can generate an event of “affective inter-subjectivity” with the potential to irrevocably alter or re-organise our “implicitly felt inter-subjective field”.^[127]

We activate our own enquiry in affirmative terms as a training programme for the attention — collaborative writing-reading with/in public space as a method for gently tending and attending to the experiential aspects of situated embodiment. Yet within our writerly interventions, we also recognise a certain resistance. In one sense, our project explores ways for intervening in, disrupting or unsettling the homogeneity of civic consumerism and the commercialisation of urban common space, through the quiet act of focused attention and through languaging public space otherwise. Whilst the gesture of writing is itself slight, barely perceptible from the outside, we recognise how the stillness and immersion of our collective writing had the capacity to interrupt or disrupt the habitual rhythms and patterns of the square, the circulating practices of shopping, of commuting and passing-by, of gathering in groups for coffee and conversation. Or maybe it was the radical passivity of our writing, of our paying sustained attention, that somehow became marked against the more regular activities of a civic square. At times, our own act of bringing attention to the square (through writing) called or caught the attention of others. There were moments when we felt the emergent ‘we’ of our shared practice expanding and becoming porous, as others became interested in our presence in the square, our own field of attention extending like ripples on water through others’ attentiveness. On other occasions, our focused writing with/in public space appeared to raise suspicion, appearing somewhat opaque. Certainly, the mode of attention that we seek to nurture needs to be differentiated from hyper-vigilance — the nervous and exhaustive alertness of fear, uncertainty and doubt; the shallow and agitated attention of the contemporary attention economy. We see our act of collaborative writing as an antidote (even as a form of resistance) to the ever-increasing surveillant nature and ocular regime of contemporary public space and public life. Surveillance aims to control, however our writing with/in public space affirms what remains beyond control and capture.^[128] As Bell asserts, “Fully attentive, radically alive, aware of a physical vulnerability […] we still have choices about what we attend to, and attending to the miracle of our consciousness in the world … is the most difficult, necessary, and radical act of all”.^[129] For Bell,

(O)ur attention — our capacity to decide what we observe — is one of the critical frontlines in our new, dystopian reality […]. To counter this we need a radical attention that understands consciousness is still harnessed to the flesh. Bodies that are mutable, strange, contingent and mysterious […]. In a world in which everything is explicable where is the space of wonder. ^[130]

Our interest in heightened forms of attention is to be differentiated from the imperative of transparency — a transparency that seeks to make ‘everything explicable’; to demystify, to strip or divest of all covering, lay bare. For philosopher Byung-Chul Han, “Transparency, the imperative of dataism, is the source of the compulsion to transform everything into data and information, that is, to make it visible. It is a compulsion of production”.^[131] In writing and in turn recognising the limits of our language, we affirm what cannot be seen, what remains invisible, what refuses to be grasped. Or else, through a poeticising form of language, we seek to resist the pressure of dataism, refuse to participate in the rendering of experience as information.^[132]

Ecologies of Attention

We conceive our practice of collaborative writing-reading with/in public space as a training of the attention. Yet beyond resistance, what might this training of attention affirm? In The Ecology of Attention (2017), Yves Citton argues that contemporary neoliberal life is marked by a gross overabundance or excess in terms of production, alongside a critical deficit in or exhaustion of our collective and individual attention. He traces the emergence of the ‘attention economy’ within late capitalism, an economy whose “principle scarcity is attention rather than the traditional elements of production”.^[133] Citton asks: “What can we do collectively about our individual attention, and how can we contribute individually to a redistribution of our collective attention?”.^[134] He addresses the potential of ‘joint attention’, collective attention and even individuating attention — where “The coconstruction of subjectivities and intellectual proficiency requires the copresence of attentive bodies sharing the same space over the course of infinitesimal but decisive cognitive and emotional harmonizations”.^[135] Here, Citton’s proposal of joint or ‘presential co-attention’ resonates with the quality of shared attention that we experienced together by collaboratively writing-reading with/in public space, where “several people, conscious of the presence of others, interact in real-time depending on their perception of the attention of the other participants”.^[136] Within our enquiry, we explore what happens through writing-reading in the same space, at the same time, in relation to the same prompt. By bringing our shared attention to the everyday rhythms of a particular public space, a singular moment collectively witnessed has the capacity to become infraordinary. There are certain moments that appear within each of our individual writing-observations — the clapping hands of a group by the statue; a change in temperature, a particular person crossing the square — as simultaneously we witness the same thing, moreover, witness each other witnessing. Together (following Perec) we attend to “what happens when nothing happens”, which through attention unfolds in its manifold richness. The incidental becomes transformed — becomes an event.

We are interested in those forms of attention generated through the ‘circulating practices’ of collaborative writing with/in public space, the ‘joint attention’ emerging through being together in the same space, at the same time, engaged in a shared activity. Through such practice, we enter circulation together, activating the intensity of bodily co-presence through spatial proximity or nearness. How might this unusual and unexpected synchronicity in action and attention impact on our shared attention? How might we cultivate the conditions for transformative forms of co-attention? Can we shift the notion of what artistic research does to better consider the ecologies of shared practice that researching artistically — researching aesthetically, researching attentively — enables? Indeed, rather than being bent on the individual production of knowledge, how might collaborative writing-reading with/in public space involve the ethics and politics of shared research practices within a co-creative whole. We conceive our ‘circulating practices’ of writing-reading as engaged in the cultivation of reinvigorated forms of attention, of being attentive, helping to nurture a research approach for gently tending and attending to one another’s processes and practices, rather than fixating only on the production of more and more knowledge in an already over-saturated ‘knowledge economy’? Our writing-reading practices involve collective practices of ‘with-nessing’ — bringing a particular quality of attention towards being-in-relation, commitment to be fully present to what unfolds.

Re-turning as a Circulating Practice

However, there is also another form of attention that emerges through a different kind of circulation within our project — that of returning, of coming back again and again to the square, of reengaging it anew through the activation of different prompts and scores. Circulation — as with the blood, of moving so that it returns and begins again. We return again and again, each time attempting to write from zero yet at the same time allowing for an intimacy, intensity and emergent ethics made possible by repeatedly ‘coming back’. Our enquiry involves acts of both writing and reading with/in public spaces; it unfolds through feedback loops of writing, reading and listening. At times, the writing generated through different scores is read back immediately to the site itself: the act of reading aloud in situ itself creating moments of temporal indeterminacy and slippage, as the textual notations of ‘then’ (what was happening before) become interwoven with ‘now’ (the continuing unfolding of activity within the square). In reading our texts out loud we amplify the grain of the voice of the text, in turn, we attend through listening to the voice of the other. We come back to the texts over and over, to read them aloud together or else to listen to them again once more.^[137] Specifically, while we were in Vaasa (June 2022) we made a series of recordings, with each of us reading our texts aloud. We also came back again together online (Spring 2023) to engage in a practice of RE-TURNING, which included us re-reading our texts again to each other. We each took turns to read aloud a section of the text that we each had generated in response to a specific score/prompt — a fragment or a section or a longer length of the text. We continued going around the circle until everyone had read aloud their full text. How was the new ‘sense’ or meanings emerging in the meeting of fragments, and the sense of space-time that emerges therein? How could reading together operate as a way of re-turning to the practice and site of the square?^[138] Re-turning as a ‘circulating practice’ — we wondered, how might we re-turn to our experience of writing-reading together, as a collaborative practice in-and-of itself?

