Strange Machinery
Strange Machinery is an investigation of impasse. Set in and around Tucson during the early Trump years, the critical-creative essay collection examines recent crisis from the vantage of being stuck — stuck in an echo chamber of liberal paradigms that can’t answer political-ecological catastrophe or rising fascism; stuck with the demoralizing limits of liberatory movements and radical critique; stuck in daily experiences of confusion and information overload, reaching for understanding that always seems just beyond one’s grasp. What does it look like to take this stuck-ness seriously, to linger with what’s uncertain and intractable about a historical moment without sacrificing a sense of ethical urgency? How does one work within personal and public disorientation, seeking the seeds of transformative politics without recourse to comforting, teleological escapes? Strange Machinery pursues these lines of inquiry from the vantage of ordinary, ad-hoc sense-making. The book begins as I arrive to the Arizona desert in the fall of 2016, following the collaged, DIY research process by which I stretch to tell genealogies of interconnected crises and examine the dynamics that reproduce them. One essay picks through garbage in a Wild-West ghost town to confront histories of frontier-style land theft, extractivism, and myth-making that still dominate US politics. Another weaves together tours of Bay Area tech sites and memories of a failed quantum computing novella to think through questions of technological violence and the politics of popular information and shame. Still another essay runs a 5k at the world’s largest irrigated pecan farm to understand the winner-takes-all resource precedents structuring western water futures (and land use more broadly), while one more makes quince paste and documents community at a Circle K to study the limits of current practices for remembering historical destruction and loss. I draw on a range of theory and history to analyze this material but find equal insight in creative tactics, autobiographical anecdote, and conversations with the friends, lovers, and strangers who populate the book. What emerges is resolutely hybrid: part crisis memoir, part experimental US history and field guide, and part crowd-sourced handbook for exploring transformative possibility amidst ongoing upheaval, precarity, and impasse.
Infinite Text Collective
The Infinite Text Collective is a vibrant space for critical-creative writing. Beyond the bounds of institutional pressures and disciplinary constraint, against the depredations of late capitalism, my co-founder Paige Sweet and I nourish writing that experiments in living critically and anchoring political praxes. Our sense of purpose and pedagogy grows out of a 15 year friendship built on shared writing and ongoing conversation. We have always talked about whatever was currently lighting up our brains: the supersonic dimensions of Clarice Lispector’s work, quantum computing as a metaphor for collective processing, or any number of other concerns about relationships, politics, and how to embody our convictions. These conversations weren’t academic or aimed at professional advance; they sought inspiration and solace and a deep, playful camaraderie premised on questioning—on experimentation—as an ethics and way of life. This is the spirit of collaboration Paige and I hope to cultivate in our classes, workshops, and project consultation. We launched our first class, Autotheory as Practice, in February 2022, where our theories of self and place mingled and were refined alongside the theories of those who joined us. One year later, we have added workshops and project consultation to what we do. Our name, The Infinite Text Collective, reflects our expanded offerings and is inspired by one participant’s estimation of our class spaces: : a loving community pursuing the pleasures of language and the elaboration of infinite texts.