Friendly Writing as Non-inquiry: The Problems of Collective Autoethnographic Writing About Collective Autoethnographic Writing

We are a group of Polish evocative autoethnographers who have been cooperating on various autoethnographic projects for several years. We write suggestive autoethnography as a form of resistance to the neoliberal university, reification and reduction, measurement, control, and isolation (Poulos, 2017). We write evocatively because experience is not a “dead thing” viewed from the perspective of an isolated subject but something that is being felt and something that one is affected by (Manning, 2016; Massumi, 2011; Stengers, 2011; Whitehead, 1978). Writing the autoethnography, we created cracks in which we were able to develop a different way of thinking about science, existence, education . . . Our writing: to experience something different, become different and become the other. We were able to open (oneself) to the flows of being—where writing itself, meeting others itself became a kind of realization of dreams contained in words. At the same time, like guerrillas, we sabotaged the activities of the university machine. Working with our experiences, mainly educational ones, allowed for a better understanding, sometimes identifying actors whom we had no idea about, but who (co-)created “our I / we”; our better being: to feel and flow along the line of flight . . . —until the next intersection of production—and again . . . ¹ “Working with our experiences, mainly educational ones, allowed for a better understanding, sometimes identifying actors whom we had no idea about, but who (co-)created “our I / we”. Assembagges of bodies who (co-)created our better being in the processes: feeling and flowing along the line of flight - . . . —until the next intersection of production— and again . . .”.

Now, we decided to write about the experience of collective writing following the call of Lucinda McKinght, Owen Bullock, and Rubby Todd (2017) for collective writing as inquiry. The idea seemed quite simple: By referring to the previous events related to the writing of co-autoethnography and the event of current writing, we wanted to grasp what it is and what it does to us. It turned out to be much more difficult than we had thought. At present, after almost 6-month work on the article, we are close to the statement that the project we have undertaken is impossible. The question arose whether we had reached the limit, or perhaps one of many limits, of language and research.

It was crucial for our project that, in our opinion, co-autoethnography should be implemented to write about the experiences of co-autoethnographic writing. We believe that this is a privileged method when it comes to dealing with the multiform and multidimensional experience of collective writing. Sensitive to experience, itself being an experience, it becomes its integral element. “Collaborative writing is about writers being present in the moment, writing from the soul, constructing a space where selves flow together, being vulnerable, pushing always for connections between personal troubles and public issues” (Wyatt et al., 2014, p. 414). Being present here and now in the process itself, immersing in it and being created by it, becoming the very process . . .

Privileged, but also entangled. We did not treat our writing as writing autoethnographic stories which we would discuss later and reflect upon (see Cord & Clements, 2010). The approach presented by Bonnie Cord and Mike Clements, which assumes the “I” as nonproblematic and reduces the common to discussion, assuming an autonomous, humanistic subject, is not unusual. On the contrary, Elizabeth St. Pierre in her discussion of the book Deleuze and Collaborative Writing: An Immanent Plane of Composition (Wyatt, Gale, Gannon, & Davies, 2011) wrote that she did not even imagine how one could think about collective writing without a humanistic subject (Wyatt et al., 2014). A reference to autoethnography may strengthen the narratives about the self-referring subject. Gale and Wyatt (2017) also state that one should depart from autoethnography because it assumes a focus on a humanistic subject and thus is unable to capture complexity.

Instead of starting from the subjects, we started from the process itself (Whitehead, 1978; see also Jusiak, 1999; Manning, 2016; Massumi, 2011). It was our assumption: Writing is a process, something that happens. “Auto”—thus referred to the strange we, to its experiences, its experiencing as such and experiencing in the event. To the experience of this composition rather than any other one. Such an approach seems to us to be consistent with the spirit of autoethnography. First of all, autoethnography does not assume an isolated and given subject, but a subject which is always in relations; second, the autoethnographic “I” itself is not something stable, but rather it is constantly changing its position in entwinement with the Other (Spry, 2016). This “I” is something dynamic, something entangled in the network. Autoethnography practiced by us revealed these networks and problematized both the cultural and the social, as well as the “I” itself, asking about other possibilities of subjectification. Autoethnography comes out of everyday experience, from the everyday establishing of subjects: from subjectification and desubjectification, in a specific, concrete environment (Adams, Jones, & Ellis, 2015; Bochner & Ellis, 2000; Ellis, 1997, 2004; Ellis, Adams, & Bochner, 2010; Grant, Short, & Turner, 2013; Winkler, 2018). One can say, using Simondon’s terminology, that co-autoethnography concerns not so much the individual but individualization (Simondon, 1992; see also Scott, 2014). It concerns the creation of us and the environment. At the same time, “we” and the “environment” do not constitute separate spaces, but a mutual connection, mutually restraining one another and acting—In collective writing, we are dealing with something that Donna Haraway calls “perhension” (see Haraway, 2003).

