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INTERDISCIPLINARY
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Volume 2, Number 5

Fictocriticism as Social Movement

Ann Deslandes

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Fictocriticism as Social Movement
Ann Deslandes, University of Sydney, New South Wales, Australia

Abstract: In this paper I trace a shift in the method that I used to research the alliance between 'first' and 'third' world act-
ivists in the global justice movement. This shift takes place between a sociological case study of relations in the global
justice movement movement, and a fictocritical diagnosis of the ethics and politics of these relations. Referring to postcolo-
nial feminist critiques of sociology and ethnography, I consider fictocriticism as a framing technology for activating Spivak's
'transnational literacy' and 'ethical semiosis'. Thus I pose fictocriticism 'as' social movement, in the sense that it allows the
social critic/activist to move between master and othered frames in thinking through the question of alliance across difference
and power.

Keywords: Ethnography, Sociology of Social Movements

one’s privilege as a loss’, can be a crushing revela-

ESTRAGON: That’s the idea, let’s abuse each tion. Rather than engaging with another, the activist
other. is revealed as largely engaging with herself.4 Indeed,
They turn, move apart, turn again, and face whilst confrontation with one’s privilege might be
each other. represented as an absurdist drama, the (absurdly)
VLADIMIR: Moron! impossible-but-necessary process of unlearning
ESTRAGON: Vermin! privilege is not an act to be blocked with an entry
VLADIMIR: Abortion! and exit point.
ESTRAGON: Morpion! This paper is situated in my postgraduate project;
VLADIMIR: Sewer-rat! one which might be implicated in ‘activist scholar-
ESTRAGON: Curate! ship’, and which is thinking through the way in
VLADIMIR: Cretin! which ‘first world’ activists in the contemporary
ESTRAGON (with finality): Crritic! ‘global justice movement’ practice solidarity in their
VLADIMIR: Oh! alliances with ‘third world’ activists.5 The terms of
(He wilts, vanquished, and turns away).1 this inquiry were particularly honed through my (first
world) experience of a provisional research visit to
BUSE - EVEN abusing each other - makes

A privileged activists, as crritics of the unjust

global order, feel better about their con-
stitutive complicity in this injustice.2 That
this enjoyment occurs simply on another axis of
privilege,3 as opposed to functioning to ‘unlearn
Brazilian sites associated with the (third world)
Landless Workers Movement (Movimento sem Terra
in Portuguese, or MST), between August and
November 2005.6 I had originally planned to write
a sociological case study on the MST, however the
displacements entailed by the research encounter

1
Beckett, Samuel, Waiting for Godot, Act Two, Faber & Faber, London, 1965, p.75
2
Brown, Wendy,’The Desire to be Punished’, Politics out of History, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 2001, pp.45 -62.
3
Žižek, Slavoj, For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor, Verso, London & New York, 1991.
4
As Gillian Whitlock puts it: “When members of privileged groups imaginatively represent to themselves the perspective of the oppressed,
their representations can often carry projections and fantasies through which their own complementary image of themselves is enhanced
and reinforced.” Whitlock, Gillian, Soft Weapons: Autobiography In Transit, University of Chicago Press, Chicago & London, 2007, p.67.
‘Unlearning one’s privilege as a loss’ refers to Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s formulation, see Spivak in Harasym, Sarah (ed.), The Postco-
lonial Critic: Interviews, Strategies, Dialogues, Routledge, New York and London, 1990, p.30.
5
I am guided by Chandra Talpade Mohanty in my use of the terms ‘first’ and ‘third’ world – I note that the term ‘third world’, for example,
‘is inadequate in comprehensively characterising the economic, political, racial and cultural differences within the borders of Third World
[sic] nations …’ but ‘retains a certain heuristic value … in relation to the inheritance of colonialism and contemporary neocolonial economic
and political processes’. See ‘Women Workers and Capitalist Scripts’, in Feminist Genealogies, Colonial Legacies and Democratic Futures.
Eds. M. Jacqui Alexander and Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Routledge, London 1997, p.7. See also Mohanty, ‘Under Western Eyes Revisited:
Feminist Solidarity Through Anticapitalist Struggles’, Signs, vol.28, no.2, 2003, pp.505-507. A useful text for defining the global justice
movement is Notes from Nowhere, We are Everywhere, Verso, London, 2003.
6
For information on the MST see Sue Branford and Jan Rocha, Cutting the Wire: The Story of Brazil’s Landless Movement, Latin America
Bureau, London, 2003. The MST website (in Portuguese) is at http://www.mst.org.br . There is a website with information in English at
http://www.mst-brazil.org .