In Slow Philosophy: Reading Against the Institution (2017), Michelle Boulous Walker outlines the importance of the slow and patient act of returning as a necessary precondition for engaging with the complexity of the world. She asks: how can we engage with the world and our work in meaningful, non-utilitarian ways? Drawing on the writing of various thinkers including Luce Irigaray, Hélène Cixous and Simone Weil, Boulous Walker advocates a practice of ‘slow reading’ that requires the sustained act of returning, reassessing, reconsidering, re-engaging, a relational and ethical attentiveness based on intensity, intimacy and proximity, increased receptivity to complexity, difficulty, even strangeness.^[139]  For Boulous Walker, “Reading slowly and rereading, returning time and time again to read anew, we return, similarly to the things in the world anew [...] Slow reading would not simply mean always reading slowly, but would, rather, involve a preparedness to return time and time again to what we read”.^[140] We conceive our practice of returning akin to Boulous Walker’s advocacy of slow reading, of re-reading. Reflecting on the practice of slow reading, she says: “By granting us unhurried time, we are able to open out to the world. It is this openness that permits us what is ultimately an ethical relation with our world. Openness to otherness, to strangeness, to complexity is what constitutes ethics. And slowness, in this sense, is what enables this openness”.^[141] We approach our own practice of writing and re-writing with/in public space as a ‘circulating practice’ for slowing down and in turn becoming more open to the infraordinary dimension of embodied experience — that is, we conceive our practice as an ethico-aesthetic practice.

As our texts are re-read again and again away from the square, the practice of reading aloud together opens unexpected temporal, spatial and even subjective ambiguity. Since the original writing task could be in any chosen language, the performative reading pays respect to a shared multilingual space, emphasising the tonal and acoustic qualities of spoken language as much as the meaning-sense of words.Aware of language limitations and abilities, we argue that challenging understanding involves caring for communication and reciprocity — even if we lack exact translations. Silences and overlaps can occur; misunderstandings can happen, repetitions can take place. Our recorded readings are available to listen to within the exposition itself [See exposition forSCORE/ARTEFACTS]. We also gather all the readings together in one place [See COLLECTED READINGS here —https://www.researchcatalogue.net/view/1842387/2229846]. We invite you — the reader — to explore for yourself what happens as these individual recordings meet, attending to the inter-subjective potential of a sonic ‘we’ that might emerge in and through the act of listening to the interplay of different voices. We wonder — how might reading the texts aloud (and listening to these readings) create a liminal space-time, through the intermingling of different voices and approaches to writing-reading? 

The Space-time of Writing-Reading-Listening

For Boulous Walker, slow reading is a form of ‘attentive listening’: “A slow engagement with the ‘strangeness’ or otherness of the world — an engagement that transforms and moves us beyond ourselves”.^[142] We wonder: Where are you when you listen — especially if you don’t grasp the language? Do these circulating practices of writing-reading affirm a shared space — and if so, what does it feel and sound like? We are interested in how our very act of writing and reading, and especially collaborative writing-reading, might have the capacity for generating other spaces (and temporalities) beyond that of the square itself. We return to Perec’s inventory of spaces for the possibility of a dual meaning that ‘inventory’ might afford: To detail or to list, to name what is found; or else, from invenire — to find, to discover, or perhaps even to invent. From in- and venire ‘to come’. How is the relation between observation-documentation of what-is and invention? How might writing might bring about the ‘to come’, the what-if, the what-might-be? Can writing bring into existence shared spaces and times constructed in/by/with/through the text itself? We want to clarify the quality of this other space-time that we seek to inaugurate through the shared practice of writing-reading-listening. We acknowledge the critical potential within certain approaches to the fictive, however our own enquiry is not concerned with the space-time of fiction, of the fictional possibilities of writing as a spatial practice.^[143] Like Perec’s writerly attempt at ‘exhausting a place’, our own enquiry tries to resist fiction or storytelling as such. We conceive this resistance as making a commitment to the present — a commitment to being there.

In our commitment to being there, writing from direct experience, we conceive resonance between our own approach and aspects of phenomenological writing. For Max van Manen, phenomenological writing involves the “aesthetic imperative”^[144] of a “poeticizing form of writing”^[145] that “aims to bring experience vividly into presence”^[146], “to fasten a hold on nearness”.^[147] Van Manen asserts that the process of phenomenological writing attempts “to express the noncognitive, ineffable, and pathic aspects of meaning that belong to the phenomenon”^[148], which involves attending to “what is singular, subtle, or what can only be grasped with inventive and vocative means of reflective writing”.^[149] Vocative — the voking dimension of language; both to bring to speech and the capacity of a text for ‘speaking to’. For van Manen, “the term voke derives from vocare: to call, and from the etymology of voice, sound, language and tone; it also means to address, to bring to speech”.^[150] Van Manen outlines the vocative dimension of phenomenological writing by methods of the revocative (lived throughness: bringing experience vividly into presence through anecdote and imagery); evocative (nearness: an in-touch-ness activated through poetic devices including alliteration and repetition); invocative (intensification: a calling forth by incantation); convocative (pathic: expressing an emotive, non-cognitive sensibility).^[151] Turning also to performative writing’s evocative potential Pollock writes, “It does not describe, in a narrowly reportorial sense, an objectively verifiable event or process but uses language like paint to create what is self-evidently a version of what was, what is, and/or what might be”.^[152] For Pollock, performative writing “moves with, operates alongside, sometimes through, rather than above or beyond, the fluid, contingent, unpredictable, discontinuous rush of (performed) experience”.[153] She observes that this process “requires that the writer drop down to a place where words and the world intersect […]. The writer and the world’s bodies intertwine in evocative writing, in intimate coperformance of language and experience”.^[154] Here, Pollock’s intertwining of the bodies of writer and world in turn invokes Merleau-Ponty’s reflections on the touching flesh of body and of world: “Flesh of the world — Flesh of the body — Being”.^[155] For Pollock, performative writing is a way of attending to, even enacting, this intimate interrelation of body and world, language and experience.