An attempt to give meaning, to understand, to change “our” life does not necessarily have to be limited to the human subject. Our life is a process. Collaborative writing is a process of a certain “we.”

In this sense, what is affectively reserved not only for the human being, but rather what flows through the processes of subjectification and desubjectification (see Manning, 2016; Spinoza, 2002).

The community, “we,” which emerges, its composition, depends on whom it embraces and whom it does not embrace, while what will happen depends on the event.

That is all we could say. ² Although Oskar values Deleuze and some post-humanists, as well as the accomplishments of Gale and Wyatt, he was afraid that the next word would lead us not so much to practicing cowriting as to practicing a particular concept. We did not assume any concept. We come from different traditions, we speak different languages. In addition, we see a problem in Gale and Wyatt’s description. They argue that they will be practicing Deleuze’s concepts in their writing (Wyatt et al., 2011, Wyatt et al., 2014), and later they characterize coauthorship using Deleuze’s theory (Gale & Wyatt, 2017). So the question arises whether they do not loop stories, whether they do not fall into a vicious circle—explaining Deleuze later through the example of collective writing, rather than explaining the collective writing itself? We wanted to avoid this—to start an event and . . .

This was in order not to reduce the event immediately to an example, without putting ordering glasses—even post-humanistic ones. Each of us wore their own glasses as an element of his or her early subjectification and subjectifications during other events—Oskar—Anarchist-Marxist-post-Humniastic ones, Paulina—humanistic ones, Marcin—described writing in reference to his own work in an alternative theater, Colette referred to the concept of management, which she was permeated with during her first studies. These subjectifications were important because they brought other experiences and other desires to the experience of cowriting.

To remain in the experience, in the process itself . . . To the above-mentioned description of collective writing, we added a question mark at each turn. We suspended theoretical reflection by submitting to the event itself—to the writing together as such. This is what autoethnography was and is for us—It means staying in the experience, neither smoothing it, ordering it according to an academic view, nor jumping to the soothing level of theory. It was in experience—It was the experience.

For us, collective autoethnography activates what is congealed. It problematizes the “I” and “we,” it shows productions and revives rhizomes. As part of our problem, what is “I,” what is “we,” who says what, who feels what, who writes what have become more and more problematic.

Initially, our text was supposed to be a praise, a kind of manifesto, a joyful indication of the power of the collective word. However, a problem appeared: Was it really the way we thought it was while we were carried away by euphoria? We began to consider and recall what had happened before as well as closely observe our current writing. It turned out that by submerging ourselves in writing, we had discovered its less bright faces such as the dark aspects of power, exclusions and voice monitoring by “autoethnographic canon,” philosophical fashions or issues of voice intimacy, the method of writing, and compromise (Tamas, 2014). However, this is not the subject of our consideration in this short contribution. Neither are the issues connected with the combination of stories, the technical problems of presence and nonpresence in real and virtual space (Sakellariadis et al., 2008), the circulation of materials and the breakdown of interpretations, and silencing related to the placement in social and cultural space. These problems did not undermine our intention, but they enabled us to add something new to the excessively euphoric literature about collective writing or (co)autoethnography (Pelias, 2005; Speedy, 2012). In this literature, it is the narrative that seems to be one-sided, and what is being erased is how full of violence, conflicts, suffering, and darkness collective writing can be. Such a narrative leads to the romanticization of collective writing (St. Pierre, 2014).