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244 THE INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF INTERDISCIPLINARY SOCIAL SCIENCES, VOLUME 2

overtook this objective by bringing the privileged
position of the researcher into central view. As such,
this paper traces a movement between sociological
and fictocritical approaches to analysis, and meditates
on the (im)possibility of writing displacement in such
a way that it does not become a replacement for
giving up power (which thereby reinscribes priv-
ilege).7 As I will show, the necessity of such an ap-
proach foregrounded itself in certain aspects of my
research adventure.
“Ann requires contemporary examples through
which to sociologically articulate the theoretical and
practical issues associated with tensions, reflection
and re-constitution within the global justice move-
ment”, I wrote in the 'research project summary'
section of my submission for approval by the Univer-
sity Human Research Ethics Committee. “The MST
exemplifies an ‘autonomous’ form of activism
within a collective structure (in that it is autonomous
from all other organizations and it emphasizes the
self-determination of each of its members). The MST
also exemplifies a working relationship between
activists in ‘third world’ locales and those in ‘first
world’ locales. For this reason, Ann has elected to
use the MST as the subject of a ‘case study’ (Flyvb-
jerg 2001, Snow and Trom 2002)8 of the issues at
the heart of her thesis.
“Ann intends to use feminist ethnographic meth-
ods of interrogation”, I continued. “These methods
will take the form of active participant observation
utilizing focus groups and/or individual semi-struc-
tured interviews, (depending on the advice of MST
leaders when she is in Brazil) and analysis (that is
produced in dialogue with the participants).”
“Which method is deployed will be guided by
Ann’s initial interactions with leaders, members and
affiliates. All participants will be given a participant
information sheet, and no observations or interviews
will take place without each participant signing a
consent form.”
“Once the data is collected Ann will process it in
relation to the key research questions and will
provide a research report to all participants. Verific-
ation from participants will be sought throughout the
preparation and reporting of data.”
During the process of the research premeditated
in my Ethics Committee application, I was regularly
reminded, by MST settlers, of my privileged position
as a white, English speaking, first world academic;
a position that was particularly obvious to them as
‘conscientized’ subjects of the ‘pedagogy of the op-
pressed’.9 One activist, José, for example, berated
me one afternoon as we sat outside his house on Si-
mon Bólivar assentamento. “Foreigners like you,
academics, people from the first world, can’t say my
story, my truth”,10 and “it’s different where you’re
from, where there is so much more money”. Later,
Carolina, an activist with the MST’s Gender Sector,
advised me that, as a foreign young woman from a
university, I was completely out of place in rural
Brazil, and linked this to the reason that women in
the MST don’t tend to identify or engage with first
world feminist organizations, because “our concerns
are so different.11”At the time, I giggled when José
first approached the question of my position as ‘for-
eign, academic, first world.’ My giggle was showing
an enjoyment, as Wendy Brown and Slavoj Žižek
would have it, which is also a desire to distance
myself from such a geopolitically authoritative
reading of my relative position. This reading is rare:
the subaltern, after all, cannot speak.12 José and
Carolina breached the tenets of my inquiry as
premised upon our agreement on its universalist
terms (e.g. ‘collaborative’, ‘feminist’). This brings
the borders of inquiry into question and makes them
an object of critique under the question of alliance
in activism and scholarship. It opens the inquiry to
a different method, which must be able to open soci-
ological inquiry to something other, without losing
sociology as object and subject of critique. How
could a method cross this disciplinary breach without
cancelling it? What method can retain the openness
required to continuously ‘learn to learn from below’,
as opposed to the ‘learning about difference’ origin-
ally contained in/by my research proposal?
As noted by Mark Sanders in his Gayatri
Chakravorty Spivak: Live Theory; ‘learning to learn

