Re-turning as a ‘circulating practice’: How to re-turn to the artefacts, memories, reflections, experiences generated by the score/prompt What Resists? How to re-turn to our experience of writing-reading together, as a collaborative practice in-and-of itself? We agreed to take some time to re-turn to the materials that we had generated in relation to the score What Resists? , whilst also trying to bring to mind again the experience of writing together in the square. We came together online on ZOOM [31 MAY 2023] to practice re-turning together.
RE-READING PRACTICE (SEE zoom recording RIGHT)
We each took turns to read aloud a section of the text that we each had generated in response to the score/prompt What Resists? It could be a fragment or a section or a longer length of the text. We continued going around the circle until everyone has 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, and revisiting the practice and site of the square.
SPEAKING CIRCLE — A CONVERSATION
We then each took turns to speak/reflect in relation to the score/texts/experience of What Resists? The ‘Speaking Circle’ adapts a model based on Nancy Kline’s ‘thinking environment’ or ‘time to think’ approach, where individuals are provided a period of time of uninterrupted time for thinking-speaking.1 It was possible to stay silent, to pause, to speak single words or fragments, to use more than one language. We activated three ‘circles’ or ‘rounds’ where in each round we had 5 minutes thinking-speaking time.
1. See Nancy Kline, Time to Think: Listening to Ignite the Human Mind, (London: Cassell, 1999).
BELOW: We present a reworked transcript from the Speaking Circle (A conversation) as a further attempt to explore way of collaborative writing. We have highlighted sections of the transcript (which feel pertinent to both our own enquiry and the notion of 'circulating practices' more broadly), and redacted out other parts (that felt tangential).
What resists – speaking circle
In hindsight, I had to think of the role of humour and the relation between humour and resisting. And I was also transported back to the moment in the square and when I saw and looked at this text again that is supposed to be mine, I thought, what was I doing? I was resisting or I was lazy, I was not really attending to the task. I just hopped onto these two little girls on the square and when I read this now I wonder – what is this kitschy, strange relic of time that I produced back then. But When I hear CELVA’s text, CELVA which is the communal us, together — it is just beautiful to see how at the very same time, someone else was doing something and it was in the same score. The same situation, the very same space, but acting and reacting very differently. And somehow doing the work, more attending to what … do OK, I am trying not to be lazy now and to think about ‘What Resists?” score. OK, I try to continue, I started with the relation of Humour and resistance, and what is it that also insists and resists in language? Andrea focused very much on what was behind her, behind her, or out. She spoke about what was physically behind her back and there was one sentence that kept on coming back to me which was “siempre hay un ass en asiento”, which means “There is always an ass in (a) seating”. So in this mix of Spanish and English, it is so beautiful how you bring in the body in language.
This brings in what is at stake when we write, when we are physically there, but at the same time, in writing something, creating something that is on the paper, and we look at the letters. And this is very different, To write ‘in one’s room’ or being in the square, and being an object also of sight, being an object that can be seen by others. And sometimes it is the very ineptness of that space, how you are seated, as there is no proper seating it makes one much more aware of The physicality of writing or of one’s own body. Yes, and I said there is almost, I am not sure how to call it, a dialectics of, I think I called it a ‘contradiction’ in the beginning — by naming what is resisting, and yet by naming it, by languaging it, we are summoning it into being, in language. Like the ‘bleached colours of the flag’. So we are un-escaping it, or we are writing it in, and at the same time as noticing we bring out what resists. Yes, it is kind of strange listening to the readings again – How it is to be transported back into the space? back into the square, and it is strange what comes to mind. The light, the quality of light, or the evening, was very present as I was listening and in a weird kind of way there was a strong sense of melancholy somehow and loss. Something about this attempt to attend and write and note, and attend through language to what unfolding in the square and yet this recognition of the impossibility of that.
