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Academic writing as shaping and re-

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a
Graham Badley
a
Research Support Unit, RDCS , Anglia Ruskin University , UK
Published online: 27 Mar 2009.

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 Teaching in Higher Education
Vol. 14, No. 2, April 2009, 209
219

Academic writing as shaping and re-shaping

Graham Badley*

Research Support Unit, RDCS, Anglia Ruskin University, UK

Academic writing, especially the writing of research articles, dissertations and

theses, is often viewed in the literature as ‘writing up’. It is as if first comes the
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research, an active creation of new knowledge, and then comes the writing, a
relatively passive assembling of what has already been achieved. It is as if
researching and writing were two entirely separate processes. Alternatively we
may choose to conceive of academic writing as a set process which overlaps
considerably with researching itself and, indeed, which may contribute dynami-
cally to knowledge making. This article outlines some of the ways in which we
may re-conceptualize academic writing as a more dynamic set of activities and
practices. This includes a consideration of, for example, academic writing as
constructing, deconstructing and reconstructing knowledge, connecting, discon-
necting and reconnecting concepts, describing and re-describing our views of the
world, as well as shaping, mis-shaping and reshaping ideas.
Keywords: academic writing; writing up; knowledge making; shaping and
reshaping ideas

My aim in this article is to examine academic writing
the writing of articles, books,
chapters, conference presentations, monographs, reviews, and so on
not as a
passive procedure of ‘writing-up’ but instead as a more active set of activities and
approaches. This set includes de-constructing and re-constructing, dis-connecting
and re-connecting, as well as shaping and re-shaping. I see all these activities and
approaches as useful metaphors for academic reading and academic writing,
metaphors which are fruitful ways for characterizing what we do as academics,
when we try to answer research questions or pursue scholarly inquiries.

Against academic writing as ‘writing-up’

My purpose in this opening section is to deny the usefulness of the term ‘writing-up’ in
the context of academic writing. I do so for four main reasons. First, ‘writing-up’
appears to be an add-on to research and scholarship instead of an integral part of it. It
is as if ‘writing-up’ were a separate coda to the main research opus. Second, ‘writing-
up’ sounds rather neutral and objective. It suggests a simple summarizing of what has
already been achieved. Third, ‘writing-up’ appears to be an uncreative and rather
passive process of setting down what has already been established. Fourth, and most
importantly, ‘writing-up’ fails to convey what good academic writing should always
be, namely, a problematical and tentative exercise in critical reflective thinking.

*Email: graham.badley@anglia.ac.uk
ISSN 1356-2517 print/ISSN 1470-1294 online
# 2009 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/13562510902757294
http://www.informaworld.com
 210 G. Badley

Writing-up as an add-on
Researchers sometimes give the impression that first of all is the research and then
comes the writing-up. Indeed, in the standard model of qualitative research, writing-
up consists of stating the results of the research and the evidence on which they are
based, and demonstrating the adequacy of the evidence by agreed criteria (see Woods
1999, 5). Writing-up thus appears to be altogether separate from the research process
itself. In this standard account, research results, evidence, and criteria almost acquire
a stand-alone quality. Writing-up seems to be entirely unconnected with the person
who did the data collection, checked the evidence, selected the criteria and set out the
results. In this way, both research and writing-up are presented as almost
disconnected processes.
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Writing-up as neutral and objective

In the traditional approach to writing-up, especially in such social sciences as
ethnography, researcher-writers may appear to be omniscient observers. As such,
they often present themselves as being able to describe and represent reality in
objective terms as well as to analyze and interpret it accurately or correctly. These
realist writers claim to get reality right, even to tell it like it is. Such writers assume a
detached or neutral or disinterested stance and presume to use scientific criteria to
validate their research findings.
However, no writers
not even scientists
in these post-modern and post-
positivist days can any longer claim neutrality and objectivity. They cannot claim to
get reality right. All they can do is to say how they perceive it and then to show us
why they think theirs is a plausible account of what they have been observing,
studying, and writing about. They can tell us how they see things from their
particular stance. They cannot tell us how things actually are. In order to do so, they
would need to show that they possess a god’s eye view of the world. Without such an
Olympian vision, no matter how prescient or omniscient they might want to be, or
how strong their data are, they cannot claim to tell it like it is.

