Vulnerable academic performances. Dialogue on matters of voice and silence in academia

In this dialogue, authors collectively reflect upon their experiences of being feminist philosophers. They diffract their personal and embodied experiences, philosophical reflections, and critiques of institutions in order to consider how and where a “vulnerable academic performance” is possible. In particular, the authors address matters of voice and silence within academia by asking the following questions: How are voices distributed and materialized in academia? Whose voice is heard and listened to vis-à-vis exisiting philosophical canons, classifications, and regimes of citationality? Bringing to the fore both personal and affective registers, the authors address the standards of legitimacy, hierarchies of voices and precarious labor conditions in academia as factors that render voices un/heard. With this in mind, they suggest a move towards vulnerability as a potent source of collective empowerment that is capable of disturbing academic power structures and canons.

In this conversation we diffract (Haraway, 1997;Barad, 2007) our voices through one another, letting the concepts that we think with, the ideas and experiences that we share amongst ourselves, and the vulnerabilities that we reveal to each other overlap like waves, creating new pathways for our dialogue(s). As such, diffraction is indeed "a lively affair" (Barad, 2014, p. 168) to us, a means of wondering and wandering about our own situatedness within, against, and beyond academia with the aim of "breathing new life into it" (Barad, 2014, p. 168).
This approach is also a way to destabilize fossilized subject positions and to unsettle our own positions that we may take for granted, and, instead, search for collective-building strategies that emerge from our thinking about academic labour. As well, applying diffraction towards this line of inquiry effectively undermines the concept of vulnerability as a weakness2 and, by making differences matter (Barad, 2007), it attends to patterns of relationality, solidarity, and possibilities, that emerge from encounters between variously situated and vulnerable subjects.
In this dialogue we mobilize an experimental mode of practicing thinking that involves both theorizing and feeling. We call it a "vulnerable academic performance," a method aimed at troubling traditional academic conventions, such as the rules dictating the format of scholarly articles or the stylistic expectations governing a conference presentation or lecture. We first presented this method at a New Materialist Politics and Economies of Knowledge conference in Maribor, Slovenia in 2015 (Rogowska-Stangret & Cielemęcka, 2016;Maldonado & Guenther, 2017)so pervasive is this tendency that there is even a whole emergent literary genre of "quit lit" (see Schuman, 2013;Dunn, 2013). Taking into account our own precarious situatedness, the question of changing professional path has crossed our minds. However, there are multiple factors that influence this sort of decisions. That is why we recognize the need to think simultaneously within, against and beyond academia respectful of those who exit, those who stay, and those who are temporally in and temporally out. See also Nanna Hlín Halldórsdóttir's short essay Academic Praxiography in this volume. We thank Maria Tamboukou for bringing our attention to the phenomenon of quitting academia and pointing out some of the discussions held. 2 Other researchers have also undertaken this task of reconfiguring vulnerability, repurposing it towards political goals by use of various (interdisciplinary/transdisciplinary) methodological devices; see for example, the concept of weak resistance in Ewa Majewska's work (2018).
Matter: Journal of New Materialist Research, volume 1 (2020): 23-51 ISSN: 2604-7551 (1) 2015), performing it in front of an academic audience well aware of the conventions and expectations already mentioned. With this move we hoped to offer a recalcitrant alternative to standardized academic performances by bringing the personal and the affective registers of scholarly presentation to the forefront of our talk. Herein, diffraction allows the meaning to arrive from within our conversing voices, from within our encountersin the form of a response.3 Vulnerability plays the essential role of a pre-condition to enter into a collective dialogue. It allows for an openness to that which emerges without us ever fully predicting or controling its trajectory, conditions reminiscent of Elizabeth Grosz's (2010) epistemological reflection on feminist theory as an always already openended project. Open-endedness is part and parcel of what we envision to be a performative, that is, an embodied, located, and relational dialogical practice. The range of meanings and uses of "performance" and "performativity" are both expansive and overwhelming to the point that parsing through their prolific application exceeds the scope of this piece. Yet we do evoke these terms to signal this conversation's strange position as both staged and spontaneous, curated and unconstrained, contained and open-ended. A vulnerable academic performance calls in the embodied, the experiential, the excitable, and the personal aspects of our existence and, consequently, disturbs, if only momentarily, the rigorous norms of speaking in academia. Furthermore, "vulnerable academic performance" is also a method of engaging with ourselves in academic lifewithin/in, against, and, we hope, a way of moving beyond academia defined as an institution of higher learning and research, foregrounding instead academia as a workplace and as a web of (power) relations that cuts across established institutions, canons, classifications, disciplines, rules, and hierarchies, involving both humans and non-humans as both subjects and objects. As such this method and this dialogue are a "power-sensitive 3 In our article "Stigmergy as a Collective Research Practice"  we further develop the importance of relationality, response-ability, com(mon)passion, collectivity, and experimenting for research practices today in advocating collective and collaborative approach to research.  (1) conversation" (Haraway, 1988, p. 590), particularly aware of the murmuring of power relations within and across academia.