7
Probyn, Fiona, ‘Playing Chicken at the Intersection: The White Critic In/Of Whiteness’, borderlands, Vol.3, No.2, 2004, available from
http://www.borderlandsejournal.adelaide.edu.au
8
Bent Flyvbjerg, Making social science matter: why social inquiry fails and how it can succeed again, Cambridge University Press, New
York, 2001 and David A. Snow & Danny Trom, ‘The Case Study and the Study of Social Movements’ in Burt Klandermans and Suzanne
Staggenborg, Methods of Social Movement Research, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 2002, pp. 146-172.
9
The English term ‘conscientization’ is a translation of conscientização as coined by Paulo Freire (1921-1997) in his book Pedagogy of
the Oppressed, trans. Myra Bergman Ramos, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1972. In the Freirean sense, it refers to an education process
grounded in a person’s reality (in the case of Freire’s students, the reality of peasant men and women who were illiterate and living under
a dictatorship) which concurrently engages the person in political activism to transform unjust conditions at the local and global level. MST
activist training utilizes the Freirean model to a great extent; Freire himself having been a strong supporter of the movement.
10
The names of people and places associated with my research are pseudonyms to protect confidentiality.
11
See Deslandes, Ann, ‘Moving Encounters’, Cultural Studies Review, vol. 5, issue 1 forthcoming 2009, for more extensive discussion of
these interactions and their impact on the terms of inquiry.
12
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’, in Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg, Marxism and the Interpretation of
Culture, Macmillan, Hampshire,1988.
 ANN DESLANDES 245

from below’ is a formulation which supplements13
Spivak’s earlier challenge to the western feminist
intellectual (an activist scholar par excellence) to
‘unlearn your privilege as a loss’.14 This supplement-
ation is required in order to maintain the displace-
ment necessary to living ethically with the tension
between, as Fiona Probyn puts it, the desires of the
privileged subject in social movement (i.e. to remain
secure) and her practices (i.e. of challenging the
structures of privilege) - without this displacement
then re-configuring itself in a re-taking of power.15
Maintaining this displacement, in other words, must
not move towards no-placement; utopia, insofar as
that is an acceptance of impossibility and the end of
learning.16 As I will show, answering fully to this
call is impossible (utopian), but it is also necessary;
impossibility and necessity condition each other in
answering.17
The absurdity that arises from such paradox was
reflected throughout my travels around (but never
with) the MST. I was in a Portuguese speaking
country speaking broken Portuguese with an unusual
accent. I was a fastidious vegetarian in a locality
where meat rules the dinner plate. I was often inter-
pellated as too young and female to be a doctoral
student, but at twenty-five, too old and female to be
without husband or children. Partly as a result of all
this, for quite some time I couldn’t locate the one
contact who was to broker my entry into grassroots
sites of the movement – and when our meeting did
eventuate, it was ten minutes of confusion (he
thought I was a high school student from Austria, I
thought he was my colleague). I was, and still am,
Waiting For The MST (of my imagination).
The modernist art and philosophy of absurdism
worked the displacement from familiar frameworks
into apparently unrelated ones. Practitioners high-
lighted the comedy of a failing modernity and con-
current cultural collapses in meaning.18 In the 1970s,
American sociologists Stanford M. Lyman and
Marvin B. Scott marked this social-scientifically in
their “Sociology of the Absurd”; an obscure precusor
to postmodern critiques of purist claims to positive
truth.19 As an absurdist, comedic performance, then,
the case study lost its meaning on the sites that I had
staged for its actualisation as soon as they were jux-
taposed with my positionality; as soon as I appeared
upon the stage (I had constructed for myself). The
parabasis (from Greek comedy, the digression
between performance and audience, subject and ob-
ject)20 that this loss represents has the critical func-
tion of re-address.
Re-address, because the failures of the sociological
case study are already well understood within post-
colonial and poststructural feminist work on the
problem of ethnographic authority.21 These literat-
ures shifted my methodology away from a sociolo-
gical case study of the MST as a microcosm of rela-
tions in the global movement, towards a fictocritical
diagnosis of the politics of these relations; edging
my project into a contemplation on the ethics of
solidarity. My case study ‘failed’ because it assumed
the ‘(impossible) presence’22 of the genuinely
transcultural relationship that is implied by the dis-
course of the global justice movement. This failure
is representative of global(ized) incommensurabilities
in cultural power, which express themselves in the
academic research encounter as much as in social
movement alliance making. The researcher and first
world activist – me - is positioned in this as a priv-
ileged, complicit subject. So, again, what framework
might be used in order “to write privilege while
holding ourselves accountable for it”?23
In social science, ‘reflexivity’ has proved a fecund
source of imagining researcher implicity, if not
complicity (or; the researcher is implicated, if not