Writing-up as an uncreative process

No longer may writing-up be conveyed to us as a detached and objective description
and presentation of a research account. Writing-up may not be offered as a completely
accurate and correct analysis and interpretation of research data. For we have now
come to see that writing itself is a creative process of choosing words and structures
with which to express how we see things. We cannot represent reality, the world,
accurately. We can only provide our made-up descriptions of it and hope to convince
others that our descriptions are authentic and useful ones. However, even terms like
‘authentic’ and ‘useful’ are highly contestable. Furthermore, the data we refer to in our
research accounts are not neutral and objective facts but have, indeed, been
constructed and selected by us as we try to make, to fabricate, a reasonably convincing
narrative for others to read. ‘Reasonable’ is another contested concept. Indeed, there is
often in academic writing a ‘fetishism of evidence’ where ‘data’ are mistaken for the
concrete when they are actually ‘the product of a formidable abstraction
it is always
the case since all data are constructions’ (see Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992, 225
6).
 Teaching in Higher Education 211

We should admit
or better celebrate
that as writers we are our own chief,
creative research instruments. We are the ones who do the data collecting, data
constructing, observing, seeing, focusing, choosing, who pick the words and form the
sentences which we hope will convince others that we have something useful to say
about important issues and problems. We decide what research questions we will try
to answer. We try to put those questions in words which, we think, make them clear
and accessible. We write down as clearly and succinctly as possible what we think we
see and what we think we understand.
We recognize that all of this is a struggle. We know or soon realize that where to
begin our writing is difficult. Indeed all writing
our beginnings, our middles, our
endings, our structurings, our attempts to be as clear, direct and simple as our subject
allows
is problematical. All we can do, whether we are writing research papers or
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short stories, is to approach the business of writing as a creative craft and to make
our work as good as we possibly can (see Lodge 1996, 172).
My argument here is that writing about and in our research is best not described
as writing-up. Writing, even in the often arid zones of educational research, is a
matter of constructing, creating, and making. Writers about research are actual
makers of research products: articles, books, conference papers, dissertations,
reports, and theses. We try to find the words which we judge best fit the situations
and issues we are trying to describe, interpret, and analyze. All of this shows us as
researchers and writers who look at aspects of the world and try to note down what
we think we understand about it. We write, we create, we make, we fabricate.
And we needn’t apologize for our writings, our creations, our makings, our
fabrications, because they do not or cannot meet the impossible standards of absolute
objectivity. All we can claim as creators and fabricators is a kind of ‘rigorous
subjectivity’ (see Wolcott 1994, 354) or, preferably, ‘rigorous inter-subjectivity’.
Whether, in the UK, assessors in the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) would
accept such contentious notions as fitting in with their requirement for ‘rigour’ in
academic research is another matter (see RAE 2006). My view of the RAE is that it is
an anti-carnival which promotes conformity and fails to celebrate the richness and
variety of academic writing, research, and scholarship (see Badley 2007).

Writing-up as critical thinking?

Some academics, however, stick to the idea of research as writing-up. For example,
Woods says research writing is nothing like writing ‘delightful’ junior school essays
or turning out ‘cathartic bits of biography, diary or magazine articles’. Instead
‘academic writing is a strongly disciplined activity, and we have to gear ourselves up
for it’ (Woods 1999, 16). For Woods, ‘writing-up’ requires ‘gearing-up,’ ‘cranking-
up,’ and ‘psyching up.’ Writing is clearly a disciplined process but Woods also makes
it sound extremely painful.
However, what Woods calls ‘writing-up’ I prefer to call, not more simply but
more complexly, writing. I am not sure that the extra ‘up’ does anything for the
research process except to suggest that writing is totally different from or separate
from research itself
a kind of ‘mopping-up’ as Richardson (2000) calls it. We can
certainly write up a diary or field notes in order to keep them up-to-date or make
them clearer. Perhaps, the use of the term ‘writing-up’ is really meant to suggest or to
claim that we have provided a full and a definitive account of a piece of research. Or
 212 G. Badley

do we mean that our account is a ‘write-up’ in praise of our own work as opposed to
a ‘write-down’ where we disparage some other, clearly inferior, account? Finally,
I prefer to see academic or research writing as a constructive and creative process of
learning or transforming what we know, whereas ‘writing-up’ sounds more like an
unconstructive and uncreative claim to be stating what we already know.