And yes, not only a sense of What resists but also what is lost? Maybe there is something about this resistance that has a double dimension to it — on the one hand, there is an active resistance, as in that which does not wish to be recorded, that wilfully resists representation or capture in language. And then that which slips or seeps past in a way. And I guess, you know, In a way the physical architecture of the space remains, it is the physical architecture of the square that stays reasonably constant.But All of the life of the square slips by somehow, is changing all the time, is resisting that kind of representation. in a sense. So I was thinking about this relationship between this particular score, What Resists? and Acousmatic. AndIn Acousmatic there was this struggle or this dilemma or this wrestle to find a linguistic correspondence for sound and how hard this was, this translation of sound into language, and the search for a language to give articulation to these sounds, these sounds with no sources. And here, in this score, it also feels that There is a dilemma or a struggle, yes, an attempt being made to somehow find ways of bringing experience into language. This lived experience, this passing of life which is somehow ungraspable — which is not in the architecture, or the cobbles, or the buildings, or the signs; which is always animating the square but which is liquid and mercurial and hard to grasp in a way. So this sense of melancholy but also, I don’t know, something that is very beautiful in this act of attending to all of these lives. Like the lives of those girls that you were describing – I can see them now walking across the square. And there is something very delicate and fragile about attending to all of these almost like minor moments, these life lines in a way within the square. And yet at the same time recognising the impossibility or the limitations of language. Or even that sense that language might risk almost stifling the life that it tries to attend to. Always this risk that writing solidifies into these nouns and things, and all of the flux, all of the aliveness, there is always a risk that this is lost or stifled or evacuated in a way.
But yes, I was thinking about this tension between, This relationship between, on the one hand, To write with the experiential or to write with this present tense, attending to this now which is constantly unfolding so fast all of the time, a kind of now unfolding so fast that I miss it, I keep missing it. On the one hand, I cannot write fast enough, on the other, it is futile. When I look at my notes, I have also written down the score as ‘What escapes’, ‘What escapes description’, ‘What is left out?’. And I also wrote that we were standing in a line and the score was to write for three minutes and then to walk forwards I guess, with ten steps. So the score had a certain space and movement to it. Today when I read my text, I found that it was for me, a somewhat difficult score to be there. That I kind of went in and out of the score in concentration, and maybe this has also to do with the actual score, with what resists. But I also think of the, kind of the materiality of writing and the writing in the public space, where you have no means of, in a way, the biggest test is the lack of control. And even the lack of control of my own concentration.
So on the one hand, there is the materiality or the moment of being there., and on the other, as you said Emma, There is a certain delicacy and fragility to the writing. It is as if the writing is trying to kind of touch — as was going to say grab, but then it is not about grabbing with words. It is about finding a proximity and a way to write according to the score. My thoughts also went to Perec and what he writes in the preface, An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris. He is saying that he is not going to write about the ‘monuments’ but he is going to write about ‘the rest’. And what is ‘the rest’? And in a way, He is placing writing away from the monumental, away from the architectural, concrete, cobble-stone- dimensions, and instead to the more ephemeral, to the infra-ordinary.
I also come to think that We are one day and one year apart from the writing, and this is one more dimension that is layered with this practice of collective writing. And in a way, Also now when I tried to go back to the writing itself, there is also the time in between. And something that resists me going back. And I am also thinking if the square would have a say here in this conversation — what would it say or how would it breathe? And I am thinking of, I guess I really like the cobble stones, and I am thinking if the cobble stones can really remember all the events that have played out on the market square and does the memory change being on the market square. As I was reading the square, the score, that day, what Cordula has pointed out, I couldn’t remember where I was, or how I was thinking at that time. What we did yesterday when we read out yesterday’s scores, on the Acousmatic score, I could very well place myself in that same situation. But today, even though I fragmented the text and read it in several parts, It was almost like I couldn’t recollect how I was feeling or what I was really seeing, and even reading things which were not really bringing to memory the sensation of that time, doing this exercise. And, and, also the relationship of writing now, since 2020, in the same spot or around the same place, I often think about the relationship it has developed with the place. In a way, that despite the revisiting it is almost like one has to force oneself to, or I have to really force myself to situate myself there and start observing.
