Writing on Writing is a Method of Encounter. Correspondences with Ursula K. Le Guin and the World [Redux]

Main Article Content

Damien A. Bright
Diego Antolinos-Basso

Abstract

What can writing as creative practice teach us about writing as a research method? By examining the technique of ‘writing on writing’ in the textual theory of Ursula K. Le Guin, this article investigates writing as a dynamic and open-ended tool that gathers author(s) and text(s), and inquiry and world. This technique motivates ‘correspondence’, in the twofold sense of learned exchange and conceptual alignment. We analyze and enact ‘writing on writing’ by making one version of our argument (the spoken script of a conference presentation) into the starting point for another (the written text of the present article). Layered annotations and comments show how revision, review, response, and exchange collapse the form and content of research, pulling focus on its presence (for the ‘author’ in action) and consequence (for the ‘world’ under description). If writing is a tool for thinking, what is learned in the spacetime of hesitation between draft and text? What kind of reading practice follows when a text is finite and open-ended, provisional and iterative?

Downloads

Download data is not yet available.

Article Details

How to Cite
Bright, D. A., & Antolinos-Basso, D. (2020). Writing on Writing is a Method of Encounter. Correspondences with Ursula K. Le Guin and the World [Redux]. Diseña, (16), 88–123. https://doi.org/10.7764/disena.16.88-123
Section
Original Articles (part 1)
Author Biographies

Damien A. Bright, The University of Chicago

MA in Political Sociology, Sciences Po. MA in Anthropology, The University of Chicago. PhD candidate, Department of Anthropology at The University of Chicago. He is completing a dissertation entitled 'Whither the Reef? Marine Futures at Extinction’s Edge', which examines the way global heating is pressuring practical reasoning and experimental intervention in favor of Australia’s Great Barrier Reef. By building a conversation across science studies, media theory, and the anthropology of ethics, this inquiry investigates how and why the very idea of mass extinction is recasting the practices, promises, and publics of environmental research. His investigation is driven by the questions that arise when the subjects and objects of research come to share in a fate.

Diego Antolinos-Basso, Sciences Po

BA in Linguistics, Université de Nice Sophia-Antipolis. MA in Computational Linguistics, Université Paris-Diderot. He is a Research Engineer at the Sciences Po Center for Political Research (CEVIPOF). As part of the Chaire d’excellence junior USPC (Research Chair for Political Behavior, Université Sorbonne Paris Cité), he is developing mixed qualitative and quantitative research tools for analyzing political party publications, media interactions, and social connections (automated online data collection, social media scraping and text aggregation). For CEVIPOF, and in collaboration with the Sciences Po médialab, he contributes to the design, formulation, and analysis of social science data experiments and is co-organizer of the research methods seminar MetSem and the research methods workshop METAT. He is co-author of 'Why has the Debate on #EuropaCity not Taken Place on Twitter?' (with F. Paddeu, N. Douay, and N. Blanc; RESET 7) and 'Does Anything Dive? Up/Against Diving as Metaphor for the Anthropocene' (with R. Kimmey, to be published in Techniques et Culture, Vol. 74), among others.