Within our own practice of collaborative writing with/in public space, we make a commitment to come together, and to attend to a specific space for a specific time. Yet even during writing, we are constantly being pulled elsewhere — experienced as momentary lapses of concentration or the seduction of association, endlessly and relentlessly drawing our attention and the writing away from the ‘now’, from the present of what is unfolding, towards other temporalities of future and past. To try to stay with the present moment of observational writing requires focused attention — this kind of writing is challenging. Writing (especially in a public space) is hard work — it is difficult to remain concentrated. We recognise that writing inevitably involves some invention, some interpretation or imagining, however we nonetheless try to stay with the direct experience. We attempt to avoid a form of narration that translates or interprets the presence of individuals as characters within a given scene. In turn, we also attempt to renounce the fiction of the self. Following Weil, we aim to “give up our imaginary position as the centre, to renounce it”.^[156] Our attempt at writing without narration is not about striving for ‘objectivity’. We see our commitment to this task, to embodied writing, to the present, as politically relevant — there are so many calls on one’s attention that one could flee into, away from one’s present experience. Staying-with is an act of resistance. Writing with others creates solidarity — creates a common bond, a common goal. We each help create the conditions for the other’s attention, in turn, for their capacity to be transformed. We agree to remain, to stay with: through writing we attend to the reality of an unfolding moment, to stay in touch with that which is almost ungraspable. Yet, at times, something else appears through this focused act of writing: we recognise other qualities of space or time that emerge through the encounter with the square, that are somehow differentiable from it. Our writing happens within chronological time, attending to time unfolding, second by second, or minute by minute. Yet at times, the temporality of writing and reading together almost appears atemporal, as if it had no time whilst at the same time combining many times.

Textorium

Our writing emerges through the interplay of different calls — between the call of the space, the call of thought and the call of the words themselves unfolding on the page. Through the act of writing together we are navigating the space of the square, at the same time navigating a virtual space of writing. This space that the text opens is not that of the square itself. Specifically, we are interested in the notion of the textorium (the virtual space that writing opens up) as a phenomenal dimension of writerly (readerly and indeed ‘listenerly’) experience. Phenomenologist Max van Manen reflects on the phenomenology of writing, asking at what point in the writing process is he — the writer — ‘actually writing’, if there is “an actual moment that he can say ‘Now. Now I am writing’ ”.^[157] Van Manen argues that during the process of writing he seems “to be seeking a certain space. A writerly space”. He states that “In this space I am no longer quite myself”. [158] He further poses the question “Where am I then” during the process of writing itself. For van Manen, the term textorium refers to a “virtual space that the words open up […]. The physical space of reading or writing allows me to pass through it into the world opened up by the words, the space of the text”. ^[159] For van Manen, the textorium is a spatio-temporal phenomenon that we can only enter alone: “we take leave of the common world that we share with others. We step out of one world, the ordinary world of daylight, and enter another, the textorium, the world of text”.^[160] Struck by van Manen’s account of the textorium, we wondered how our experimental practices might generate insights into the experiential textorium of collective writing? What worlds become “opened up by the words”, by “the space of the text”? We engage in our ‘circulating practices’ of reading and re-reading for exploring the notion of space and time opened by the writing itself.

Within this essay, we explore what emerges (at times unexpectedly) through collaborative writing-reading with/in public space, attending specifically to the ‘ecologies of attention’ constituted through our circulating practices. We also explore the emergent spatialities and temporalities that collective writing-reading might enable. A central thread within this contextualising essay is a sense of the interwovenness of various circulating flows and forces within the experience of collaborative writing-reading with/in public space: between writing, reading and listening; between the flesh of the body and flesh of the world; between life and language; site and subjectivity. By attending to the corporeal, collective and performative dimensions of our approach to language-based artistic research, we acknowledge ourselves as “linguistic bodies”. For Ezequiel A. Di Paolo, Elena Clare Cuffari and Hanne De Jaegher “As a linguistic body, you are made up of utterances and relations between utterances […] They are acts. They are embodied, material patterns enacted by organic and sensorimotor bodies. They unfold in time and space”.^[161] For Di Paolo, Cuffari and De Jaegher there is an inherently ethical dimension to language: “We are, by approaching language as a living stream of activities and agencies, compelled to consider linguistic bodies in their full ethical being and becoming”.^[162] They argue how the “participation of our bodies, and participation with others, is a given for linguistic bodies. Every body participates. What we want for linguistic bodies, what we think makes them thrive, is critical participation […] This ethics-as-practice is realized in keeping ourselves open to our own unfinished becoming — in other words, in learning”.^[163] We conceive our research project as a form of training, of learning — specifically for focusing on the corporeal, collective and performative capacity of language-based practices for attending to the embodied situatedness of lived experience with/in public space. The knowledge that our research project generates is neither that of concrete findings, nor even the production of resulting artefacts as such. Rather, as Henk Borgdorff asserts, we foreground how “Knowledge and experiences are constituted only in and through practices, actions and interactions”.^[164] We are interested in what language-based artistic research might enable, what it might do. Within this exposition we attempt to show the scores and artefacts generated through our enquiry, elaborating and contextualising our ‘circulating practices’ such that they might become activated by other “linguistic bodies”. Focusing on the specific example of collaborative writing-reading with/in public space, our enquiry addresses how language-based artistic research might create conditions for enabling reinvigorated forms of critical participation with/in public space through its capacity for both resistance and affirmation.

CONTEXTUALISING ESSAY

[Essay: Scroll to read online]

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[1] This specific phase of the research project was initiated by Lena Séraphin within the frame of her postdoctoral research, Sharing Text, at Åbo Akademi University and the Faculty of Education and Welfare Studies in co-operation with Pro Artibus Foundation 3-year artist residency in Vaasa, Finland. Financial support:  The Swedish Cultural Foundation in Finland with Bröderna Gröndahls stiftelse, KulturÖsterbotten, Svensk-Österbottniska samfundet and Svenska folkskolans vänner.  We use the term ‘score’ to refer to the ‘prompts’ that we have devised within our shared writing-reading practices that initiate each phase of activity, where both ‘score’ and ‘prompt’ relate to a written invitation that incites or moves to action, an inciting cause that prompts further investigation. We conceive these scores/prompts as ‘open concepts’ that help to direct and frame the writer's attention. However, we also foreground the term ‘score’ as a way of invoking a relation to a wider lineage of practice. For example, we conceive our use of ‘scores’ in relation to Perec’s own ‘score-based’ or ‘score-like’ approach to writing, that is, his deployment of various ‘exercises in constraint’ or ‘rules’, an approach common to the wider OuLiPo movement.  Reflecting on the resonance of Perec’s writing to site-specific dance practice, choreographer Victoria Hunter refers to practitioners within contemporary dance who “employ scores as devices through which an individual’s process of attending to and engaging with pragmatic and temporal dimensions of place are foregrounded”. See Hunter, ‘Perecquian Perspectives: Dialogues with Site-Dance (Or, “On being here and there”)’, Literary Geographies 3 (1) 2017, p. 34. Hunter elaborates that “scores often include a simple set of instructions or directives that facilitate the mover’s exploration of a particular theme or idea through improvised movement explorations” (p. 34). She argues that rather than “a restrictive or prescriptive set of rules or instructions however, scores can be perceived as guiding devices” (p. 35). This sense of the score as a ‘guiding device’ resonates with our own use of the term. We also acknowledge a relation to a broader lineage of language-based practices using scores, including Fluxus scores, scripts and proposal pieces (See La Monte Young, An Anthology of Chance Operations, (first edition published La Monte Young & Jackson Mac Low, 1963), and Ken Friedman, Owen Smith and Lauren Sawchyn (eds.), The Fluxus Performance Workbook,  re-published as a Performance Research e-publication, 2002 [https://www.thing.net/~grist/ld/fluxusworkbook.pdf]. In his essay 'Orders! Conceptual Art's Imperatives', Mike Sperlinger examines the role of instructional practices in bridging between avant-garde performance works of the early 1950s and 1960s and conceptual art, observing how such instructional practices might operate as a “series of prompts for the audience to break off from habitual ways of perceiving the world”. Sperlinger, 'Orders! Conceptual Art's Imperatives', in Afterthought: New Writing on Contemporary Art, (Rachmaninoff, 2005), p. 11. Likewise we consider our own scores/prompts as specific 'constraints' that enable us to approach the encountered situation afresh or from a different perspective.