So sometimes I often feel I create a rather unrealistic … In the sense that I am not really feeling very interested in what is happening in the square but as the exercise I am taking a decision to very much to embed myself in that space, and to experience it in all possible ways. So, to kind of dramatise. or play this extra drama in this sense of exercise, It almost feels as if one is under water and one does not know how to swim. You are just kind of moving your body about thinking maybe this can bring you afloat. If you don’t know what kind of movement can push you up onto the surface of the water. I was reflecting or comparing the repeated squares, the repeated scores, as this movement under water, if one does not know how to swim and sometimes if by fluke or by chance, if the movement is correct, you can come to the surface. And I am just, because we are discussing it, one day after another, I am reminded of the Acousmatic score compared to the What Resists? score, and because of not being able to recollect, or even while reading not being able to understand what is it that I have made a note of. And I definitely, or at least I think from my own writing process, I must have created some kind of a macro score in the writing experience itself, but I don’t seem to find that within the text at this point in time. I really loved, I know it was unintentional, the repeated squares, but I really loved that because my head immediately wanted To think how many squares have I experienced, because they are repeated squares. And also repeated in a sense that they kept happening, or keep. But they are different squares at the same time. So it is repetition of different squares. My head went to think of that. And this notion of the river and the person – never the same river, never the same person. At the same time, a change is needed to stay the same sometimes. And then that connects with what Emma was saying about a nostalgic feeling. I was thinking of that time but at the same time, with Cordula and Vidha, I also did not have the same experience as when reading the text from yesterday. Because with yesterday I could remember the experience of where I was sitting, who was next to me, I could remember the whole, or a lot of it. Whereas with this one, I wrote it in points, and when I was reading it I was wondering, and then when Lena remembered that we were in this straight line, moving with this bodily score, then I could, and I realise I was constructing, and yes,I was constructing my memory from your different things, from what each one remembered, not from my own memory. But then when Emma mentioned notes about the bodily sensation, one the square, and then I went back to think about what I wrote, and about the shadow of the building, about how it felt cold at some point. Because I was in the shade of the building and because of the time. So it was an interesting experience right now, to build this experience from different bits and pieces, from the text, and your memories, and what you were speaking. And also, I had a particular moment in speaking in Spanish, because I know that Cordula understands Spanish, and in that moment, I did feel that I was reading to someone, rather than just reading out loud, which was interesting. And then a thought of what resists, and I was thinking that with this prompt I did not feel it was flowing when I was writing because, because all the time I was open about the square I was resisting it in a way. Also the experience of this communal self that was out there in a way, subjected to the same score and the same task. Yes, taking up those particles and cobble stones, Lena, when you were speaking it was almost that you were fantasising about some trans-historical medium which is the cobblestones, each cobble stone I was imagining it as a trans-historical medium that was able to grasp everything that we are not. And what is it actually, this medium of writing, that is so bound to physical things but then is not. And I was reminded that the score had this parenthesis, I think it says what resists … description and/or storytelling, I read. So it makes me think of those inferred scores that are not spoken out, that we somehow agreed upon without necessarily always repeating them. And one of them is about story-telling, we shall not story-tell because fiction would be too easy an escape into something else, into not somehow attending to the phenomena, to the phenomenality of what is happening at the very same time when we write. Not attending to the here and now, but at those borders where story-telling begins, for example, I see those girls walking by and I felt compelled to follow my imagination, of their being together. And here it is very hard to say where is the storytelling begins. But I also wanted to talk about the other inferred, almost prohibition. Which is to talk about oneself, or perhaps one could talk about it as the psycho-geographic aspects of our exercise, because there is the boundary, the boundary between what is inside and what is outside is blurry indeed. There is a certain light, one comes somehow with a certain energy – I remember now if I go back to this time zone, that I was very stressed, it was shortly before this PhD defence. So all these things, even if they are not supposed to surface, they are there. At least for me in the writing. And yes, I think it is somehow inferred in our exercise, that we attend to what is observed and not what is in us, which would also be very boring, and it would be another