13
Derrida, Jacques, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore & London, 1976,
p. 144-145.
14
Sanders, Mark, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak: Live Theory, Continuum, London & New York, 2007, p.77. As Sanders notes, the notion
of ‘unlearning privilege’ eventually led to ‘licensing narcissism among some of Spivak’s followers’.
15
Probyn, s.20
16
Utopianism, as Leela Gandhi demonstrates, does not necessarily signify ‘the end of learning’, but this can be a consequence, as in any
fundamentalist or fetishizing response to an ideal. See Leela Gandhi, Affective Communities: Anti-Colonial Thought, Fin-de-Siècle Radic-
alism, and the Politics of Friendship, Duke University Press, Durham & London, 2006.
17
Probyn (after Derrida and Khanna), s.41. See Derrida, Jacques, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, The Work of Mourning, and the
New International, Routledge, New York & London, 1994, p.xviii; Khanna, Ranjanna, Dark Continents: Psychoanalysis and Colonialism,
Duke University Press, Durham, 2003.
18
See for example Martin Esslin, The Theatre of the Absurd, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1980.
19
Stanford M. Lyman and Marvin B. Scott, A Sociology of the Absurd, Meredith Corporation, New York, 1970, p.vii.
20
As used by Spivak in Sanders, p. 119
21
See Ahmed, Sara, Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Postcoloniality, Routledge, London, 2000, pp. 114-160. Other relevant examples
include ‘Carnival of the Senses – with Michael Taussig’, in Zournazi, Mary, Hope: New Philosophies for Change, Pluto Press, Annandale,
Australia, 2002 ; John, Mary E. Discrepant Dislocations: Feminism, Theory and Postcolonial Histories, University of California Press,
Berkeley, 1996.
22
Derrida, Jacques, ‘Différance’, Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1982, p. 3-27
23
Probyn, s.14
246 THE INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF INTERDISCIPLINARY SOCIAL SCIENCES, VOLUME 2

complicated). The activist scholar is often located
here.24 Concerned with the disclosure of bias, reflex-
ive research is typically founded on notions of col-
laboration and reciprocity between researcher and
subject, which manifested in the ‘participatory’
techniques I had planned to apply in my case study
research.25 Of course, the problem with participatory
techniques developed by the researcher is that she
still directs the scene. She ‘allows’ the subject to
collaborate – ultimately, to speak. In this paper, for
example, I recode individuals with a unique personal
history as ‘José’ and ‘Carolina’, who are thus more
likely to be read as generic Latin American activ-
ists.26
Thus, the hierarchitecture of the research model
imbricates methodology with morality: regulating
the relationship between ‘researcher’ and ‘re-
searched’, whereby the researcher’s idea of how so-
cial life ought to be and/or what is worth investigat-
ing in social life implicitly structures the research
encounter. This is well explained by Aileen Moreton-
Robinson, who suggests that, no matter how much
self-disclosing reflexivity is deployed by the research-
er in the project, the conceptual basis of reflexivity
still presumes an equal playing field that ‘researcher’
and ‘researched’ have created and participated in
together.27 Sara Ahmed also picks up this thread,
noting that the reflexive turn in ethnography still
“presupposes the possibility of overcoming the rela-
tions of force and authorisation that are already im-
plicated in the ethnographic desire to document the
lives of strangers.”28 This ‘ethnographic desire’ is
laid bare by Ahmed’s and Moreton-Robinson’s the-
ory-in-postcoloniality as by my interactions with the
MST.29
Fictocriticism is located at this juncture, often in
deliberate opposition to anthropological and sociolo-
gical knowledge making. Fictocriticism enacts a re-
fusal of the conventional academic performances of
objectivity and regularity, often, again, as a deliberate
strategy against the colonizing practices which would
over-write subjugated knowledges. As Probyn has
observed, the fictocritical is a space for privileged
white subjects – such as Stephen Muecke and Mar-
garet Somerville - to perform post-coloniality as a
‘poetics of failure’, or indeed complicity.30 Fictocriti-
cism is a form of critical analysis which seeps into
the border of social science research to replace the
avowal of ‘researcher positionality’ with an in-text
consciousness of this positionality. As Bourdieuan
reflexivity would have it, “sociologists can find in
literary works research clues and orientations that
the censorship specific to the scientific field tend to
forbid them or to hide from them.31” (Still. Bourdieu
wouldn’t go so far as “bovaristic confessions about
myself, my lifestyle, my preferences”32, seemingly
for fear it would turn him into a woman, and/or even
a cow). Against this censorship, and providing more
than clues; the fictocritic introduces the critical liter-
ary method of reading and writing to the practice of
social inquiry and analysis. As an interdisciplinary
move, this takes me back to the beginnings of post-
colonial discipline as a ‘worlding’ of literature, and
out again to a literary reading of the world. 33
That is, fictocriticism invokes a form of semiology
(that alluded to by Chela Sandoval)34: the practice
of reading social phenomena as signs and re-con-
structing them from multiple perspectives, allowing
the oppression of subjects through binarized and
hierarchical systems of thought to be textually re-
vealed and released. Both ‘the researcher’ as inquir-
ing subject and ‘the research findings’ can be re-po-
sitioned against power relations within this method-
ological terrain. Sandoval calls this ‘the methodology
of the oppressed’, a set of practices within ‘differen-
tial consciousness’. It also stretches into Spivakian

