Table Of ContentNew Perspectives on Academic Writing
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Alternative | Education
Series Editors:
Bernd Herzogenrath (University of Frankfurt, Germany)
Tim Ingold (University of Aberdeen, Scotland)
Alternative | Education shows how education could be reimagined so as to have its
source in experimentation rather than in a formalized teaching/learning relation, and
as a result focus more on thinking and studying with, rather than thinking and
studying about or of. Th e books in this series off er a much needed idea of education
that does not separate a sphere of “what one has to know” from life, but that brings
life and education together, exploring ways of creating new ideas and new ways of
experiencing the world. Th e series draws together ideas, experiences and research
from across the disciplines but also goes beyond that, focusing on the practice of
interdisciplinarity itself and highlighting the benefi ts this has not just to looking at
theory but in doing theory.
Advisory Board:
Cala Coats (Arizona State University, USA)
David R. Cole (Western Sydney University, Australia)
Jan Masschelein (University Leuven, Belgium)
Also available in the series:
Knowing from the Inside: Cross-Disciplinary Experiments with Matters of Pedagogy,
edited by Tim Ingold
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New Perspectives on
Academic Writing
Th e Th ing Th at Wouldn’t Die
edited by Bernd Herzogenrath
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BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC
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Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
First published in Great Britain 2023
Copyright © Bernd Herzogenrath and contributors, 2023
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Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identifi ed as Author of this work.
For legal purposes the Acknowledgments on p. ix constitute an extension
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Contents
List of Figures vi
Series Editors’ Foreword vii
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction: Th e Th ing Th at Wouldn’t Die B ernd Herzogenrath 1
1 Th e Structure and System of Academic Writing L evi R. Bryant 13
2 Walking on Sunshine Jessie Beier and Jason Wallin 25
3 Science Fiction Devices D avid Burrows and Simon O’Sullivan 39
4 Mythoplasia and Fictioning in Academic Practice: “Writing; Other” L iana
Psarologaki 53
5 [Fill In the Blank] Kalani Michell 61
6 How Can One Be Farocki? R embert H ü ser 85
7 Step 2 Hearing: “Th e Parties Agree to Use Th eir Best Eff orts”.
A Dramatic Academic Work J ennifer Hayashida 99
8 Writing the Unwritable: Raveling Worlds J ulie Vulcan 109
9 Writing In Between A nna Gibbs 121
10 Unwriting for the Anthropocene: Looking at the Disaster from
the Inside . . . D avid R. Cole 137
11 La Mise- en-Ab î me: Placing Academic Writing in Scare
Quotes Mick Wilson 149
12 Abstract Academic Expressionism: An Alternative
Aesthetics of Scholarly Practice Anne Pirrie 161
13 Aff ective Academic Writing Bernd Herzogenrath 173
14 Write to Life Erin Manning 187
List of Contributors 191
Index of Subjects 197
Index of Names 199
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Figures
5.1 Screenshot of Word document / submission “Seeing Crisis in Harry Piel’s
Ein Unsichtbarer geht durch die Stadt (1933)” with an editor’s comment in
the margins and my response. 62
5.2–5.12 All images untitled, from E vidence , 1977, Larry Sultan and
Mike Mandel © Mike Mandel / courtesy of Robert Mann Gallery © Larry
Sultan/ courtesy of Casemore Kirkeby, San Francisco, Galerie Th omas
Zande, Cologne, Yancey Richardson, New York, and Estate of
Larry Sultan. 62–65
5.13 Edited screenshot of website: https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/
news- photo/child- waits-to- be-medivaced- by-u- s-army- soldiers-from-
the-news- photo/95921976 . 69
5.14–5.17 Carolyn Lazard. A Recipe for Disaster , 2018. HD Video. 29 min.
