When I was thinking what my first post in this blog should be I became aware for my 1000th time of the difficulties of starting to create content: text, music, visuals, anything, need of a spark that lights the process. This page was born of the will to communicate ideas, to present myself to the world as an academic, but without leaving behind other identities that often entangle. Therefore, I thought that, even though I do this a bit in the About section of the site, I thought it would be of interest to digress briefly about what does it mean to write academically, what does it mean to write an academic blog (they do not count as publication so, are they actually out of the academic?) and what does it mean to try to create an online hybrid content register where academia is the excuse, but not the final aim (if there is one at all).

More and more I think of how these different identities are connected but difficult to reconcile. There is, first of all, an issue of language and linguistic conventions. Poetry, music and academia are usually constrained to their own codes. One of the things that has kept me away from blogs for a long time has been an internal need for coherence. The fear of not being able to deliver that has been a tall wall difficult to knock down. I think that now, this blog, is my main weapon to knock that wall down. To do this, I think of it as a multilinguistic, multicode repository where things that connect do not need to share the same language or code, they do not need to be translated. I choose not to translate, to let tensions exist and say things. The connections between a priori incommensurable are as much as the nodes the surrround them.

Such fractality (Haraway, 1991) might include references, like the one I just threw in there, might include commentaries, might include cryptical writing, might include embedded music and video players,  might include pictures. The list is finite but extensive.What I want, and need, is a space for possibility, a space where constrains do not come from genre but from the context itself, able to be in a constant state of redefinition.

References

Haraway, D.J., 1991. Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. Routledge, New York.