Our biggest “mistake,” which led us to the inexpressible, was submerging in the writing itself, writing as becoming, the very process of it. We were interested not so much in the technical process of writing and its organization, which was sometimes chaotic in nature, but rather in the process of writing as a process of transforming, changing, as a specific didactic process, an event—how it works, how it transforms us, what relationship it creates with surroundings, with academia, journals, and terms of publication.

Our approach assumed that each process of writing is both a new writing and a new event (for the singularity of the event and the relationship between events, see Massumi, 2011). Something that at first seemed to us a unity, a single event, turned out to be a multiplicity. Not only in the sense that our previous collective writings could be presented, problematized, or interpreted in different ways; sometimes they appeared to be one thing and sometimes another. The problem was that the very writing about events became another event, which generated more and more subsequent events. Writing has become the practice of the constant generation of multiplicity. Every time our text became a new text; something that we treated as a writing machine (Deleuze & Guattari, 2003) became a multitude of writing machines, the relationship between which was and is unclear to us. This multiplication of events and adding the subsequent layers of writing raised several problems.

The first one is the issue of the sequence: writing about writing, and writing about writing concerning writing about writing. . . The next meeting is another entry, another layer of writing that transforms and creates something new. Seemingly, it is only the appearance of the already known feature of collective writing as an infinite and constantly open process (Gale & Wyatt, 2017, p. 362; Guttorm, 2012, p. 595; see also Pensoneau-Conway, Bolen, Toyosaki, Rudick, & Bolen, 2014, p. 314). Seemingly, because the recognition of this as a uniform process, and not as individual events, is already an assumption imposed on what is happening. This is a certain conviction, which is also related to a linear and progressive record of experience. Meanwhile, it is quite possible that each moment is a separate moment which requires consideration without being treated a priori as an element of one process. In our experiments, we were not able to determine whether individual projects constituted any continuity. Nor were we able to ascertain whether our collective writing constituted one coherent whole or rather many different writings. Even a simple indication of basic “machinic indexes” (Deleuze & Guattari, 2003, p. 47) presents a significant difference. Limiting ourselves to the reconsideration of meetings within the framework of this project, we observed that despite a fixed number of participants, the meetings were variable. The first meeting: four bodies in one place, no equipment which could be the medium except for sheets of paper, pens, and laptops for note taking. The second meeting: Colette is absent from the body; first he is on the phone, then on the computer, then on the phone again, first one, then the other; there is also a voice recorder, notes. The third meeting: Marcin on the computer, voice recorder, lots of notes and books, a larger share of “external voices,” that is, texts concerning co-autoethnography and collective writing, which are read, and through which we filter what we wrote. The meetings are not everything that creates our cowriting, but there is also a collective chat and an online text editor, where discussions are held. How does all this relate to meetings? We can obviously cite Deleuze and Guattari: this and this and this and . . . (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987) belong to our writing machine. Next elements were simply added to improve its functioning. Such an approach would ensure the unity of our experience and authorize speaking about becoming and about considering writing as a process of continuity. However, first of all, the strategy “and . . . and . . .” is not a strategy of revealing and showing sense, but it is a strategy of becoming invisible (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987; see Düttmann, 2002). Second, our autoethnographic approach undermines “the philosophical optimism.” We observed breaks that could indicate not only improvement but also the construction or functioning of another machine. For example, Oskar experienced loneliness while writing in an online text editor. After the second meeting, during which he was a part of the writing collective, he withdrew until the third meeting. Then he began to read texts related to collective writing and works connected with the university’s projects. The shift, even if treated as a uniform machine, triggered other experiences and other approaches to writing the text: from being inside the text, in the process of writing, lonely despite being collective due to the connection with the project, with the collective text presented on the computer screen, to the communal being without writing, where writing itself becomes something that functions alongside, in favor of speech and speaking about writing, the physical presence; and another shift, where we functioned on the fringes of text and speech as well as the writing community, where the dominant feeling was a distanced indifference, dictated not so much by the events within the framework of collective writing as by external factors, such as writing a book and correcting articles, which are part and parcel of the university employee’s obligations. However, the difference between these shifts cannot be reduced only to the opposition: physical presence/online presence. Oskar observed that between the second and third meetings, there was a difference in his experience: during the third meeting, having reported on the articles he had read, he became a carrier of the “expert voice” that separates itself and prioritizes the writing community. By checking the records of conversations from the second and third meetings, it is difficult to see whether the second meeting forced or provoked the appearance of the “expert voice.” It rather resulted from the idea of publishing a text in a certain journal, not from the dynamics of writing. Furthermore, topics and problems raised during the second meeting were also discussed in the third meeting. And every time the question appeared: What are we writing about?

