roots§routes is a magazine with an editorial vision announced by its editorial board, which guarantees the quality and coherence of its contents. We consider it crucial to maintain an ongoing receptivity towards any submission of quality, provided it corresponds with the final vision shared among the editors. We therefore not only solicit work from artists and scholars, but also encourage submissions from contributors working in contexts that we do not know directly.
roots§routes announces a Call For Proposals, asking artists and scholars to submit proposals, beginning with the magazine’s theme for the upcoming quarter. Submissions should be sent in the form of an abstract, with a maximum of 350 words, to the following email address: redazione@roots-routes.org, with the subject heading “Article Submission.” Abstracts written in English, Italian, French, Portugues or Spanish are acceptable. In case of interest on the part of the editorial board, an email requesting the full paper will be sent to the author of the abstract. The paper is to be written in the language of the author’s choosing.
The editorial board, upon receiving the full paper, reserves the right to request partial edits, or to reject the piece, in the case that it does not align with the earlier proposal. For those interested in submitting materials, the themes for the upcoming issue of the magazine will be announced on this section of the website.
edited by Anna Chiara Cimoli and Alessandro Tollari
I speak of gods; I am an atheist.
But I am also an artist, and therefore a liar.
Be wary of what I say. I am telling the truth.
Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
On the run from the method
In order to be able to carry out research, one must first define a problem, establish a field of investigation, take a position and find suitable arguments to support the thesis. You need a solid network of bibliographical references in order to be able to perimeter the object of study and the state of the art around the issue; and, furthermore, a method, a coordinated set of steps to transparently address specific and progressive objectives. And you, doing research, should write «as if you never talk to yourself / and avoid yourself» (W. Szymborska, 2009, p. 463), aspiring to neutral subjectivity. This way only it is possible to arrive at the results, which are always expected, and at the production of true and verifiable knowledge. And all the time that is devoted to the production of knowledge is an effort to synthesize the storm of events: a linguistic extraction, an abstraction from the world. A text more durable than bronze – at least until other literature comes to supplant it. A competition against (and out of) the time of life; and against the competitors of the neo-liberal academy. These are the ends, these are the means. There is no alternative. Or is there?
At the discussion of her doctoral thesis, the committee asked Luce Irigaray what method she had adopted to conduct her research. «Delicate question. Because it is precisely the method, the way of knowledge, that has led us astray, that through fraud and artifice has led us astray» (A. Gordon, 2022, p. 66), the candidate replies.
In recent decades, much academic research in the purely humanistic and artistic fields has tried to shake off a self-view heavily marked by the supremacy of the quantitative methods typical of the ‘hard’ disciplines, as well as the qualitative methods typical of the humanities, within a vision of knowledge entirely consistent with the project of capitalist realism in which we live (M. Fischer, 2018). A trip through unknown territories, inhabited by uncertainty, the unexpected, the risk of failure; but also by the exciting possibility of positioning accordingly to one’s own act of knowledge production, not out of personalistic whimsy but out of recognition of the partiality of perspectives and the intrinsic danger of reproducing epistemic violence in one’s own methodological proceeding; because «some of humanity’s greatest disasters have been produced by the narrow vision of men with good methodology» (A. N. Whitehead, in E. Manning, 2016, p. 26). This is the field of Research Creation (recherche-création), and in general of post-qualitative, practice-based and art-based methodologies. Investigations in which the field of study and the method are not given in advance, but are co-constituted in the research process.
At the margins of knowledge, between ghosts and earthquakes
Avery Gordon, in Ghostly Matters. Haunting and Sociological Imagination, reflects on the seemingly neutral and legitimate trap-question posed to Luce Irigaray: «At the outset there is a question: what method have you adopted in your research? More precisely: how is it possible to use fiction as data? What are we talking about when we talk about ghosts and hauntings?» (A. Gordon, 2022, p. 66).
To set out on this dowsing path, the first gesture we must make is a minor one [1], by putting ourselves on the side of these almost absent presences. Because of ghosts and hauntings we speak, obstinately, in our historical, artistic, anthropological, ethnographic, poetic research: ectoplasms of profiles and historical presences that we attempt to describe, glimmers of forms in the penumbra, possible epistemological models that slip through our fingers.
The archive we explore is a cemetery, made of mute ashes. Nathalie Léger writes in Suite for Barbara Loden: «I know from experience that one accesses the dead by penetrating a mausoleum of papers and objects, an enclosed place, full and yet empty, where one struggles to stand. What do we find? Boxes, remains, simulacra whose accumulation exudes excess and incompleteness and, despite some brief triumphs, defeat. […] ‘There are twenty-five boxes of documents,’ Barbara’s son told me on the phone, ‘what are you looking for?’ He probes in a cordial tone, the cordial tone one expects from someone who has decided not to give you access to anything» (Léger N., 2020).
The twenty-five boxes are then “earthquaked” by the researcher, so that the pieces fall into another form. In Léger’s narrative, autobiography, autoethnography, the history of cinema, publishing, feminism are threads of a fabric that is at times evident, at others submerged. They do not counterfeit what we know of the ‘real’ Barbara Loden, the half-forgotten American actress and filmmaker, but open up the trace and expose it to the contaminations of the possible. The form of the suite, of the sequel, of the exploratory and interrogative addendum is the rod that leads beyond the obstacle: the earthquake generates a new world [2].
Vitality of matter and deadly menace are the poles within which the practice of research is placed. How do we talk about the half-dead, actually very much alive, time we spend in there? It is a political question: we can either turn the document into a funeral monument or we can slip into the shadows, observe the cracks, follow the mirages of analogy, open ventriloquial dialogues with the not-anymore, feel the bowels like a haruspex in search of the not-yet.