24
For example Amory Starr, Global Revolt: a guide to the movements against globalization, Zed Books, London, 2005 ; Tom Mertes,
Movement of Movements: is another world really possible? Verso, London, 2004 ; Boaventura de Souza Santos, Another Production is
Possible: Beyond the Capitalist Canon, Verso, London 2007.
25
Pierre Bourdieu, In Other Words: Essays Towards a Reflexive Sociology, Stanford University Press, Stanford, 1990. See also Pierre
Bourdieu and Loïc J. Wacquant, An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology, University of Chicago Press, 1992.
26
See Moraña, Mabel, trans. Susan Hallstead,‘The Boom of the Subaltern’, The Latin American Cultural Studies Reader, Duke University
Press, Durham & London 2004, pp.643-654.
27
Aileen Moreton-Robinson, Talkin’ Up to The White Woman: Aboriginal Women and Feminism, University of Queensland Press, St
Lucia, Australia, 2000, pp. 121-125.
28
Ahmed p.63
29
The term ‘postcolonial’ has many interpretations. I use the term as Ahmed does, that is to say that the postcolonial marks, and responds
to, colonialism as ‘central to the historical constitution of modernity’, ‘a failed historicity’ through which we ‘investigate how colonial
encounters are both determining, and yet not fully determining, of social and material existence.’ (11). Postcolonialism functions, for me,
as a trope in the practice of cultural analysis, ‘an interdisciplinarity’ … in which the “object” from subject matter becomes subject, particip-
ating in the construction of theoretical views”. It is “an understanding of the past as part of the present”. See Mieke Bal, ‘Introduction’, in
Bal (ed.) The Practice of Cultural Analysis: Exposing Interdiscplinary Interpretation, Stanford University Press, Stanford 1999, p.12, 1.
30
Probyn, Fiona, ‘A Poetics of Failure is No Bad Thing: The White Writing of Stephen Muecke and Margaret Somerville’, Journal of
Australian Studies 75, pp.17-26
31
Bourdieu & Wacquant, p.206. See also Leela Gandhi’s discussion of the ‘sociology of literature’ and its role in postcolonial thought, p.
147-151.
32
p.203
33
Gandhi, pp.146-153.
34
Sandoval, Chela The Methodology of the Oppressed, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 2000, pp.82-113.
 ANN DESLANDES 247