exercise. This atmosphere, this inner atmosphere is also there, and I could very much connect to what Emma you mentioned….I mean I think that One needs to differentiate, but I don’t have the time now, between nostalgia and melancholia. But with a certain inner atmosphere, one is tempted to be attracted, to tune into other people’s energies. And I can only speculate now why I was drawn to those girls, and that there were other sensing organisms around that gave a more ample experience of the square. It is an interesting experience today with these technological challenges I am facing as I keep getting booted out of zoom, because There is also something about this delicacy or fragility of thinking that we do together, in this context, but also when we are writing together, that I think requires certain conditions. and To be moved and be able to follow the lines of thinking and ideas that are arising does feel a very delicate choreography in a way. So on the one hand I am thinking about this space of attention, or the conditions of attention that are required for the kind of work we are doing … maybe I will come back to that. Or how easy it is for that to be ruptured and how much of contemporary life has the capacity to rupture that in many ways. There is something about this attempt to capture the fragility of a living space. and I was reminded this morning, when I was thinking about today …. I had not made the connection so explicitly before today, but I was thinking about some of the writing of Hélène Cixous, whose writing I really like and often return to — and how so much of what she talks about in her writing, and what I am drawn to in her writing, has this interest in what resists. Where she talks about trying to capture this quality of the instant, this instant that is disappearing so fast, and how to do that in a way that, as she says is, “touching the mystery with the tips of words and trying not to crush it.” And this sense of approaching, of approaching the thing in its strangeness. And the kinds of, and qualities of patience, that is required for that. So I was thinking a lot about This quality of attention and receptivity. and also yesterday, Lena, You were talking about this passivity, this quality of active passivity, and of a writing that is trying not to grasp but to allow things to come in a way. So it feels that with What resists?, as soon as I enter a grasping languaging, a grasping writing, everything resists. It is like I am trying to grab it so hard that everything squeezes away, like I am trying to hold on to liquid. But if I change the approach to something that is more receptive, it is more like holding a space open for something somehow.
Rather than grabbing it is a more receptive key. And I was also Thinking about Perec, and Perec’s project, and the way in which we might be doing something that has a relationship to that, but also has a difference. And It made me think about the phenomenological dimension of what we are doing — particularly in this sense of trying to get close to the lived experience of a particular place. And here
We take Max van Manen as a reference point and I was thinking about some of his work on phenomenological writing, where he is talking about the need for a poeticising language, an evocative language, a vocative language, to somehow capture … no, not capture, it is so easy to go to this word ‘capture’ when I talk about language … but really to find a language for invoking or evoking or bringing alive again this sense of life. Yes, he says “to express the non-cognitive, the ineffable and pathic aspects that belong to a phenomenon”.So I was thinking about this, that there is some kind of an endeavour there within what we were doing.
And then, I was also thinking about this ‘what resists?’, in terms of our resistance — writing as a kind of resistance. And particularly this kind of very fragile, delicate attention, that writing requires as a kind of resistance, and what kind of resistance that might be. And I think that night of focusing to write, in the town centre, as it was beginning to enter its evening phase, to resist that through this very gentle act of writing. So I think I will continue there about the act of writing, and if the writing itself can be resistance, and in that case, resistance of what, or what does this resistance strive for? OK, so I will try to continue about the resistance, and if collective writing in public space is a resistance, then something that comes in my mind is other types of observational happenings, recordings, on the square and also the new dominant position of facial recognition technology and also how public spaces are recorded by CCTV cameras. I think that a camera that is recording like round the clock, it is still like … I mean I guess I am trying to say that the writerly effort of being there and writing in the square captures something quite different to that of the CCTV camera. And I guess that there is also like a sort of, My mind is now going to the actual observational qualities and if they can be dominant and in that case how does dominant observation effect us being in the square? Meaning, do we look at each other when we pass in the square because we are knowledgeable about CCTV and facial recognition and in that case what kind of presence does collective writing then offer, give instead. I would also like to connect to Cordula and you speaking about storytelling, and I guess for me, it is interesting, because have this what resists, so do not do storytelling.
