Tim Stephens

This article is based on one fact about the author’s biography and one retold memory of the author’s mother. Each relates to the conception of the author. It takes the form of a performative autoethnography employing photofiction.1 The article specifically interrogates the grounded nature of subject identity in bodily experience, as matter, and chronology through speculative inquiry and the intersubjective relation, as themselves “photographic,” mediated through language. However, notions of subject and experience, photograph and academic language are pushed to an extreme position until highly reflexive and to a point beyond literary metafiction. The article thus elaborates and enacts photofiction as autoethnography, replacing “meta” thinking and representational thinking about events and memories, with the nonrepresentational, to write the real [self] as nondualistic: experiential data as nonphotography. The onto-epistemological position of the researcher, author, Subject, in relation to his or her own status is in fact a photofiction.

This is a complex textbook addressing key examples of mixed form over the last 500 years in Western European and Anglo-American cultures. With 80 colour illustrations, it is extremely well referenced in historical and contemporary sources, yet of distinctly different parts, including two wholly visual chapters. This is a standard Bloomsbury hardback, with the paperback version published in June 2023 at considerably reduced cost. The economies of aesthetic forms, early publishing circulation, is one facet of the book’s narrative, and the contrast between mixed forms exclusively for the wealthy and popular mixed forms, is central to the book’s dramatic, and hence performative, structure. We are taken to some of the earliest European curatorial and authorial contexts in which mixed forms, whether opulent object collections or folded paper publications, constituted both a material type and a conceptual category for aristocrat and manual worker respectively. The narrative style features a broad vocabulary, inter-related arguments with cross-chapter questioning that is difficult to precis or gloss. Is there some operational logic to this type of a book? If my interpretation is valid that this project’s distinctiveness aligns visual practices with forms of material production and with modes of reading and writing employing multidisciplinary operational concepts, then this might best be understood if represented in a table. The ‘table’ therefore also stands in as a publishing convention, for a detachable, general overview of what any narrative cannot achieve in sufficient detail: a comprehensive summary. The table below (see Table 1) is a formal feature and type of paratext, which here represents a visual and conceptual overview of the book from which the review is drawn.

This article addresses how breath is intra-active with reading and writing. The two meditation methods I used for concentrating on and writing the breath-experience were ‘attention on the breath’as taught within a Korean Seon (Zen) tradition, and writing this experience as ‘meditative enquiry’ [Stephens, T. 2021. ‘A Meditative Enquiry into Presence: Unmaking the Autoethnographic Self.’ Journal of Writing in Creative Practice 14 (2): 161–178]. Two ‘texts’ gradually converge into an intertwined experience of reading both academic and literary writing, blurring distinctions between them. Various theories are drawn from that un-do dualistic frameworks of epistemology assumed in reading academic texts. This raises questions for the embodied cognitive humanities, post-qualitative methodologies, and in autoethnographic and phenomenological writing as well as for creative writers. The article draws from cultural, philosophical, and literary studies, recent breath studies, and from the field of embodiment, to contextualise the ‘creative academic writing’ excerpts; leading to an unavoidable conclusion: this type of ‘new writing’ is not new but, rather, contiguous with practices of embodiment. Yet, how can a written fabrication of breathing be read, and does stylistic innovation present insurmountable problems for the academic validation of creative academic writing?