deconstructive practice, which, in textually revealing
oppression, insists on the complicity of the researcher
and ‘the acknowledgement’, in this, ‘that [my] own
discourse can never be adequate to its example’.35
Pedagogically, in Spivak, this translates to a
‘transnational literacy’ – the capacity for knowledge
making to travel the globe with intimate awareness
of its power (in)tract(abilitie)s, and continuous
commitment to ‘learning to learn’ from outside the
centres of power; a supplement to the global justice
movement’s implied discourse of transcultural ex-
change. Fictocriticism is amenable to this as a dis-
course of ‘travelling concepts’36 – often literally re-
flecting the geopolitical travels of the critics them-
selves, as in the case of Muecke, Somerville, and my
travels in this paper.37
Beyond reflexivity, fictocritical analysis ‘extends
the doubt present in all reasoned philosophical inquir-
ies’38 to emphasise a problematization of the idea of
methodology within the research project over a jus-
tification of the use of a particular methodology (as
I am attempting to do in this paper). The critic is de-
centred in the critique she writes through the very
method of criticism. It is this which has led scholars
of fictocriticism such as Helen Flavell to suggest that
this partial practice performs an ‘unlearning of priv-
ilege’.39
Still, my interlocutors who would critique reflex-
ive research also imply reservations about the ficto-
critical ‘method’ as they do towards some other
practices aligned with poststructural feminism. Sara
Ahmed’s critique of ‘stranger fetishism’,40 for ex-
ample, runs against Stephen Muecke’s ‘stranger’ as
the de-centred ‘starting point’ for inquiry.41 Like the
humbling affect of the reflexive gesture in social
science, an orientation to strangerness still takes
place within an understanding of the researcher’s fi-
nal authority: the ethnographer (fictocritical or other-
wise) is ‘praised for giving up their authority’.42 In-
deed, as I have documented elsewhere, there was a
‘perverse thrill’ attached to some of my Brazilian
displacements – as though they were somehow au-
thenticating me as a first world activist being confron-
ted with third world ‘reality’.43 This narcissism nat-
urally forecloses the possibility of unlearning priv-
ilege. So, in writing ‘contingent’ interactions with
‘strangers’, how can I avoid celebrating ‘stranger-
ness’ as a ‘technique for the acculmulation of
knowledge’,44 and rather engage this definitive con-
tingency as a technique for the production of know-
ledge towards my preoccupation with the ethics and
politics of solidarity. I-the-master-of-all-I-survey45
had not ‘achieved’ an un-learning of privilege
through an obligatory baptism of fire in the third
world and – as was impressed upon me by José and
Carolina – I continue to be complicit in its construc-
tion.
Following Ahmed: to use, in this instance,
Muecke’s peripheral stranger, would be to objectify
him or her as having worth solely on the basis of
their otherness to me: they are ‘cut off from their
histories of determination’.46 As a stranger to me,
José could be cast as such in the research account;
simply supplementing my need to feel less priv-
ileged, as opposed to directing a line of inquiry out
towards the structures of global domination with
which said inquiry is complicit. Similarly, to start
with my own strangerness is to overidentify with a
marginality that I do not actually experience under
these structures. Muecke’s contingency, in this in-
stance, connotes extricability.
Along this very line Spivak makes the wry note
that philosophical writing practices which rely on
‘the power of indeterminate suggestion rather than
determinate references that could overwhelm and
sabotage the signifying conventions’ tend to be ‘more
politically significant for the writer than for the
reader’.47 If transnationally literate analysis is to
maintain a displacement and openness to otherness;
without obfuscating other aspects of being, how can
its written form reflect this directionality? How can
I write literately, that I may be read outside discipline
(refusing to legitimise the structures that maintain
privilege) but still within power (refusing, as a priv-

35
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty ‘Translator’s Foreword to ‘Draupadi’, by Mahasweta Devi’, In Other Worlds: Essays in Cutural Politics,
Routledge, New York & London, 1987, p.180.
36
Bal, Mieke, Travelling Concepts in the Humanities, University of Toronto Press, Toronto, 2002.
37
Muecke, Stephen, No Road: bitumen all the way, Fremantle Arts Centre Press, Fremantle, 1997; Somerville, Margaret, body/landscape
journals, Spinfex Press, North Melbourne, 1999.
38
Nettelbeck, Amanda, ‘Notes Towards An Introduction’, The Space Between: Australian Women Writing Fictocritcism, University of
Western Australia Press, Nedlands, 1998, p.6.
39
Helen Flavell, Writing-between: Australian and Canadian fictocriticism, Ph.D Thesis submitted to the Division of Arts, Murdoch Uni-
versity, 2004. Available at http://wwwlib.murdoch.edu.au/adt/browse/view/adt-MU20051222.114143
40
Ahmed, pp. 3-6
41
Muecke, ‘Contingency Theory: the Madagascan Experiment’, Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, Vol 6, No.2,
p.212
42
Ahmed p.64
43
Deslandes, forthcoming 2009.
44
Ahmed p.60
45
Pratt, Mary Louise, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation, Routledge, London & New York, 1992.
46
Ahmed p.5
47
Spivak, ‘French Feminism in an International Frame’, Yale French Studies, No. 62, 1981, p.166 - 167
248 THE INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF INTERDISCIPLINARY SOCIAL SCIENCES, VOLUME 2