Courtesy the artist and Maxwell Graham/Essex Street, New York. 72–76
6.1 “Meeting Space at a Glance,” (2015), SCMS 2015, Conferessnce Program ,
Fairmont Queen Elizabeth, Montreal. March 25—March 29, 2015, p. 16 85
6.2 Lee, K.B. (2015), “282. Learning Farocki: A Live Desktop Response,”
vimeo , screenshot. 88
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Series Editors’ Foreword
It makes a world of a diff erence, how one derives the etymological origin of the word
education . Whereas the Latin educare points to what we traditionally read as “instilling,”
the alternative e ducere literally means “to lead out.” Th e former suggests an almost
feudal idea of installing socially approved knowledge into the mind of the hierarchically
“lower” pupil; here, knowledge is understood as a corpus that can be transferred (or
even sold) from one generation to the next, in order to produce a certain eff ect in the
latter. Against this “strong” (or dominant) concept of education, “weak” (or minor)
education stems from the idea that knowledge is generated by persons and problems.
Th e task, then, is to create the conditions favorable for knowledge to grow and fl ourish.
Th ese conditions call forth an atmosphere of cooperation, of searching and re-
searching together. Education in this minor sense is about thinking with people, about
working in a spirit of hope rather than unbridled optimism. It is not so much a means
of transmission as a way of “commoning”—of mutual and patient experimentation—
judged not by its ends but by its capacity to inspire new beginnings. In this perspective,
teaching is less a method than a heuristic: a journey into unknown territory. Most
importantly, it is not a study o f , but a way of studying with .
University education is in crisis. In this day and age of “academic capitalism,” and in
the crossfi re of both neoliberal and ultra- conservative perspectives, we need to go
beyond the “negative mode” of criticizing the institutional status quo, and to set out
positive alternatives. Th is means challenging the most fundamental premises of
education itself. As Rita Felski has succinctly put it: “Why . . . is the aff ective range of
criticism so limited? Why are we so hyperarticulate about our adversaries and so
excruciatingly tongue- tied about our loves?” John Cage once commented on the ethical
responsibility of experimenting: “I can’t understand why people are frightened of new
ideas. I’m frightened of the old ones.” Shift ing the register from posited meanings to
aff ective operations, as Brian Massumi has argued, is ultimately an ethical act, since it
means allying oneself to an “ethics of emergence.” An education predicated on
experimentation, instead of clinging to the status quo or to the dominant sense of
education, aims not to raise students upon the platform of where they stand , but to lead
ourselves and our students to a place where we have not yet been , facilitating an
encounter with things beyond the reach of present thought—things which force us to
think, to envision educational futures. As Jacques Ranci è re proclaimed: “let’s make
poetry . . . together.”
To take these ideas seriously, we have to rethink education, less as a “home” to which
one dutifully and habitually returns, than as a form of pedagogical nomadism which
seeks to create encounters and connections for thinking that are dishabituated from
models that already presume how education ought to go. It is along such lines of
experimentation that alternative approaches to education can be explored on behalf of
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viii Series Editors’ Foreword
generations to come, off ering an education that does not separate a sphere of “what one
has to know from life, but that joins the very forces of life—forces that create new ideas,
new ways of experiencing the world. Education becomes a potentiality for exploration
and discovery in a terrain that is ever- unfolding. Here, theory and practice are
inseparable. Could the university, aft er all, be the place where this kind of alternative
education can be put into practice? What if the institution of the university, far from
resting on a bedrock of stability, were itself suspended within a dynamic fi eld of ever-
multiplying relations? Could the university become a “multiversity”? Books in the
series a lternative | education will address these questions.
Bernd Herzogenrath and Tim Ingold
S eries editors
Acknowledgments
I would like to express my gratitude to B loomsbury (in particular Alison Baker) for
giving us and me the opportunity to publish this book and try out “new things.” Th ank
you! also all those wonderful people that contributed to this volume—it has been a
pleasure! Special thanks go out to Yusuf Buhurcu, for all the work you’ve put into this!
I dedicate this book to Janna and Claudia, and to the memory of Frank.
Parts of Bernd Herzogenrath’s introduction and essay already appeared as a part of his
essay “Et in Academia Ego: Aff ect and Academic Writing,” in Ernst van Alphen and
Tom á š Jirsa (eds.). H ow to Do Th ings with Aff ects: Aff ective Triggers in Aesthetic Forms
and Cultural Practices (Leiden: Brill, 2019), 216–4. Reprinted with kind permission.
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