We are inclined to believe that each time we had to deal with a new representation and a new machine, as well as a new text. This was revealed in the way of its growth: The text was not just developing but rather swelling, being filled with further remarks, observations. Moreover, it went beyond the structure, creating autonomous fragments, subsequent dimensions, and it unraveled in discussions that flooded “pure” ³ words; into the act of writing itself, or more precisely, into a series of acts of writing, taken and interrupted accidentally, more often by external interventions (duties at work, examinations, holidays, illnesses) than by their own hardening.

The abovementioned problems raised the question: If we have a number of acts of writing, single events that are elusive and variable, quickly changing into new events, if on the one hand this process is infinite, open, and on the other hand, it constitutes separate processes, single, unique, as well as open, infinite, or rather flashes, how can we write an article about the experience of writing co-autoethnography?

The first remark which appeared and which seems to be obvious: There is not one experience of writing co-autoethnography, but there are many different experiences. We do not want to generalize it in any way. These are our experiences. Probably the fact that we are from the periphery, both in the local and global sense: A peripheral university and a peripheral country, where autoethnography is not remarkably widespread, especially evocative autoethnography, ⁴ affects our work. We feel like guerrillas, conspirators, and we stick together like the followers of a secret and persecuted sect, and the writing: Writing is our holy mass. However, the problem is more complicated. It is not only about how to inscribe our experience into one text. Our experience is a multitude of experiences and the unknown arrangement of these experiences; it is constantly budding, changing; it is the very act of writing. Although, of course, the reduction of our writing to the form of an article, even with the assumption of creating a messy text, requires some criterion of cutting and arranging, selecting and silencing, some reduction and breakage of rhizomes. These rules are established by the journal in which we would like to present the text, by the environment and prevailing customs (even when it is a habit to break them, this is carried out, as the poet used to say, within the limits of the law). The problem is that when we paused our writing, the text did not reflect our experience. The very experience of writing as writing slipped away, as if the constant adding of new layers was to preclude all forms of reification so that the empty shells of words did not simulate the living forms. It seems to us that when the act of writing is paused, there is silence and there are some forms left, but they are not the same as the act of writing which, as an act, remains elusive.

Let’s say it again. The problem was not connected with the fact that we silenced a certain story—“to tell some story [is] simultaneously compelled not to tell others” (Guttorm, 2012, p. 595; see also Lewis, 2017) that there were some blank details or missed perspectives. It was not just that: “Meanings are always in motion, incomplete, partial contradictory. There can never be a final, accurate, complete representation of a thing, an utterance or an action. There are only different representations of different representations” (Denzin, 2013, p. 354). The problem was that our story became impossible to tell at all. Our stories either did not say anything when they were read or they said something else—for example, about a conflict with an academic writing, entanglements in an alienating system. As if our experiences were impossible to be expressed in words and written down. Moreover, the problem was not connected with the closeness, lack of a proper distance—the distance did not brighten anything—it distracted and dispersed. Could our writing about experiencing writing here and now, at this moment, be revealed only through emptiness?

It seems to us that the recurring question of what we are writing about reflected the abovementioned impossibility to express our experience in words, our collective presence among words. It indicated that we had reached certain limits. As if by asking this question, we were informing ourselves that we were not writing about what we had assumed.

It was as if the composition of writing bodies, the writing desire, escaped all consciousness, all knowledge—a conatus escaping the regimes of knowledge/language/power in the joy of becoming (Spinoza, 2002; see also Deleuze, 1988; Gale & Wyatt, 2017).