And I think that There is a small change of concentration when you are close to the phenomena and you are perceiving with your body and your senses, and when does that tip into storytelling, what happens at that very millisecond or even nanosecond when the more present writing becomes storytelling, or if not even storytelling, then writing by association, that I see something that makes me think of something, that makes me write something. So there is a whole process starting from there. So that is maybe the biggest resist, to try to resist that — would it be an urge, or something that easily happens — to really try to stay in that mode when I am perceiving. I am not even trying to grasp or understand, I am perceiving what is happening on the market square. And when I think about the process of writing in those terms I am thinking about not externalising the writer, so when we stay close to what is happening on the market square we are actually present there. So in a way the writing does not externalise the writer. But then again I ask now, what is an internalised writer? Is it the voice in the text? Or is it the relationship to the writing itself? And I go back again to this small opening between fiction writing or story-telling and the more observational writing by bodily presence at the square, and I feel that this gap or that interstice is very important there. To kind of, I am not sure if it is possible to notice it, but it really is there, it is a kind of place where writing can change towards, in this case, storytelling. There is really not a lot on my mind other than this word that I am picking up from the conversation is resistance. I am very curious when Emma mentioned that writing solidifies, and for me, I know solidification does not have any quality in itself, but I know I have this tendency of trying to resist that solidification. I think that is why sometimes I have an aversion to defining things because I feel like I can’t, or then that would be it. So I am just, it would be welcome to know what this solidification means to someone else. Because when I think of the text and of writing, it does happen that something gets, I mean, text does not move by itself any more, the letters are there. The ink is not going anywhere, but at the same time, or maybe I am trying to find a way to not have it solid. When reading it, this, there is always morphing or flowing out somewhere, from what is written. Like pursuing a meaning or a memory or going within, so that the letters are not there anymore. And yes, when I was listening to these things about language, I also thought when I am writing, I am always amazed by these situations where we do something automatically. Like when someone drives and you stop kind of like being totally aware that you are driving because you are thinking of something, but you don’t crash, you keep driving, and you are driving well most of the time I hope. Or you are sitting there and looking at the void and there are all these images before you but you are not seeing any of them consciously. Like you are in your head, with these mental images or something like that. And then with writing I was thinking about how we look at the paper and we write and see the letters and the text being built, but at the same time it is like driving in automatic. It is like it is the thoughts that are there and not the text, or maybe half and half, or I don’t know the proportion but then if I think of the square it again becomes something else. Because the things are before each of us and we are trying to write. So it is just thinking of this relationship between writing and seeing and awareness and not necessarily meaning, but what is being dwelt on in that moment. Thinking about the various reflections and also then thinking about what I was reflecting upon before, There seems to be a tendency to loop certain repeated thoughts and in a way trying to present or reflect in a way a comprehensive evidence of what took place. And it comes across also as a way of navigating ways of observation and indulging in a way into those forms of observation. And I think while one is at the square, while one is writing, while one is observing, there is a very present sense of avoiding a possible confrontation, and also a very present sense of creativity. And if one can call it surviving of that time of the square. And it is not to say that one is naively present there or that one is unaware of what could possibly go wrong or not go in the manner that one has decided to take the time, but there is a constant invention and a constant sustaining of these environments. There is also a realisation that what one is writing would immediately become different even if another person was writing at the very same spot as us, so it opens up the various possibilities of how things could happen differently when observed by different people. Not just observation, but also writing what one is observing. There is also a sense of hospitality of the square, even though on the one hand I find it not so interesting, but having placed oneself repeatedly there is the capacity of the square to be hospitable, to kind of separate the writer/reader that is us from its own consequences and series of events, which is quite liberating also. And in that sense, I don’t see it so much as resistance as us being participants or kind of particles in that cosmos. So it also feels like there is no exclusion but this gathering of us writing, also reveals certain long-term preoccupations, what one sees, what one wants to put out in writing, a certain vocabulary especially within the setup of the square, the various squares, the various scores that are being put forward. And then a circulation of those words, now that we read them again, almost a year after having written them.
ABOVE: Recording of our zoom-based Reading Practice. Click to play. Double click to open full screen.
BELOW RIGHT: We present further annotations and comments (the different fonts reflecting our different voices), through which we attempt to continue the dialogue, keep the emerging ideas in circulation. An attempt is made here to 'show' or share an emergent practice of collaborative writing, through its resulting artefacts and documents, rather than necessarily present a text comprising resolved insights, arguments or conclusions.