For academic writing as de-constructing and re-constructing

By de-constructing, I simply yet complexly mean reading as an academic. By
re-constructing I simply yet complexly mean writing as an academic. By de-
constructing I do not mean reading destructively as if the intention were to
undermine what other writers have written, to condemn or diminish their attempts at
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writing honestly and truthfully. Instead by de-constructing I mean to read the texts
of others in a spirit of critical appraisal. My approach is to decide, from my own
point of view and through my own critical lens and from my own stance, what
I judge, interpret, to be good for me, and possibly for others, in what I read. My
version of de-constructing is one of examining a variety of texts to see whether I can
see something good or useful there for my particular academic purposes. This is
clearly a critical and interpretative and persuasive process rather than an attempt to
prove that my reading of a text is the right one or the true one.
Deconstruction is, as Derrida has said, ‘affirmative in a way that is not simply
positive
that is, it is not simply conservative’ (Derrida 1994a). I believe that when
we read other texts, we do so not in order to reproduce them exactly but in order to
examine them for ideas which mean something for our own particular purposes. This
is especially the case with academic reading, where we are examining a topic or
question which interests us and for which we want to provide at least some kind of
response. We are, I think, reading texts to decide if we can see in them things

concepts, ideas, suggestions, values
which may be good for us as, say, teachers or
researchers. Whether our reading, our de-constructing of a particular text, opens up
something new or original would be a bonus. Whether it produces something true is,
further, a matter for the consensus of our peers.
Derrida suggests, indeed, that deconstruction creates a tension between a
conservative fidelity to existing texts and the radical possibility of something new,
some new insight or interpretation as a result of our particular reading of a text. An
interdisciplinary approach may be especially helpful here where readers/researchers
could be encouraged to cross borders, establish new themes and make new
connections between ideas (based on Derrida 1994a). Derrida agrees that decon-
struction is characterized by a possible tension between a deliberate disruption of
existing texts and a tendency to be, perhaps, (over) attentive toward them. He insists,
however, that deconstruction is, despite this tension, a respectful process. It is, for
him if not for some of his followers, a matter of ‘trying to read and understand’ the
texts he examines. Indeed, where, in his case, the great texts of Plato and Aristotle are
concerned, he feels we have to read them again and again in order to learn more from
them (Derrida 1994b). This is not a matter of ‘commending or repeating or
conserving’ them but rather ‘an analysis which tries to find out how their thinking
works or doesn’t work, (an analysis) of the tensions, the contradictions, the
heterogeneity within their own corpus, as well as the law of this self-deconstruction’
(Derrida 1994b). De-constructing such texts is not applying an alien tool or method
 Teaching in Higher Education 213

to them. Instead it is analyzing, out of respect, how they function internally (Derrida
1994b).
Another way of putting this is to suggest that reading important texts for research
and scholarly purposes is de-constructing them in order to work out how their authors
have actually made them, fabricated them, that is constructed them. ‘Making’ and
‘fabricating’ are especially honorable metaphors for the creative process of writing.
De-constructing a text is trying to tease out, for own critical appreciation and
understanding, how a writer as maker or fabricator has gone about constructing and
shaping that text. Significantly, an archaic meaning of ‘maker’ is that of poet, someone
who especially deals in metaphors and other images in order to illuminate and
communicate an understanding of some aspect of the world. Similarly, ‘fabricator’
derives from ‘faber,’ a skilled worker originally in metal, but later in textile fibers.
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‘Fabrication’ as forgery or lying is a relatively recent connotation.

