This presentation explores the creative and critical potentials of a collaborative and performative writing practice which has its origins in diverse disciplines. It engages with the work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s on levels both conceptual and methodological.
In our recent jointly-produced work (‘BLOODCRYSTALPOLLENSTAR’, Deleuze and Contemporary Art, eds. O’Sullivan & Zepke, University of Edinburgh Press, 2010.), we set out to engage with a series of concepts taken from Deleuze & Guattari's work in a set of interlinked fictions. Throughout the text, however, a kind of image appears, which seems to disrupt the work while continuing to affirm its creative and critical process. In Deleuze and Guattari’s writing, too, such images appear and are posed against the conventions of philosophy’s discipline. These mutant images are not insignificant elements, we propose. In their tenacious disruption they can be shown more clearly to be constitutive of critical work. Our presentation takes this methodological insight and questions its potential in a practice assembled differently, with components of art, literature, performance and philosophy. Departing from a series of moments in our previous text, it mobilises the resistance encountered when the mutating force of the image is exposed, doing so to propose a future for creative work.