Cirrus@Austlit

'Corrupted, cherry-picked, and compromised; three derogatory terms used to describe permutations in knowledge across disciplinary boundaries. Yet some of the 20th century’s most lauded ‘incorruptible’ French thinkers, Derrida, Deleuze and Foucault, were celebrated for their disobedient interlacing of concepts from biology, mathematics, linguistics, and literature. How might we approach corruption, not as a failing, but a hallmark of knowledge transformation? 

'This hybrid essay engages with the visual and linguistic poetics of much translated French thinkers, Cixous, Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari, while activating contemporary creative techniques offered by Legacy Russell in Glitch Feminism (2020) and Quinn Eades in ‘Écriture Matière: A Text That Matters’ (Quinn 2015). Structured in five parts, the text draws on Russell’s call to embrace the errant powers of the glitch that destabilise binary systems crossing technology and culture, as they are performed through postdigital bodies entangled in practices both online and ‘away from keyboard’ (AFK) (2020:15). Building on Russell’s proposition, this text considers how glitching can be harnessed across languages and postdigital textualities, using playful techniques of mistranslation to resist closed systems of interpretation enforced though hierarchal systems of knowledge control. At the same time, the text explores Quinn’s approach to écriture matière, as a “writing of the material, of matter” that seeks to open to “proliferation of écritures”, or ways of writing the body (2015: 10). Specifically, this essay composes with material fragments of writing circulated through canonical bodies of western thought. Remixing fragments of the photographed bodies of French Theory, ‘cherry-picked’ citations and typographic overlays, it toys with closed economies of citation that both constrain and seed future ways of knowing and being. Through these creative experiments, the work expands upon traditions of bricolage (Levi-Strauss, 1962), while intersecting with contemporary e-literature practices that navigate the affordances of glitch poetics (see Jones, 2022). 

'The piece expands the author’s transdisciplinary practice, which is informed by her position as multi-racial cisgendered woman, whose writing is heavily informed by a language in which she is fluent, but that is not (and will never be) her own (Derrida 1998) – French. Initially trained in scholarly traditions of abstract theory, her creative research uses text and image across different formats (including curated exhibitions, live programs, poetry and essay forms) to experiment with materialities of thought, where the latter emerges through ecologically, socially and technologically entangled bodies. Inasmuch, this text does not escape hierarchical binaries, but explores her experience of their pervasive operation across different axes of cultural and economic privilege. In doing so, it considers ways we survive within these systems (often to our own detriment), while offering glimpses of resistance, where meaning is yet to be foreclosed.' (Publication abstract)