Prof Stephen Muecke, UNSW

Literary events as heterogeneous assemblages of writings, readers, institutions and places have a way of sustaining their own existences. If literature’s materialism is not only historical but also vital, then it could be conceived as ‘vibrant matter’ (Bennett) constituted by its relations of potentiality, of growth. This capacity for growth, or reproducibility, is the mode of existence of literary events as forms destined to form relations among multiple realities (Latour). The capacity of a writing to ‘live’ is neither engendered by the life of the writer, nor by any felicitous fit that the writing, as representation, may have with a world. It is through its capacity to form new relations: writing with rather than writing about. The linguistic moment emphasised only one relation among many, linguistic communication. Here the metaphysics of writings is concerned with the career paths of writings that trace unique signatures through different worlds. By tracing such paths, rather than presupposing communication gaps, we can perhaps describe writing’s mode of existence more accurately.