Interestingly, Derrida saw James Joyce as ‘a great landmark in the history of
deconstruction’ especially because of the way Joyce used language almost as a way of
insisting that his readers become critical decipherers and interpreters of what he
himself was writing and enciphering (Derrida 1994c). Joyce confirms for Derrida a
claim that deconstruction is critically affirmative. Derrida borrows from Joyce the
last word in Ulysses
‘yes’
and states that deconstruction is also a ‘yes’ and itself is
‘an affirmation’. However, deconstruction only remains affirmative, only remains a
‘yes’, if it is repeated, if it implies what he calls ‘iterability’ (Derrida 1994c). I see this
as suggesting that our own academic readings of texts also have to be undertaken not
only critically but also in this Joycean, life affirming, repeating, spirit. I would
connect this approach to the suggestion I have already made that we (should) read
academic texts in order to see what they contain which may be good for our various
human (including academic) purposes. I have suggested elsewhere what we might
mean by examining and interpreting academic texts for what may be good for us (see
Badley 2004). Generally, my basket of goods includes more democracy, freedom,
liberalism, pragmatism, and tolerance in higher education and in society.
There is a danger, however, of thinking that Derrida has somehow managed to get
language right, that his view of reading and writing words, of de-constructing and re-
constructing, is the one true way. Rorty criticizes Derrida for tending to think of
language as something more than just a set of tools, for occasionally treating
Language as if it were ‘a quasi-agent, a brooding presence, something that stands over
and against human beings.’ Language should not be reified or treated as a mysterious
substitute for ‘God’ or ‘Mind’ (Rorty 1991, 3
4). For Rorty, the best part of Derrida is
when he regards his own descriptions and deconstructions as useful rather than as
right. The worst part is when he appears to suggest that he has represented language
accurately, as it really is (Rorty 1991, 5). But this does not mean that Derridean
deconstruction is useless. Instead, Rorty urges us not to underestimate ‘the utility of
merely therapeutic, merely ‘‘deconstructive’’ writing’ (Rorty 1991, 6).
I would put this slightly differently. I would suggest that therapeutic, decon-
structive and affirmative reading of texts should help us become better able to
construct and re-construct our own texts (writing) to meet our own aims and
purposes. This is to propose that reading as de-constructing prepares us for writing as
constructing and re-constructing. The de-constructing (reading) process enables us to
analyze, collect, evaluate, and interpret important educational materials. The
constructing and re-constructing (writing) processes help us to synthesize, re-collect,
 214 G. Badley

re-evaluate and re-interpret our new texts in order to put forward our own
understandings of educational issues and topics. I would further suggest that our
deconstructive reading of ‘other writing
as writing’ (Said 1975, 20) is not just
affirmative but is also energizing and enlivening as we ‘write over’, ‘rewrite’, ‘write
about’, and ‘write to other writing’. Indeed, Said suggests that such a view of writing,
‘writing against writing,’ may sound like antithetical criticism but should also be seen
as constructive (that is, affirmative). His summary of writing as ‘a ceaselessly
changing triangle of encipherment, decipherment, and dissemination’ is similar to
my view of academic writing as deconstruction, construction, and reconstruction
(Said 1975, 20
1). It also resonates with Derrida’s view of deconstruction as the
decipherment of (Joycean) encipherment. Writing is the act of taking hold of
language in order to do something
to act
and not just to repeat ideas verbatim
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(Said 1975, 377
8). Said calls this taking hold of language an active, even aggressive,
sense of writing in which we may ‘write in and as an act of discovery rather than out
of respectful obedience to established ‘‘truth’’’ (Said 1975, 379). Writing is a
beginning to the production of knowledge (see also Winter and Badley 2007, 268
9).
This approach to the complexity of writing also takes us a long way from the
banalities of ‘writing-up’.

