Chapter 16 The Heart of Research
Fictioning and Diffractive Writing as Critical Research Practice
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Abstract
This chapter investigates the artistic practice of writing as a critical diffractive practice seeking to develop new, urgent strategies to understand how we might ‘live and die better in a thick present’, as Haraway might have it. The chapter argues that such a ‘thick present’ has been built upon binary approaches to worlding. Whilst it might be possible to suggest that binarity orders the world material-discursively, what would it mean in practice to explore such brave, new, onto-epistemic ways of thinking? The chapter draws on the way the heart moves blood around in the physical human body to critically analyse the processes involved in the writing of a speculative fiction. The case used is a novel written by the author. Taking a practice-as-research approach, four key practices are identified in the writing: becoming aware of the sensuality of materials; deep listening; coding; and diffraction. Such practices form the rebellious nature of the project that seeks to introduce non-binarity of thought as a creative, critical mode of world making, discussing practice-based apparatuses that the reader can use in their own speculative writing.