[2] ‘Language-based artistic research’ is a new term for an emergent genre or field of artistic research which we — Cocker, Daus, Séraphin — coined for describing approaches to artistic research that work-with language as their material. This emergent field of practice relates to, overlaps with, but is also perhaps differentiable from practice-based literary research. See Corina Caduff, Tan Wälchli, (eds.) Artistic Research and Literature, (Wilhelm Fink, 2019). Along with Alexander Damianisch, we — Cocker, Daus, Séraphin — are co-founders of the Society for Artistic Research: Special Interest Group for Language-based Artistic Research which was established in 2019 within the frame of the Research Pavilion #3, Venice. See https://www.researchcatalogue.net/view/835089/835129

[3] Dieter Mersch, Epistemologies of Aesthetics, (Zürich/Berlin: Diaphanes, 2015), p. 115. He says, “Art portrays, exhibits, presents and performs, but the decisive epistemic modus of these varying practices is always showing. Key to an epistemology of aesthetics is a detailed reconstruction of these varying ways of showing,” 2015, p. 14.

[4] Mersch, 2015, p. 170.

[5] An alternative line of enquiry to our own might have developed with reference to wider debates on the production of space [For example, Henri Lefebvre’s, The Production of Space (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 1991)]. See also Phil Hubbard, Rob Kitchin and Gill Valentine, Key Thinkers on Space and Place, (Los Angeles, London: Sage, 2004). An exploration of how everyday life in public spaces might interweave with the writerly practices might also resonate with Michel de Certeau’s, The Practice of Everyday Life, (Berkeley, London: University of California Press, 1984), where he explores the relation of space and place and how this might be navigated through various ‘practices’ (including walking, writing etc.). For example, see de Certeau’s chapter on ‘Story Time’, pp. 77 – 90.Resonances might also be found with Lefebvre’s posthumously published Rhythmanalysis: Space, Time and Everyday Life (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017) and those research methods derived from it — for example see Dawn Lyons, Rhythmanalysis: Research Methods, (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020) where she identifies rhythmanalysis as an orientation or disposition in ‘thinking rhythmically’ or in ‘temporal thinking’ for attending to the social world.

[6] Different iterations of the practice develop outcomes such as spatial and book-based publishing, Artist Pedagogy or performative approaches. See https://writinginpublic.space

[7] See Emma Cocker, Cordula Daus, Lena Séraphin, ‘Reading on Reading: Ecologies of Reading’ in Mika Elo, Tero Heikkinen, Henk Slager (eds.), RUUKKU #14 Ecologies of Practice, 2020. Available at https://www.researchcatalogue.net/view/618624/618625

[8] Other public spaces might include parks, the ‘common’, as well as the square. On the history and evolution of the public sphere see for example, Craig Calhoun, Habermas and the Public Sphere, (Cambridge Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1992).

[9] Whilst our enquiry is not ‘about’ Vaasa’s Market Square as such, we provide some visual documents and sound recordings within our exposition [See THE SQUARE], to provide a sense of ‘orientation’ in relation to the square including its acoustic qualities and texture.

[10] See Georges Perec, An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris, trans. Marc Lowenthal. (Cambridge (MA): Wakefield Press, 2010). Tentative d'épuisement d'un lieu parisien was written in three days 18 –20 October 1974 in Place Saint Sulpice, Paris, and was first published in 1975 in the journal Cause Commune followed by a publication in 1982 by Christian Bourgois éditeur. The English translation An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris by Marc Lowenthal was published in 2010 by Wakefield Press.

[11] Perec’s work has been a reference point within other projects. Séraphin’s research practice Writing in Public Space is specifically inspired by Perec’s An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris (2010 [1975]). Coyotzi Borja’s current research (Doctoral research project at Aalto University) is In the Middle of Things: On Researching the Infraordinary. Perec’s essay ‘Reading: A Socio-Physiological Outline’ from Species of Spaces and Other Pieces, was a reference for Cocker, Daus, Séraphin within the project, Reading On Reading (2019).

[12] Georges Perec, ‘Approaches to What?*’ in Species of Spaces and Other Pieces, trans. John Sturrock, (London: Penguin Books, 1997), p. 210. L’Infra-ordinaire was originally published in 1989 (Editions du Seuil).

[13] Perec, 1997, pp. 209 – 210.

[14] Perec, 1997, p. 210.

[15] Perec, 1997, p. 210.

[16] Perec, 2010 [1975], p. 3.

[17] Perec, 2010 [1975], p. 3.

[18] Perec, 2010 [1975], p. 5. For Marc Lowenthal, “Reading through Perec´s Attempt [An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris] makes one realize the degree to which our perception of the world is formulated through categories, genres, and classifications, many of them specific to the cultures we come from,” Translator’s afterword to An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris by Georges Perec, pp. 49 – 55. (Cambridge (MA): Wakefield Press, 2010), p. 52.

[19] Perec, 2010, p. 42.

[20] Later in this essay we elaborate how we conceive our expanded multisensorial writing as an antedote — perhaps even form of resistance — to the prevalence of CCTV within public urban space and its visual insistency.

[21] See Ezequiel A. Di Paolo, Elena Clare Cuffari, and Hanne De Jaegher, Linguistic Bodies: The Continuity Between Life and Language, (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2018). We return to this notion of ‘linguistic bodies’ later in this essay.

[22] See Maxine Sheets-Johnstone, The Corporeal Turn: An Interdisciplinary Reader, (Exeter, UK: Imprint Academic, 2009). On embodied research practices, see also Christine Fentz and Tom McGuirk, Artistic Research: Strategies of Embodiment, (NSU Press, 2015).

[23] Torkild Thanem and David Knights (eds.), Embodied Research Methods, (Los Angeles, London: Sage, 2019), p. 27. Thanem and Knights cite fragments of Merleau-Ponty’s writing from The Phenomenology of Perception (1962 [1945]), where he “argues that his body is ‘his point of view on the world’ (p. 81), the basis of consciousness, and the ‘vehicle of being in the world’ (p. 94); he further maintains that ‘the body expresses existence at every moment’ and that ‘experience realizes itself in the body’ (p. 192); indeed, the body is the knowledge-acquiring apparatus which enables us to conceive our own existence (p. 409)”, 2019, p. 27. See Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception, trans. C. Smith, (London: Routedge & Keagan Paul, 1962 [1945]).

