‘How to Write as Felt’ Touching Transmaterialities and More-Than-Human Intimacies

Abstract

In this paper, I invoke various matterings of felt in order to generate a practice of writing that engenders bodily difference that is affective, moving, and wooly. In attending to 'how to write as felt,' as a touching encounter, I consider how human and nonhuman matter composes (Haraway in Staying with the trouble: making Kin in the Chthulucene, Duke University Press, Durham, 2016). This co-mingling that felt performs enacts what Alaimo (Bodily natures: science, environment, and the material self, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 2010; Exposed: Environmental politics and pleasures in posthuman times, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 2016) calls transcorporeality. Connecting felt with theories of touch and transcorporeality becomes a way to open up and re-configure different bodily imaginaries, both human and nonhuman, that are radically immanent and intensive; as an assemblage of forces and flows that open bodies to helices and trans connections (Springgay and Truman in Body Soc 23(4):27–58, 2017b). My contribution to this collection on 'humanity in a posthuman age' is experimental and performative. Felt is activated not as a metaphor but rather poses questions about what writing does at the interstices between research and creation.