Within the framework of our works, we have noted the differences between writing co-autoethnography regarding, for example, studying (Kaczmarczyk et al., in print) or the problem of lecture (Szwabowski & Wężniejewska, 2017) and co-autoethnography concerning the process of writing co-autoethnography. However, we are not talking about meta-reflection on something that is already given, but we want to write down something that is happening: revealing the very writing in writing. In the writing of co-autoethnography there was something more, something that did not directly break through the text, did not reveal, did not exist on the margins. This is something that is not expressed directly—This invisible margin causes us to prefer co-autoethnography. Something that is present for us mainly in co-autoethnography rather than in conventional collaborative writing, which has a corporate and professional nature based on the distribution of work and the separation of theoretical matter from the researcher’s existence. This is communization: co-autoethnographic writing as a specific act of writing. It is something that generates some forms of community; it becomes a friendly dispute where words themselves become carriers and supporters of the act of being together. In our co-autoethnographic writing, the most communal moments of writing were at the same time the least precise, the most chatty, free and full of rhizomes. And, paradoxically, they barely expressed this communality in words.

The flow of “pure” words—the intensification of co-writing, the joy of the event that rejoices in itself (see Massumi, 2011), all the more it eluded the requirements of a text, not only an academic one, but of any text—“pure” words escaping graphic representations—a meaning being created in the writing-being, got diffused in the record. A dance of words without a melody—lively-(non)-rhythmicity—sparks and acceleration—“an idiot’s speech”? (Stengers, 2005)—and . . . —pure words?—or maybe a language that has strayed from its course—Who has spoken? What has spoken?—. . .—“nothing is less within men’s [sic!] power than to hold their tongues” (Spinoza, 2002, p. 281).

Oskar interrupts the fun. The flow of the autoethnographic writing machine is cut by the publishing machine (Deleuze & Guattari, 1983).

It is possible that because co-autoethnographic writing about writing co-autoethnography becomes an act in which we care about and develop friendship, it also becomes something intangible and inaccessible to the trained eye of the researcher—just like friendship. Considering the issue of friendship, Giorgio Agamben indicates that it is something which is so close that it falls outside concepts or any form or representation (Agamben, 2004, p. 4). Friendship that does not refer to any object or feature, being a sense and a practice, is only a practice and a sense. It seems to us that in the case of our cowriting, we can only practice it without being able to say what it is—It is an experience so immanent that it opposes all representation. Moreover, it cannot be reduced to intersubjectivity “that chimera of the moderns” (Agamben, 2004, p. 6). ⁵ Friendship is something that should not be talked about, which is emphasized by the example of Agamben, who tried to write about friendship with his friend. This attempt ended in silence (Agamben, 2004, p. 2, see Mościcki, 2012, pp. 231-237). For us, this impossibility manifests itself in the inability to write a text without the betrayal of experience and community. ⁶

It should be noted that our aim was not to write a text about how we—some entity—understand friendship or writing, or more precisely, friendly writing. Our intention was not to seek individual or social constructs. We are not, and were not, interested in how friendship affects the acquisition of data (Taylor, 2011; Tillman-Healy, 2003). Furthermore, we did not mean to write how we understand writing or our communal existence, or the analysis of the relationship between you and me in the context of writing (Pensoneau-Conway et al., 2014). We were not interested in opinions about collective writing (Day & Eodice, 2001; Lunsford & Ede, 1986). What was supposed to be the subject was the experience itself, the becoming, the way in which friendship and writing manifest themselves and happen, and where the entities are created and located within the framework of representations in which writing as the practice of friendship takes place. Our writing is a friendly writing, not writing about friendship as a thing or writing as a thing; it is the process itself.

Our project put us in front of the question whether in the face of a specific collective autoethnographic writing (see Winkler, 2018, p. 239) mentioned above—immersed in its own creation and its happening—this act itself and experiences related to it are something inexpressible, impossible to present and possible only in practice. We can write collectively about something, but is the collective writing in the spirit of autoethnography about the collective writing an unfeasible project?

Our doubts could be reduced to the matter of the postmodernist impossibility of reflecting the experience. We know that every entry is creation and reference, not reflection. And we have seen this. Our multimonth writing creates us as a group, creates a text, a story. However, the action itself is something completely elusive. And it can only happen on condition that we do not write about it. It is created not so much by writing as by nonwriting (D’Hoest & Lewis, 2015) or maybe . . .