ileged subject, to elide my complicity in its struc-
tures)? As a student of sociology, fictocriticism
shows me the methods for the criticism of fiction,
as it exposes the fiction of criticism. What criticism
is not fictional, then, I wonder.
A supplement (parergon, in her terminology) to
fictocriticism as reluctant genre may well be Spivak’s
notion of ethical semiosis: “the irreducible work of
translation from body to ethical semiosis” (sociolo-
gical analysis is surely a form of translation?).48 As
she recounts in the interview with Sanders, semiosis
is a response to excess in western psychopolitical
order. Under these conditions, the formation of ethics
is a semiotic process of sign reading. Ethics is excess:
within western order we only have a trace in the form
of, for example, invocations of/to responsibility and
accountability.49 These traces are put to work par-
tially, experimentally, hyperconsciously: in the form
of “a permanent parabasis”. As in teaching, where
teacher and student, like researcher and researched,
are irreducibly unequal, “the uncoercive part of it
happens without your intervention”. Ethical praxis
cannot be staged for a case study – it is not possessed
by a discipline, it is a consequence of power. “How
can I get through? Only by knowing what to
move.”50
Only by knowing what to move. How do I know
what to move? This knowledge is activated by
transnational literacy: the capacity for ‘talking across
worlds’, as Richa Nagar puts it;51 the deliberate,
strategic, insufficient, supplemented exchange across
global co-ordinates of power. It is, as Spivak often
says, doing one’s reading, one’s homework – work
that is inextricably from the privileged standpoint of
home, to the specific outlook of another place. “What
is happening there translates what takes place
here.52”
This almost certainly, and doubtless without li-
cence, reflects sociologist Alain Touraine’s notion
of the ethical subject as social movement: simultan-
eously subject to and deintegrated from master
frames; moving between them in order to imagine
other ways of being.53 Conceived in this way, ficto-
criticism is a framing technology, perhaps, then, for
an ethics of movement; for making things move:54
desires, practices, crritics.

About the Author

Ann Deslandes
University of Sydney, Australia

48
Spivak, Death of a Discipline, Columbia University Press, New York, 2003, p.13
49
Spivak in Sanders, p. 117
50
Spivak in Sanders, p. 119
51
Nagar, Richa, ‘Footlose Researchers, ‘Traveling’ Theories and the Politics of Transnational Feminist Praxis’, Gender, Place & Culture,
No.9, Vol.2, 2002, pp. 179-180.
52
Derrida, ‘Dedication’, Specters of Marx.
53
“The subject exists only in the form of a social movement”: Touraine, Alain, Critique of Modernity, trans. David Macey, Basil Blackwell,
Oxford, 1995, p.235. See also King, Debra, ‘Activists and Emotional Reflexivity: Toward Touraine’s Subject as Social Movement’, Sociology,
Vol.40, No.5, 2006, pp.873-891.
54
See Muecke, Stephen in Muecke, Benerrak, Krim and Roe, Paddy, et al, Reading the Country: Introduction to Nomadology, Fremantle
Arts Centre Press, Fremantle. 1984, p.26
THE INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF INTERDISCIPLINARY
SOCIAL SCIENCES

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Mary Kalantzis, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, USA.
Bill Cope, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, USA.

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Patrick Baert, Cambridge University, Cambridge, UK.
Norma Burgess, Syracuse University, Syracuse NY, USA.
Vangelis Intzidis, University of the Aegean, Rhodes.
Paul James, RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia.
José Luis Ortega Martín, University of Granada, Spain.
Francisco Fernandez Palomares, University of Granada, Spain.
Miguel A. Pereyra, University of Granada, Spain.
Chryssi Vitsilakis-Soroniatis, University of the Aegean, Rhodes, Greece.

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