Worlding: fictions to live beyond the end of worlds
But the affective value of bodies threatened with becoming dust and oblivion does not only concern others. It also concerns us, today, in our penultimate times. Federico Campagna asks: «What will remain of us? What will survive the end of our future? These are increasingly nagging questions for those […] who find themselves living within the song-world of westernised modernity» (F. Campagna, 2023, p. 57); and continues: «For those of us who dwell today within this cosmology now on its last legs, the task of learning to die well begins with an exercise in falsification […]. Those who will have to face the arduous task of rebuilding a world from scratch do not deserve to be handed the metaphysical formula of a civilisation whose impact on the planet has been so catastrophic» (ivi, pp. 101-102). It is a matter of offering a falsified message, a fiction “even more radical than a utopia”, an uchronic rewriting that reshuffles temporalities and offers, as Ian Cheng would say, «a future you can believe in» (I. Cheng, 2024, p. 18). This is worlding, the making of (other) worlds, to which those who make art and research are called* today.
Some fields of knowledge have long been exploring the possibility that imagination goes hand in hand with research. This is the case with design, which develops projects and scenarios from fictional speculations [3]. This is the case with Saidiya Hartman’s critical fabulation, which stitches together scraps of information, generating a quilt in which the document stands side by side with fiction, the historical trace with its shadow; which interrogates the empty as much as the full; which makes the lucid and the opaque react. What is being narrated is the story of “a certain impossibility” (Hartman, Wilderson, 2003, p. 184) generating an “asterisk in the grand narrative of history” (Hartman, 2021 p. 14), valorising “contested points of view”. Here again, there is no intention to redeem an irredeemable past, nor to take the floor from a present of achieved justice: rather, this fiction tends to (create?) a future ‘free state’ yet to be given, which is located in “a future of many futures, in the tradition of the oppressed” (T.J. Demos, 2023, p. 37).
And that is ultimately the point. Let us try to think not of what knowledge is, but of what it does, or could do: let us try to think of it as a creation of possibilities for making other worlds, possibilities not yet given, and/or no longer given, but potentially (re)emerging, assessable in terms of opportunity and efficacy, or better still, desirability and vitality. If truth must be defined (de-finished), life is a game that always wants to remain open.
So what margins of manoeuvre to carve out? How to do research that blends the semantic ambiguity of inventio, at once ‘finding’ and ‘inventing’? What worlding is possible in disciplines regulated by academic methods and metrics (in some contexts and in some countries more than in others)? While dystopian and post-truthful imaginaries rage outside, how can we take on the authorial burden of making uchronic sittings with the past, opening up heterotopic gaps in the present, divining future utopias? The art of the forger is indeed a science, even if an uncanny one.
This call invites contributions on the theme of intersection, friction, dialogue between research and fabulation, with particular reference to:
_the contribution of artistic imagination to scientific research
_the possibility of translation and osmosis of creative methods between different disciplines
_the analysis of case studies exploring the possibilities of ‘forcing’ academic knowledge, both in content and in their formal translation (hacking, embodiment, radical dissemination practices…)
_language experiments and transcodifications in the field of academic writing
_the ethical questions posed by the use of speculative finality in relation to scientific research
_refractions coming from experimentation in the field of digital and game studies, with reference to worlding
_the new codes, languages and mythographies of scientific and cultural research in the 21st century
_research through experimental teaching practice in formal and non-formal contexts
_research on chance, the unexpected and the aleatory
_the roles of analogical thinking and metaphor, the oneiric and unconscious dimension in the production of knowledge
_ uchronic/utopian/heterotopic practices in a minority perspective
_artistic practices generating critical fictions of the academic and educational imaginary
_theoretical and practical reflections around future studies and possibility studies
_and all other possibilities that we have not been able to imagine.
Notes
[1] Cfr. Manning, cit. See also Ingold T., Antropologia come educazione, La linea 2019 (ed. or. Anthropology and/as Education, Routledge 2017) about education “in a minor key”.
[2] See the novel Agadir di M. Khaïr-Eddine (1967), and the theatrical translation by Yto Barrada for the Barbican Centre of London (2018).
[3] See Dunne F., Raby A., Speculative Everything, Design, Fiction, and Social Dreaming, MIT Press, 2013.
References
Campagna F., Cultura profetica. Messaggi per i mondi a venire, Thlon 2023, (ed. or. Prophetic Culture. Recreation for Adolescents, Bloomsbury 2021).
Cheng I., Fare mondi. Vademecum per emissari, Timeo 2024 (ed. or. Emissaries’ Guide to Worlding, Ian Cheng 2023).
Demos T.J., Radical Futurisms, Sternberg Press 2023.
Fischer M., Realismo Capitalista, Zero 2018 (ed. or. Capitalist Realism, Zero books, 2010).
Gordon A., Cose di fantasmi. Haunting e immaginazione sociologica, DeriveApprodi 2022 (ed. or. Ghostly Matters. Haunting and the Sociological Imagination, University of Minnesota Press, 2008).
Hartman S., Wilderson F.B., The Position of the Unthought, in «Qui Parle», n. 2, 2003.
Hartman S., Venus in Two Acts, Cassandra Press, 2021.
Léger N., Suite per Barbara Loden, La Nuova Frontiera, 2020 (ed. or. Supplément à la vie de Barbara Loden, P.O.I. Editeur, 2012)
Szymborska W., Scrivere un curriculum, in La gioia di scrivere. Tutte le poesie (1945-2009), Adelphi 2009.
Whitehead A. N., cit. in E. Manning, The Minor Gesture, Duke University Press 2016.
CALL FOR PROPOSALS
.
abstract submission deadline
by 05 november 2024
PUBLICATION
.
publication 15 January 2025
article by 20 December 2024