[24] Thanem and Knights, 2019, p. 36.

[25] Thanem and Knights, 2019, p. 28.

[26] Thanem and Knights, 2019, p. 28. Thanem and Knights refer to the ‘concept of “flesh” in Merleau-Ponty’s unfinished work, The Visible and the Invisible (1968) where he states, “That the presence of the world is precisely the presence of its flesh to my flesh, that I ‘am of the world’ and that I am not it, this is what is no sooner said than forgotten”, Merleau-Ponty, p.127. He continues, “We have to reject the age-old assumptions that put the body in the world and the seer in the body, or conversely, the world and the body in the seer as in a box”, Merleau-Ponty, 1968, p. 138.

[27] Merleau-Ponty, 1968, pp. 132 – 133.

[28] Merleau-Ponty, 1968, p. 138.

[29] See also Paolo Virno, When the Word Becomes Flesh: Language and Human Nature, (Semiotext(e), 2015).

[30] The notion of écriture feminine is developed by Hélène Cixous in her essay, ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’, where she says, “By writing her self, woman will return to the body […] Censor the body and you censor breath and speech at the same time. Write your self. Your body must be heard” (p. 250). She continues, “It is impossible to define a feminine practice of writing, and this is an impossibility that will remain, for this practice can never be theorized, enclosed, coded — which doesn’t mean that it doesn’t exist”. p. 253. For Cixous, the feminine act of ‘writing in white ink’, “does not contain, it carries; it does not hold back, it makes possible” (p. 260). See Hélène Cixous, ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’, in (eds.) Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron, New French Feminisms: An Anthology, (New York and London: University of Massachusetts Press, 1980), pp. 245 – 264. ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’ was originally published in Signs, Summer 1976. See also Verena Andermatt Conley, Hélène Cixous: Writing the Feminine, (Lincoln and London, University of Nebraska Press, 1991), Ann Rosalind Jones, ‘Writing the Body: Toward an Understanding of “L‘Ecriture Feminine”’, in Feminist Studies, Summer, 1981, Vol. 7, No. 2 (Summer, 1981), pp. 247 – 263.

[31] ‘Cixaldian’ is the term used by Frédéric-yves Jeannet, in Hélène Cixous and Frédéric-Yves Jeannet, Encounters: Conversations on Life and Writing, (Cambridge and M.A: Polity, 2013), p. 9.

[32] Thanem and Knights, 2019, p. 38.

[33] Thanem and Knights, 2019, p. 28.

[34] For example, see Sarah Pink, Doing Sensory Ethnography, (London: Sage, 2015).

[35] See also Jacques Rancière, Aisthesis: Scenes from the Aesthetic Regime of Art, trans. Zakir Paul, (London: Verso, 2013). Richard Shusterman states that, “Somaesthetics, roughly defined, concerns the body as the locus of sensory-aesthetic appreciation (aesthesis).” See Thinking Through the Body: Essays in Somaesthetics, (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), p. 27.

[36] Alex Arteaga, How Do We Do It? An Introduction Lecture given at KASK on February 20th 2018, unpaginated. See also Arteaga, ‘Embodied and Situated Aesthetics: An Enactive Approach to a Cognitive Notion of Aesthetics*’, Artnodes, no. 20 (2017).

[37] Arteaga, 2018, unpaginated. See also Dieter Mersch, Epistemologies of Aesthetics, (Zurich, Berlin: Think Art Diaphanes, 2015) and ‘Aesthetic Thinking: Art as Theōria’, in Dieter Mersch, Sylvia Sasse, Sandro Zannetti (eds.), Aestehtic Theory, (Zurich: Diaphanes, 2019), pp. 219 – 236.

[38] Arteaga, 2018, unpaginated.

[39] Barbara Bolt, Felicity Coleman, Graham Jones, Ashley Woodward, Sensorium: Aesthethics, Art, Life, (Newcastle: Cambirdge Scholars Publishing, 2007). They invoke the term sensorium as “the place or world of the senses.” p. xii.

[40 Bolt et al, 2007, p. xvi.

[41] Bolt et al, 2007, p. xvi.

[42] Jane Rendell, ‘Pre-positions’, in Site-Writing: The Architecture of Art Criticism, (London and New York: I. B. Tauris, 2010), pp. 1 – 20.

[43] Rendell, 2010, p. 2. Rendell is specifically referring to Donna Haraway’s notion of ‘situated knowledges’ in ‘Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Knowledge’, Feminist Studies, v. 14, n. 3 (Fall, 1988), pp. 575 – 603; and Jane Flax’s writing on ‘standpoint theory’ in Thinking Fragments: Psychoanalysis, Feminism and Postmodernism in the Contemporary West, (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1991).

[44] Rendell, 2010, p. 7.

[45] Rendell, 2010, p. 7.

[46] Rendell dispenses of the preposition altogether, stating “my own impulse was to ‘write’ rather than ‘write about’ architecture”, 2010, p. 7.

[47] For María Puig de la Bellacasa, “Recognising withinness to the worlds we engage with even if critically is to relate with ‘complex layers of one’s personal and collective situatedness in the apparatuses of the production of knowledge’”, Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More Than Human Worlds, (Minneapolis, London: University of Minnesota Press, 2017), p. 80.

[48] de la Bellacasa, 2017, p. 72.

[49] de la Bellacasa, 2017, p. 77. She also states, “Situated, implicated, and grounded writing makes it uneasy to skim through, or generalize the claims, especially when writing is deliberately plagued with obstacles to reductionism, to dissection of the webs of relatedness that compose a world,” 2017, p. 76.

[50] The “minor gesture” could offer a parallel way of conceiving of the countertextual dimension of our practice. For Erin Manning, “the minor works the major from within. What must be remembered is this: neither the minor nor the major is fixed in advance. The major is a structural tendency that organizes itself according to predetermined definitions of value. The minor is a force that courses through it, unmooring its structural integrity, problematizing its normative standards”, in The Minor Gesture, (Duke University Press, 2016), p. 1.

[51] de la Bellacasa, 2017, p. 77. She also states, “Situated, implicated, and grounded writing makes it uneasy to skim through, or generalize the claims, especially when writing is deliberately plagued with obstacles to reductionism, to dissection of the webs of relatedness that compose a world,” 2017, p. 76.