With regards to live writing as a (literary) genre: It is important to abstain from thinking about text as (a literary) product.
Clarification for the reader: We used the first letters of our first names [CELVA] as a memory aid to remind us of the order during our Speaking Circle. The acronym contains a directionality, a who-when that affects the speaking. Imagine the letters in a circle.
The hospitality of performative writing: Without being announced as performance, to see people writing in public space can become an invitation to heighten or halt the passer-by's attention for what is actually there.
Attempt at comparing: If the walking practice of the Situationists was "a mode of experimental behavior linked to the conditions of urban society: a technique of rapid passage through varied ambiances" (Debord), it seems our practice is feeling-into a place in writing. The strategic vagueness of the score seems crucial here. The writer-drifter must be distracted and called by unexpected things to call his/her attention.
The on-going crossings and layerings in public space makes me address change by writing, this could be "in sync writing". But by doing so I tend to be reminded of being distracted. So, referring to Perec, and the title Attempts at.... or Tentative..., I can try but I cannot succeed in fully reporting the space. I guess, I am thinking of how does this affect me as a writer — knowing that I cannot accomplish even to the extent of admitting that a flop is at stake — and how does this affect my attitude towards the square and its dwellers?
Again related to resistance: Perec and Oulipo's conceptual writing emphasised the formal constraint ("contrainte"). If Perec's strategic aim was to describe that which normally would not be noteworthy, the infra-ordinary. Is this now covered by the 'work' of the surveillance cameras? And is our work then more centred around rendering available what can be experienced with all other senses?
"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. (...) 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.
Constant! We had a discussion on this during a seminar at the Faculty of Education and Welfare Studies as we were talking about a score on writing about what is in stillness and what is moving? What is constant, permanent, still? How do we sense that or how do we register that?
While preparing for the performance Präppla on May 20, we were counting on having the digital clock on top of the building in the corner of Vasaesplanaden and Handelsesplanden as our common nominator. But, it was dismantled. At that point I realised that there are 2 remaining clocks but only one of them is running.
The quality that comes with the writers' presence in the square might be totally independent from what they write. It is hard to tell where writing ends and performance begins. "Luckily the differentiation is unnecessary." Maybe the handwriters stand in for what cannot be retrieved, traced back. For the almost absurd action of contemplating with the help of a pencil?
Failing mnemonic: Is that a sign that the writer was not in contact with the space and/or with herself at that moment? Is it just 'bad writing'? A not-enough-condensed-writing? Or was she just attending to a moment so lose, so minor, so ephemeral that the writing that evolved from it is unable to re-activate the memory?
Moment-Monument: Not writing about monuments but allowing for something to gain momentum. To attend to 'all these minor moments' in writing.
Self-dissolution versus solution: The 'exercise' invites to dramatise, to 'exaggerate the seriousness or importance of the situation'. And it is this energy that is needed to generate intensity. A necessity. However illusionary it might be. Here this is achieved through the means of an analogy: writing = swimming. I need to write and stay afloat against an underwhelming reality.
Site and Self: The collective writing exercise is always also an exercise in self-dissolution and recollection. It does not matter any more whose memory it is/was.
Cixous writes, "Writing: touching the mystery, delicately, with the tips of the words, trying not to crush it, in order to un-lie", in Coming to Writing and Other Essays, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), p. 134.
Does this thought affect the writing?
Through which obstacles/resistances has s/he written, what s/he just wrote?
In "Gestures" Vilém Flusser writes about the resistances and obstacles that define the gesture of writing: 'graphein', the archaic act of scratching into, of inscribing something into a surface already contains the resistance of the matter. Then there is the immense virtuality of that which wants to be expressed. "When it comes to writing, one needs to begin with describing the resistance of the words." The writer in public space, it seems, by being exposed to the contingencies of the environment (and in tension with the score) becomes aware about the gesture of writing itself. Note: We were handwritting, not typing into phones. The archaic act of people handwriting in public space! From: Vilém Flusser: Gesten. Versuch einer Phänomenologie, Frankfurt 1994, p. 36 (translation from German)