Dis-connecting and (re-)connecting

One of my other objections to the notion of writing as ‘writing-up’ is that writers often
present themselves as almost entirely unconnected with, or disconnected from, the
person who did the data collection, checked the evidence, selected the criteria, and set
out the results. Both research and writing-up are presented as almost disconnected
processes. My purpose in this section is to argue that, especially, when we deconstruct
the relevant literature, we should only become temporary dis-connectors of what we
read and analyze. The most important role in reading and writing is the making of new
connections and re-connections amongst the various concepts and materials we have
examined. Here, I take not so much a Derridean approach to de-constructing and re-
constructing as a Deweyan approach to connecting and re-connecting.
My interpretation of Dewey here is based on the notion that our reading,
researching, and writing for academic purposes often forms or ‘grows out of’ a series
of natural chains or threads or connections (Dewey 1991, 1
5). When we write
reflectively (or re-constructively), we deliberately word and re-word our claims to
new knowledge based on a series of connecting ideas and firm reasons (Dewey 1991,
6
8). Our (de-constructive) reading and (re-constructive) writing might begin with a
state of doubt, hesitation, or perplexity over a problem or question. As such, our
reading and writing then become acts of inquiry or research into the resolution of
that uncertainty. Inquiry is looking for evidence to support one conclusion or
another, an inquiry into the facts (Dewey 1991, 10) (even though, as I suggested
earlier, our facts are also the result of our own de-constructions and re-construc-
tions). For Dewey, the essentials of thinking and writing are maintaining doubt
whilst continuing with systematic and protracted inquiry (Dewey 1991, 13).
Another way of putting this is to suggest that such reflective and re-constructive
academic writing is often a way of learning from the data (or re-constructed facts) that
we gain through our reading and writing. If we assume a Deweyan view of learning
from experience then we try most of all to make connections, backwards and forwards,
 Teaching in Higher Education 215

between the texts we read and the writing we produce in order to answer the problems
we are examining. Our writing then becomes a form of learning by doing, learning by
trying, learning by experimenting, in order to set down, what we think we know and
understand by the questions posed. Such writing helps us to construct or make or
fabricate ‘the connections of things’. Each piece of writing becomes a reflective and re-
constructive essay, an attempt, a try, to set down a plausible answer to a specific
problem. We may even manage to persuade others that our essay is an authentic
attempt to write something useful about the topic under discussion. This is my
reading, my deconstruction, of Dewey’s account of learning from experience:
To learn from experience is to make backward and forward connections between what
we do to things and what we enjoy or suffer from things in consequence. Under such
conditions, doing becomes trying, an experiment with the world to find out what it is
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like; the undergoing becomes instructions
the discovery of the connections of things.
(Dewey 1916, 140)

For me writing is then at least three inter-connected processes: reading or de-

constructing or dis-connecting; writing or constructing or connecting; re-writing or
re-constructing or re-connecting. However, this learning by reflective or re-
constructive essaying should not be regarded as providing final analyses or final
answers to the questions raised by our doubts and uncertainties. Our analyses and
answers can only be tentative and provisional contributions to the ongoing
discussion about what we ought to do in practice. Academic writing as reflective
or re-constructive or re-connective essaying is a potentially useful way of engender-
ing
making
further contributions to knowledge and to new social, political, and
educational practices (see also Winter and Badley 2007).

Shaping and re-shaping

There is, according to Richard Rorty, first the shaping of our species into human
beings by a process of socialization. Then, with luck and through our own rebellion
against that socialization, we should be able to individualize and re-create ourselves.
Further, and probably with even more luck, higher education might be good enough
to help us as students realize that we can re-shape ourselves by continuously re-
working our old self-images into new self-images to fit our own purposes (see Rorty
1999, 117
8). This won’t happen if higher education merely becomes the transmis-
sion of what is already believed and known and valued without question.
And, of course, one of the most important ways in which we may shape and then
re-shape ourselves away from (mere) socialized competence into a reworked self-
image is through reflective and re-constructive writing. This form of academic
writing in which we try to make sense of our understanding of the world helps us to
re-shape ourselves as critical participants in both academic and social life. However,
‘things get difficult when one tries to figure out where socialization should stop and
criticism start’ (Rorty 1999, 117). But who said that academic writing was easy?
Shaping and re-shaping intractable material, such as human beings and academic
subject-matter, could never be that easy.
Universities should be critical spaces where we might shape and re-shape
ourselves. We might hope, too, that they should also provide ‘writing spaces’ for
us, staff and students alike, to exercise our own criticality, freely and openly, as we
 216 G. Badley