[52] For Alex Fattal, “Counterpublics are a subset of publics that stand in conscientious opposition to a dominant ideology and strategically subvert that ideology's construction in public discourse”, ‘Counterpublic’, in Hilary Callan, (ed.) The International Encyclopedia of Anthropology, (Wiley Blackwell, Hoboken, NJ, 2018), p. 1. Fattal notes how for literary critic and social theorist Michael Warner, “the public sphere, a singular public often presumed to represent a social totality (a presumption shared by techniques such as public opinion polling), is really composed of an infinite number of publics”, (p. 1), moreover, “that the multiplicity of publics that constitute the public sphere are organized by the production, circulation, and consumption of texts (print as well as other media forms)” (p. 1). For Warner, “Publics are essentially intertextual, frameworks for understanding texts against an organized background of the circulation of other texts, all interwoven,” Publics and Counter Publics, (New York: Zone Books, [2002] 2005), p. 16). Elsewhere Warner argues that “Counterpublics are ‘counter’ to the extent thatthey try to supply different ways of imagining stranger-sociability and its reflexivity;as publics, they remain oriented to stranger-circulation in a way that is not just strategic, but also constitutive of membership and its affects […] Counterpublics are spaces of circulation in which it is hoped that the poesis of scene making will be transformative, not replicative merely.” (pp. 87 – 88), in Michael Warner‘Publics and Counterpublics’, Public Culture, Volume 14, Number 1, Winter 2002, pp. 49 – 90.

[53] Miwon Kwon, One Place After Another: Site-Specific Art and Locational Identity, (Cambridge, Massachusetts and London: The MIT Press, 2004), p.126.

[54] Nina Möntmann, ‘New Communities’, in Public: Art Culture Ideas, 2009, p. 16.

[55] Möntmann, 2009, p. 18.

[56] Möntmann, 2009, p. 11.

[57] Extract from Say it Again —https://www.researchcatalogue.net/view/1842387/2018358

[58] Extract from What Resists? — https://www.researchcatalogue.net/view/1842387/2020817

[59] Irit Rogoff, ‘WE: Collectivities, Mutualities, Participations’, in I Promise its Political, (Museum Ludwig: Cologne, 2002).

[60] Rogoff, 2002.

[61] Jean-Luc Nancy, Being Singular Plural, p. 3, cited in Rogoff, 2002.

[62] We acknowledge the contradiction here — for strictly speaking the performative utterance speaks for itself, rather than being argued for.

[63] Rogoff, 2002.

[64] Della Pollock, ‘Performing Writing’, in Peggy Phelan and Jill Lane, eds., The Ends of Performance (New York University Press, 1998), pp. 73 – 103.

[65] Pollock says, “I don’t mean subject-centered or circling back on the writer/subject in such a way as to enclose the ‘self’ within either narrative or mirror-reflections, or ideologies of humanist individuality or selfhood”, 1998, p. 86.

[66] Pollock, 1998, p. 86.

[67] Pollock, 1998, p. 87.

[68] Pollock, 1998, p. 87.

[69] Deleuze continues, “The map expresses the identity of the journey and what one journeys through. It merges with its object, when the object itself is movement”, in ‘Literature and Life’ in Essays Critical and Clinical, trans. Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), p. 61.

[70] Brad Haseman, ‘A Manifesto for Performative Research’, in Media International Australia, 118: 1, 2006, p. 100. See also Barbara Bolt, ‘A Performative Paradigm for the Creative Arts? ’, Working Papers in Art and Design 5, 2008.

[71] Haseman, 2006, p. 101. He continues, “This insistence on reporting research through the outcomes and material forms of practice challenges traditional ways of representing knowledge claims. It also means that people who wish to evaluate the research outcomes also need to experience them in direct (copresence) or indirect (asynchronous, recorded) form,” 2006, p. 101.

[72] Vytautus Michekevičius, Mapping Artistic Research: Towards Diagrammatic Knowing, (Vilnius: Vilnius Academy of the Arts Press, 2018), p. 147.

[73] For Henk Borgdorff, “artistic research seeks to convey and communicate content that is enclosed in aesthetic experiences, enacted in creative practices and embodied in artistic products”. See Borgdorff, ‘The Production of Knowledge in Artistic Research’, in Michael Biggs and Henrik Karlsson, (eds.) The Routledge Companion to Research in the Arts, (London and New York: Routledge, 2011), pp. 44 – 63.

[74] J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975).

[75] Erika Fischer-Lichte, The Transformative Power of Performance: A New Aesthetics, trans. Saskya Iris Jain, (Oxon, New York: Routledge, 2008), p. 45. These reflections on an expanded notion of performativity draw on Cocker’s reflections in the chapter on ‘Liveness(es) of Live Coding’, in Alan Blackwell, Emma Cocker, Geoff Cox, Thor Magnusson, Alex McLean, Live Coding: A Users’ Manual, (Cambridge, Massachusetts, London: The MIT Press, 2022).

[76] Fischer-Lichte, 2008. p. 27.

[77] Fischer-Lichte identifies a parallel ‘performative turn’ to that of J. L. Austin’s notion of performative utterance, activated in Germany in the 1960s through the work of literary historian and theorist Max Herrmann, which resists the privileging of text and semiotics by foregrounding the social dynamics of the performance event. Her notion of autopoiesis draws on the work of Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela — e.g., Autopoiesis and Cognition: The Realization of the Living (1980).

[78] Marvin Carlson, ‘Introduction’ in Fischer-Lichte, 2008, p. 7.

[79] Fischer-Lichte states, “Contingency became a central aspect of performance with the performative turn of the 1960s […] The feedback loop as a self-referential, autopoietic system enabling a fundamentally open, unpredictable process emerged as the defining principle.” Fischer-Lichte, 2008, p. 39.

[80] Alternatively, one might argue following Irwin Goffman that the ‘presentation of self in everyday life’ is inherently always a performance. See Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, (Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh, 1956) and also Goffman’s Behaviour in Public Places: Notes on the Social Organization of Gatherings, (New York: The Free Press, 1963). We also find resonance in Paolo Virno’s reflections on the relation of language, praxis and the activities of the performing artist, where he focuses on “Contingency, instability, absence of purpose, inseparability between the ‘product’ and the actions that realize it: all of these define ethical and political conduct”, Virno, When the Word Becomes Flesh: Language and Human Nature, (Semiotext(e), 2015), p. 23.

[81] See Fischer-Lichte, Chapter 3, ‘Shared bodies, shared spaces: The bodily co-presence of actors and spectators’, 2008, pp. 38 – 75.

[82] See Emma Cocker, ‘Performing stillness: Community in Waiting’, in Stillness in a Mobile World, eds. David Bissell, Gillian Fuller (Oxon and New York: Routledge, 2010), pp. 87 – 106.

[83] Lambros Malafouris, ‘At the Potter’s Wheel: An Argument for Material Agency’, in Carl Knappet and Lambros Malafouris (eds.), Material Agency, (Springer, 2008), p. 34.

[84] Malafouris, 2008, p. 35.

[85] We differentiate this witness/witnessed from the observer-participant duality of ethnographic practices.