There is also a strategy, which we have considered, of writing about collective writing at the level of a philosophical abstraction. Such a shift, if it is scientifically fertile and thus enables us to write a text, is in fact the imposition of theoretical grids with which we are trying to recognize and organize what is happening. The grids do not so much explain as create; they originate from what is known, seeing a reflection-example in what is going on. Reality becomes a reflection of philosophy. In the text, during the writing process, theoretical assumptions are implemented. In such a case, different theories neither show us various aspects nor highlight other areas. They do not show anything but themselves.

Such a strategy can be found in the texts concerning collective writing, where it is perceived as something general, sometimes wrapped in words such as friendship or love. This is deprived of a specific reference; it reveals fragile or/and wishful nature of certain concepts, as well as the description of collective writing. We also dealt with something like that when at the beginning Oskar wrote a poem about the collective writing of autoethnography. After a few months, it turned out that his enthusiastic text, full of beautiful and lofty words, is not entirely consistent with what is happening; we gave this fragment the title of “naive rhyme” and we left it as a petrified relic: something that provoked the journey rather than being the movement in itself.

Another strategy would consist in cutting and distancing. ⁷ Our writing would have to become foreign to us. Our writing would have to become a cool analysis of something that once happened to someone. However, there are a few problems. First of all, this process would have to be somehow captured in words, to be revealed in some other way than through action. Meanwhile, it reveals itself only in action, at a given moment. Second, if we distanced ourselves, we would be different entities. It would be difficult to ask someone about experience because the people who experienced this passed away with it. Anyway, the question how someone understands his or her experience is already something different from experience, and not in the sense that it constitutes an incomplete and dirty approach connected with a specific perspective, always incomplete, changeable, but in the sense that it is the voice of the entity, and not of becoming, the voice that surrenders to the illusion of subjectivity (see Mazzei, 2016).

Another strategy could consist in the analysis of what has been left. Notes, unfinished articles, recordings of conversations. However, the process itself would be a lifeless fossil, something without action. It would be like a vampire (Denzin, 2013). A vampire would suck life out of us while turning us into a thing. Moreover, a vampire would transform us into its zombie by adding the meanings of which it is the master. There is no process here; there is only death.

It could be said that friendly writing, like Friday from Coetzee’s novel, is without language. Only different people write their meanings on it. He becomes them, simultaneously revealing that he is not them. Friday dances a completely meaningless and aimless dance (Coetzee, 2010).

In the abovementioned strategies, the sense seems to be transmitted from the outside. It does not emanate from the experience itself whereas the experience seems to be silent. And it even ceases to be what is happening. There is recording, the addition of new layers of meanings, and not the trigger of the voice of happening. When we try to express the writing itself and the flashes of communality, it disperses and disappears. There are only black marks left, scattered on the whiteness of paper.

Our friendly writing is something that is happening; it is written without writing. After many hours of conversations, after writing over thirty pages, and after months of sitting in front of the screen and in front of each other, there was not any text-thing, any article, but only the entered characters which are something accidental, a side effect. Did we really get to the limit or maybe . . . Finally, it is not that we do not experience, because we do experience, but . . .

It is possible that our friendly writing is a practice which cannot become a research, and which escapes every power, including the power of sense; it becomes a pure means, a way of being that is constantly becoming—without any purpose other than becoming—the collective writing. Thus, we should reformulate the call for the collective writing inquiry and through collective writing, in favor of the call for the exodus from the regimes of cognition, giving meanings as forms imprinted in the mechanism of reification. Friendly writing becomes a study among friends: nonoperative and nonwriting community (Lewis, 2013).

This would mean a radical shift: In friendly writing, the desire would not move along and create a line of cognition, but it would move on a different line—a line of . . . . Therefore, the impossibility of knowing and expressing, which we have postulated, should not be treated as something negative, as a problem that needs to be solved, but as something positive, as a way of emancipation. In other words, our reformulation, from collective writing as inquiry (McKinght, Bullock, & Todd, 2017) toward collective writing as non-inquiry, is not only a suggestion of a slight shift of the accent, but a radical reversal of the desire connected with the practice of writing, which can also affect the process of collective writing itself.