engage with the texts of others. Indeed, we might hope that such writing spaces
become new arenas in which ‘writing itself can take on new forms and so inject new
light on dusty areas of academic life’ (Barnett 2005, 3). But does the university ‘in
ruins’ (Readings 1996) currently provide such free and open writing spaces and new
arenas for critical, yet affirmative, appraisal?
The evidence offered by the UK current RAE is that our writing spaces
are severely restricted. Instead of offering us opportunities for Derridean life
affirmation, for a resounding Joycean ‘yes,’ the RAE presents academic writers with
an anti-carnival. It is:
a collusive assessment of the usual ideas and the usual players. Unlike most carnivals it
fails to celebrate. It merely confirms the state of the lack of the art. It conforms to what
the system and its funders want. It commodifies and reifies what should, instead, be
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interesting and useful accounts of what the academic players have been up to over the
past few years . . .Ours is an anti-carnival which rewards the few and insults the many in
the interests of performativity, the surveillance state and the managerial university.
(Badley 2007)

In order to encourage new writing and new research in higher education, we need to
re-shape the RAE too. Perhaps, we should re-shape it into:
an academic festival which appraises but mainly praises the work of us all. Yes there
should be criteria
even originality, significance and rigour
but these should be
extended to embrace accessibility, clarity, readability and simplicity too. The aim of this
great academic festival should be to show what we are all getting up to, the good work
we do critiquing, discussing, thinking about and researching all aspects of the worlds we
inhabit. Sure
the big prizes will and inevitably must go to those who need big money to
do their research
the scientists, the engineers and the medical researchers particularly.
But research prizes should not stop with research products which directly serve the
military-industrial complex and the global economy. We need to preserve and develop
our civilisation by encouraging and rewarding the arts, the humanities and the social
sciences too. Even education. Even, for the world’s sake, geography and history and
philosophy. (Badley 2007)

Barnett argues that we need ‘scholarly space’ in order to pursue our research
interests and ‘intellectual and discursive space’ in order to make our contributions to
wider social debate rather than to be constrained by the distorting and performative
restrictions of the RAE (Barnett 2005, 7
8). Undistorted discursive, intellectual,
scholarly and writing spaces will only be created in higher education when students
and staff are encouraged to experiment with the ‘new forms’ of writing that Barnett
calls for. Examples of such forms
new shapings for academic writing
include the
kaleidoscope texts discussed by Nolan (2005) and the patchwork texts pioneered by
Richard Winter and referred to by Parker (2005).
The continuous re-shaping of academic writing facilitated by kaleidoscope texts
allows us to see ‘the complex nature of knowledge in process’ so that writing ‘portrays
researching and learning as contextual, learner-centred, negotiated, discursive, and
reflexive’ (Nolan 2005, 135). Academic writing shaped and continuously re-shaped
into kaleidoscope texts enables us to address and challenge ‘the problematic nature of
academic discourse in its rigid compliance with certain norms and traditions for what
counts as research and as knowledge’ (Nolan 2005, 132). This would move us away
from reading texts as linear and tidy narratives which fail to ‘fully challenge us to make
 Teaching in Higher Education 217

our own connections within multiple layers of meaning’ and remind us that ‘research is
often messy, ambiguous and even twisted at times’ (Nolan 2005, 128, my italics).
There is some hope that new forms and shapes of academic writing, even in the
hard sciences, are helping students deepen their engagement with their discipline.
This approach rejects the traditional notion of scientists first doing their research
and then ‘writing-up’ their results. Instead, students are encouraged to develop their
understanding of and thinking about science through as well as in writing, and
to move away from article and essay writing and the writing-up of lab reports toward
more experimental writing (see Parker 2005, 160). Somewhat ambivalently, Parker
also reports that experiments with patchwork texts in the UK have ‘struggled
successfully’ to be acknowledged as disciplinary writing. Such ‘alternative’ writing is
often viewed as ‘developmental, therapeutic, self-expressive, and creative rather than
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academic’ (Parker 2005, 162
3, n5). The disciplinary gatekeepers, especially in such
sterile exercises as the RAE, seem charged to exclude any writing which might just be
regarded as therapeutic and creative. Developmental and self-expressive writing
might even contaminate the pure languages of their disciplines.
Richard Rorty mocks those who regard their disciplinary languages in these
purist terms. For example, he singles out macho philosophers who solemnly tell us
that they seek the truth, an accurate representation of the way the world is, in writing
which is clear, manly, precise, straightforward and transparent and which abjures all
‘literary’ devices (Rorty 1991, 86). Instead, he proposes a blurring of the distinctions
we academics make between disciplines in favor of the idea of ‘a seamless,
undifferentiated ‘‘general text’’’ (Rorty 1991, 86
7), a proposal which would hardly
be welcomed by those who, self-deceptively, ‘magnify the importance of an academic
speciality’ (Rorty 1991, 87). Few academic philosophers would, like Rorty, describe
their own writing as bricolage and urge us not to underestimate ‘the utility of merely
therapeutic, merely ‘‘deconstructive’’ writing’ (Rorty 1991, 6). The new forms of
academic writing should encourage a creative re-shaping of all existing genres as well
as an enthusiastic admission of new shapings, such as bricolage, the kaleidoscope text
and the patchwork text, into one general, undifferentiated, academic text.