[86] With-nessing is a neologism of witnessing and being-with.The notion of ‘with-nessing’ as an artistic research approach was developed by Emma Cocker, Nikolaus Gansterer and Mariella Greil. See Choreo-graphic Figures: Deviations from the Line, (Berlin, de Gruyter, 2017), pp. 164 – 166. A variant of the term is also used by Bracha L. Ettinger who states, “the question of wit(h)nessing arises, where the I reattunes itself in co-response-ability with the non-I’s traces within a shared psychic space … where we can talk about co-response-ability and asymmetrical responsibility and coemergence-in-difference on a transsubjective level, as the time-space of encounter-event is shared by several borderlinking I(s) and non-I(s) […] Here a copoietic jointness evolves, only inasmuch as it is transfused with compassion.” See Bracha L. Ettinger, Intimacy, wit(h)nessing and non-abandonment, http://jordancrandall.com/main/+UNDERFIRE/site/files/q-node-562.html. See also Ettinger, The Matrixial Borderspace, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006).

[87] Karen Barad, ‘Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter’, Signs: Gender and Science 28, no. 3 (Spring 2003), p. 808. See also Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning, (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007).

[88] Barad, 2003, p. 827. Elsewhere they state, “We don’t obtain knowledge by standing outside the world; we know because we are of the world”, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2007), p. 185.

[89] Our use of scores invokes the adoption of ‘constraint’ based practices by Perec and the wider OuLiPo — Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle (Workshop for Potential Literature) context. We also connect to the use of attention-based ‘scores’ in the work of composer Pauline Oliveros. See Pauline Oliveros Deep Listening: A Composer’s Sound Practice, 2005.

[90] We respond to Dieter Mersch’s aforementioned call to ‘show’ artistic research. Cocker and Arteaga address the challenge of “How to publish practices?”, in their ‘Editorial: Practices of Phenomenological and Artistic Research’, in Phenomenology & Practice, Vol. 17 No. 1 (2022), pp. 9 – 56. They ask: “What is at stake in showing or sharing practices, or wanting to publish practices?” (p. 46); “Where is the practice? Where does a practice manifest? Or where is a practice operative?” (p. 50)”. Within the Special Issue of Phenomenology & Practice, the publishing of practices took place through making demonstrable two moments within the practising, “a score or outline of a practice (as a kind of pre-moment, or a to-come moment within that), and then the artifact (an after-the-fact of practicing to a certain extent).” (p. 51). In this current exposition, Textorium, our focus on foregrounding the ‘circulating practices’ themselves (via scores and resulting artifacts) rather than necessarily writing ‘about’ them in part continues this exploration of ‘How to publish practices?’, which we felt also resonant with the focus on this ViS Issue on ‘Circulating Practices’. This focus on ‘practices’ can in turn be conceived in relation to a wider ‘practice turn’, where — as Theodore R. Schatzki argues — practices can be a way to “highlight nonpropositional knowledge”. See Theodore R. Schatzki, Karin Knorr Cetins and Eike Von Savigny, (eds.) The Practice Turn in Contemporary Theory, (London and New York: Routledge, 2001), p. 1.

[91] The use conversation as a ‘circulating practice’ draws on Cocker’s ongoing interest in and development of the practice of ‘conversation-as-material’. See Emma Cocker, ‘Conversation as Material’, Phenomenology & Practice, Volume 17 (2022), No.1, pp. 201 – 231.

[92] See Nancy Kline, Time to Think: Listening to Ignite the Human Mind, (London: Cassell, 1999).

[93] Möntmann, 2009, p.11

[94] Judith Butler ‘Giving an Account of Oneself,’ Diacritics, nr 4, vol. 31 (2001), pp. 22 – 40.

[95] Butler, 2001, p. 28. Butler poses the question: “There is that in me and of me for which I can give no account. But does this mean that I am not, in the moral sense, accountable for who I am and for what I do?” Butler, 2001, p. 27. Butler presents knowledge that emanates from a subject that is not completely familiar with itself. The contextual origin for knowledge is then, at least to some extent, hidden from the knowledge-creating subject.

[96] In this sense, our enquiry resonates with a wider shift from the ocular and ocular-centric discourse. See for example, Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought, (University of California Press, 1993). In his review of Downcast Eyes, W. J. T. Mitchell argues how Jay’s publication, “makes it clear that visuality is not to be understood merely in terms of physical vision or visual representation literally understood, but as a “hidden discursive continent” (Mitchell’s emphasis), a phenomenon that surfaces in language and in all the specific “languages” of theology, philosophy, psychology, rhetoric, and poetics.” See W. J. T. Mitchell, ‘The Eyes Have It’, Artforum, January 1994, Vol. 32, No. 5.

[97] Pierre Schaeffer, Traité des objets musicaux, (Le Seuil, Paris 1966), p. 91.

[98] Schaeffer, 1966, p. 93.

[99] Pauline Oliveros, Deep Listening: A Composers’ Sound Practice, (New York, Lincoln: Deep Listening Publications, 2005), p. 13. This differentiation between ‘focal’ and ‘global’ attention mirrors the differentiation of ‘narrow’ and ‘wide’ attention by author and psychoanalyst Marion Milner. See Marion Milner, On Not Being Able to Paint, (Routledge, 2010) [First published 1950 ], p. 191. For Milner, the “analytic narrow focused kind of attention” is incapable of attending to the living of life, where “most of the vital experiences of living, which cannot be apprehended by the narrow-focused kind of attention, (are) left unthought about and only blindly lived.” Milner, [1950]/2010], p. 99.

[100] Oliveros, 2005, p.15.

[101] Oliveros, 2005, p.13.

[102] Gemma Corradi Fiumara, The Other Side of Language: A Philosophy of Listening (London and New York: Routledge, 1990), p. 1.

[103] Corradi Fiumara, 1990, p. 3.

[104] Corradi Fiumara, 1990, p. 2.

[105] Corradi Fiumara, 1990, p. 2.

[106] Bolt et al, 2007, p. xvi.

[107] Cixous, Coming into Writing and Other Essays, (Harvard University Press, 1991), p. 105.

[108] Van Manen, 2014, p. 27.

[109] Van Manen, ‘Meaning and Method’ in Phenomenology of Practice: Meaning-giving Methods in Phenomenological Research and Writing, (London and New York: Routledge, 2014), p. 34.

[110] Cixous, Stigmata Escaping Texts, (Routledge: London and New York, 1998), p. 33.

[111] Cixous, 1991, p. 111.

[112] Torkild Thanem and David Knights, Embodied Research Methods, (Los Angeles, London: Sage, 2019), p. 6.

[113] Lowenthal, 2010, p. 50.

[114] Perec’s An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris is a literary endeavour to employ the alphabet as a toolbox for examining how writing is possible when connected to civic space as well as about what the writing constitutes being something else and more than an instantaneous souvenir of the Place Saint Sulpice. Elsewhere, Perec’s constraint-based approach (reflecting the wider interests of the movement OuLiPo) might also have a quality of ‘exercise’ or ‘training’. In The Void, Perec conceives the alphabet as his toolbox, working with the constraint of a missing ‘e’.

[115] In this sense, Perec’s writing can be conceived within the wider French lineage of the essay following Michel de Montaigne, Essays (first published in 1580).

