Mixed Doubles: Collaborative Writing, Peripheral Strategies and some Friendly Serve-Volley

Background: The essay, as a mode of nonfiction writing that foregrounds the embodied, situated position of the essayist, has its roots in the concept of the Western humanist individual subject as ‘Man’. In light of posthumanist, feminist, queer and critical race studies critiques of the latter as a construct underpinning systems of domination and exploitation, how can the essay’s affordances as a techne for staging uncertainty and multiplicity be deployed to suggest and test new forms of nonfictional account that enact and embody ethical, relational practices? This work extends research into ‘cross-over writing’ (MECO Network 2019), ‘essayesque dismemoir’ (Murray 2017) and ‘essaying as method’ (Carlin 2019). Contribution: This work’s contribution lies in proposing a model for a collaboratively written essay in which nested cycles of multiplicity and dialogic relationality are playfully enacted. The work draws upon the spatial and visual affordances of the Research Catalogue publishing platform for artistic research to re-imagine the form of the essay as a de-centred, plural text in which several voices are braided in fragmented, reflective dialogues. Framed as ‘documentation’ of a performance essay delivered by the authors that ‘reported upon’ a contrasting pair of artistic research projects, the work suggests how the essay as ethical performance of relationality rather than expression of individuality can challenge Eurocentric norms for articulating scholarly knowledge. Significance: This essay was published in RUUKKU, a multidisciplinary, multilingual, peer-reviewed journal on artistic research based in Finland, which extends artistic research through innovative multimedia publication alongside the international Journal for Artistic Research. One reviewer commented: ‘I found the use of multiple views particularly important...The whole exposition has a special forward-looking attitude that gives an idea of becoming, and imaginary choices of living in the future.’