Dis-closing and closing this general text

Writing is a form of dis-closing. We dis-close and dis-cover our ideas and judgments
and even ourselves as we write. However, I want to close this general text about
academic writing in such a way that it also remains ajar. This text contains a number
of ideas I have de-constructed and dis-connected from other texts and then used to
make my own connections and re-connections. I could now re-view this text (yet
again) in order to de-construct the old and re-construct a new text. So it goes.
However, I shall leave it as it, inadequately, is. The text is not closed but ajar. Instead,
here are some further connections
attachments
I’d like to offer in order to
celebrate the partial closing of this general undifferentiated text.
First: I like Rorty’s suggestion that we should adopt a Darwinian view of
language for these post-positivist times, a view which sees us, as a species, developing
‘an increasing ability to shape the tools needed to help the species survive, multiply,
and transform itself’ (Rorty 1991, 3, my italics). We verbivores (see Pinker 2007) need
continuously to shape and sharpen our most useful tools.
 218 G. Badley

Second: this text was written without my knowing exactly beforehand which
words I would use and which de-constructions, dis-connections, constructions and
connections, re-constructions and re-connections I would make. Isn’t all writing like
this? ‘I, of course, have opened my mouth without knowing what words to bring
forth, what beliefs to proclaim or validate, what human condition to hold under my
tiny microscope. It’s frightening. And yet it’s what everybody does
learning how
you stand by hearing yourself talk (Locution, locution, locution)’ (Ford 1995, 182).
We learn where we stand by re-constructing and re-connecting the words as we write
them: our slogan as academic writers could well be ‘locution, locution, locution.’
Third: ‘Writers . . . understand that almost everything
e-v-e-r-y-t-h-i-n-g
is not
really made of ‘‘views’’ but words, which, should you not like them, you can change’
(Ford 1995, 248). As verbivores (and some of us are also verbibores) we live on words,
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words which we can change as we wish as we write and re-write, as we shape and re-
shape our limited knowing and understanding of where we currently are.
Fourth: ‘Martin Amis wrote that as readers we always have a ‘‘conversation’’
(possibly even an argument) with any piece of literary fiction’ (Ford 2007, 6).
‘Conversation’ and ‘argument’ as well as ‘negotiation’ are also processes we engage in
when we read, de-construct, dis-connect, and contest academic texts in preparation
for making the connections which help us to construct our own soon-to-be-contested
fabrications.
Fifth: any piece of writing, even the minor fabrications we academic constructors
and makers come up with, contributes to what Rorty calls ‘humanity’s ongoing
conversation about what to do with itself’ (Rorty 2007, ix). Just as he urges
philosophers to choose sides in debates about cultural and social change we, as
academics, should ask ourselves whether our modest contributions to this conversa-
tion, our humble texts, will ‘make any difference to social hopes, programs of action,
prophecies of a better future’ (Rorty 2007, x). I have described academic writers as
dis-connectors and re-connectors in their attempts to make useful texts. I would not
describe academics as dis-interested pursuers of truth. Like Rorty, I want us to be so
interested
in democracy, freedom, justice, tolerance
that we take sides by shaping
our academic writing and our socio-political actions in favor of justice and against
oppression.

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