[116] Michelle Boulous Walker, Slow Philosophy: Reading Against the Institution, (London, New York: Bloomsbury 2017), p. 56.

[117] See Adorno, ‘The Essay as Form’, in Brian O’Connor (ed.) The Adorno Reader, (Oxford: Blackwell, [1958] 2000), pp. 91 – 111. 

[118] Boulous Walker, 2017, p. 62

[119] Boulous Walker, 2017, p. 63 – 64

[120] Julia Bell, Radical Attention (London: Peninsula Press, 2020).

[121] Bell, 2020, p. 117.

[122] See also Emma Cocker, ‘Towards an Attitude of Openness’, keynote lecture at the Society for Artistic Research conference, Care, Share, Dare, 2021. See also https://www.researchcatalogue.net/view/1220981/1220982

[123] Cixous, 1991, p. 62.

[124] Cixous, 1991, p. 62.

[125] Simone Weil, Letter to Joë Bousquet on April 13, 1942. ‘Correspondance’, (Editions l'Age d'Homme in Lausanne, 1982), in Simone Pétrement, Simone Weil: A Life (1976), p. 18.

[126] Weil, Gravity and Grace, (London and New York: Routledge, 2002/1947), p. 118. First published as La Pesanteur et la grâce by Librairie PLON, Paris, 1947. In her Foreword Siân Miles observes how, “Simone Weil’s conception of ‘creative attention’ is grasped as an individual’s just and loving gaze directed upon an individual reality and the potential of the former to transform both the one who attends and the other who is attended to”, in Simone Weil, Anthology, (Penguin Classics, 2005) p. x.

[127] Daniel Stern, Forms of Vitality: Exploring Dynamic Experience in Psychology, the Arts, Psychotherapy and Development, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), p. xvi.

[128] This visual sense of surveillance is amplified by the increase in facial recognition technologies.

[129] Bell, 2020, p. 121.

[130] Bell, 2020, pp. 115 – 116. For Bell, our attention is “perhaps one of the few means we have left of changing things, as a wholehearted, conscious body in the world: on strike, in protest, in defence, in solidarity, in the way. Fully attentive, radically alive, aware of a physical vulnerability. Whatever the future holds, while we have breath, we still have choices about what we attend to, and attending to the miracle of our consciousness in the world — allowing ourselves to experience our individual, wedge-shaped core of darkness, without being nudged or pushed or spied upon — is the most difficult, necessary, and radical act of all.” p. 121.

[131] Byung-Chul Han, Disappearance of Rituals: A Topology of the Present, (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2020), p. 82. See also Han, The Transparency Society, (Stanford University Press, 2012). 

[132] For Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi poetry’s resistant function can be conceived as a “line of escape from the reduction of lan­guage to exchange.” See Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi, The Uprising: On Poetry and Finance, (Los Angeles: semiotext(e), 2012), p. 22.

[133] Yves Citton, The Ecologies of Attention, trans. Barnaby Norman, (Cambridge: Polity,

2017), p. 6. Citton seeks to reconceptualise the vocabulary through which contemporary attention has been inscribed, moving away from the language of ‘attention economy, economics of attention, economy of attention’ towards the notion of an ecology or even (drawing on the work of both Norwegian philosopher Arne Naess and Félix Guattari) an ecosophy of attention.

[134] Citton, 2017, p. 10.

[135] Citton, 2017, p. 18.

[136] Citton, 2017, p. 84.

[137] There is also a process of returning to that happens when our handwriting becomes transcribed into what is called “clean copy”— when the manuscript (the handwritten) becomes a digitised script that is legible and sharable, that is, public. This moment bears the danger/potential of editing. We agreed that we do not add or change anything but strive remain in fidelity to what was written live.

[138] This sense of returning has been further expanded through a series of artworks evolved from our shared enquiry. For example, the audio installation Salutorget-Zócalo-Mandi-Kauppatori-Marktplatz-Market Squareand Präppla — an experimental sound piece by Cocker, Coyotzi Borja, Daus, Grayson, Saumya, Séraphin & SOUNDS.  See https://proartibus.fi/en/events/prappla/and also writinginpublic.space

[139] Michelle Boulous Walker, Slow Philosophy: Reading Against the Institution, (Bloomsbury Academic, 2017),p. xxi

[140 Boulous Walker, 2017, p. xv.

[141] Boulous Walker, 2017, p. 31.

[142] Boulous Walker, 2017, p. 4.

[143] For example, Wolfgang Iser describes the fictitious (or fictive) as “an operational mode of consciousness that makes inroads into existing versions of the world”, The Fictive and the Imaginary: Charting Literary Anthropology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, (1993 [1991], p. xiv). See also Henriette Gunkel, Ayesha Hameed, Simon O'Sullivan (eds.), Futures and Fictions, (Repeater Books, 2017), and David Burrows, Simon O'Sullivan, Fictioning: The Myth-Functions of Contemporary Art and Philosophy, (Edinburgh University Press, 2019).

[144] Max van Manen, Phenomenology of practice: meaning-giving methods in phenomenological research and writing, (London and New York: Routledge, 2014), p. 240.

[145] Van Manen, 2014, p. 241.

[146] Van Manen, 2014, p. 241.

[147] Van Manen, 2014, p. 242.

[148] Van Manen, 2014, p. 240.

[149] Van Manen, 2014, p. 27.

[150] Van Manen, 2014, p. 240. He continues, “When we speak, we tend to stop listening to the object about which we speak. And now this object has lost its addressive and enigmatic power. Something can only speak to us if it is listened to, if we can be addressed by it.", Max van Manen, Phenomenology of Practice: Meaning-Giving Methods in Phenomenological Research and Writing, (Routledge, 2014), p. 240.

[151] Van See van Manen’s chapter on ‘Philological Methods: The Vocative’, 2014, pp.240 – 296. 

[152] Pollock, 1998, p. 80.

[153] Pollock, 1998, p. 81.

[154] Pollock, 1998, p. 81.

[155] Merleau-Ponty, 1968, p, 248.

[156] Weil, Waiting on God, (London: Fontana, 1959), p. 115.

[157] Van Manen, ‘Writing Phenomenologically’, in Writing in the Dark: Phenomenological Studies in Interpretive Inquiry, (Ontario: The Althouse Press, 2002), p. 1.

[158] Van Manen, 2002, p. 1.

[159] Van Manen, 2002, p. 2.

[160] Van Manen, 2002, p. 3.

[161] Ezequiel A. Di Paolo, Elena Clare Cuffari and Hanne De Jaegher, Linguistic Bodies: The Continuity between Life and Language, (Cambridge, Massachusetts, London: The MIT Press, 2018), p. 2.

[162] Di Paolo, Cuffari, De Jaegher, 2018, p. 10.

[163] Di Paolo, Cuffari, De Jaegher, 2018, p. 3.

[164] Henk Borgdorff, ‘The Production of Knowledge in Artistic Research’ in Michael Biggs, Henrik Karlsson, (eds.) The Routledge Companion to Research in the Arts, (Routledge, London, 2012), p. 47.

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