The production of the academicwritingmachine

Abstract

Abstract:The organisational territory of academia has become heavily gridded by consuming requirements to produce publications that 'count'. To survive, the scholar must plug herself into this machine -a heaving, monstrous academicwritingmachine. She must invest libidinal energy into the process of counting if she desires to be counted. This troubles us, who write for both 'work' and 'pleasure', who

Cyborgs, desiring-machines, bodies without organs, and Westworld: Interrogating academic writing and scholarly identity

“…The binary between organism and machine, human and robot, real and imagined, is transgressed, blurred, and erased in Westworld, echoing Henderson et al's (2016) and Riddle's (in press) notions of the academic writer's own mechanistic compliance to the machine of academia.…”

“…The reference to "mechanistic moves" and "packaging and sale" construct academic writing as a neoliberal machine concerned with performance and metrics. Henderson, Honan, and Loch (2016) channel Deleuze and Guattari's desiring-machine to explore the academicwritingmachine and the ways scholars may desire to both be ruled by, and to break, the machine. In a world in which academic writing is critiqued and measured at every turn, Henderson et al note that academics are shaped by their interactions with the world of publication, citation, and performance.…”

Blogging as a method of inquiry

“…Blogging is communal; I continuously am a record of my becoming, linking to the becoming of others. Furthermore, the power over the production of knowledge so long corralled by the academicwritingmachine (Henderson, et al, 2016) is intersected. Blogging is open access, it can employ various modes and genres of communication, and it invites the audience in to be an active part of the process of knowledge making.…”

“…This method employs elements of expressivist composition theory, process composition theory, and the Deleuzean inspired reading-writing assemblage theory outlined by St Pierre (2014). Like Henderson, Honan, and Loch (2016), this paper seeks to deconstruct the academicwritingmachine and reconstruct it in another way. But blogging also adds a new perspective on the composition on writing online.…”

“…Pierre (2014), and Haraway (1992) and begun to build a Deleuzean assemblage (1980/1987) of what it means to be a scholar online. I have begun to write minor texts (Barnes, in press) Deleuze, Guattari & Brinkley, 1983) within the academicwritingmachine (Henderson, Honan, & Loch, 2016). I have learnt that I do not have to deliberately stand separate from the text, that there is an ethical as well as scholarly connection between: authors past, present and future, fiction and nonfiction; my communities and those I write into being by writing about them; editors and critical friends; the Academe; the writing machine, both Deleuzian and cyborgic.…”