Olga Cielemęcka:
"…the torment of getting up to speak. Her heart racing, at times entirely lost for words, ground and language slipping away -that's how daring a feat, how great a transgression it is for a woman to speakeven just open her mouth -in public…" (Cixous, 1976, p. 880 they shape bodies, their histories, and their possibilities (see also Butler, 1997;Sedgwick, 2003). Herein, a feminist intervention was in order, and, sure enough, thinkers like Donna Haraway (1992) filled in the gaps left by Austin and his acolytes by pointing to an integral enmeshed reality in which the material, including the body, is affected by wordsa so-called semiotic or discursive reality.
Monika, you have said that ours are "vulnerable academic performances". And you invite me to perform with you and to be vulnerable with you. What is this space of performance in academia? Where is it? "To perform" means to execute and to fulfill, but it also means to produce and to enliven. Performance encompasses re-creation, a certain repetition akin to sticking to a preordained script or scroll, but it is also a creation of something new; a staging as well as becoming. In this vulnerable performance I turn to you with an invitation to speak.
I offer a space for you to speak within and from. But it is never completely safe for a woman (let alone other marginalized genders and bodies) to speak in the world of academia. To speak our bodies, to let the voice be heard comes with a risk; it is scary. Academia is not usually a space of dialogue, of heterogeneous yet equal voices recognized, heard, listened to, and taken into consideration. Academia is a battlefield, it is not free of power relationsthough it sometimes claims to be such under the guise of objectivity (which I will discuss below with reference to Donna Haraway), but quite on the contrary. It has its gatekeepers, who guard the territory, it has its strategies of survival, it has its successful and unsuccessful tactics, its stratagems, its clubs, its allies and its enemies. All covered over nicely Objectivity is here understood to be a "view from above, from nowhere" (p. 589) or as a "[way] of being nowhere while claiming to see comprehensively" (p. 584); otherwise put, the "god trick" is being everywhere and nowhere in particular, yet still encompassing all points of view. Moreover, objectivity, as Haraway (p. 581) puts it, is a conquering gaze from nowhere. This is the gaze that mythically inscribes all the marked bodies, that makes the unmarked category claim the power to see and not be seen, to represent while escaping representation. This gaze signifies the unmarked position of Man and White.

Monika
In this, objectivity erases the actual bodies, the specific material conditions, and the ingrained privileges of those engaged in the production of knowledge. At the Matter: Journal of New Materialist Research, volume 1 (2020): 23-51 ISSN: 2604-7551 (1) same time, the god trick helps to maintain a very particular power position under the guise of detachment and disembodiment.
As a response to a god trick that no longer does the trick of performing objective scientific inquiry, Haraway offers an alternative to prevailing notions of objective inquiry through her concepts of "situated knowledges" and "partial perspective" to assist in fomenting more accountable scientific research and knowledge production. Nonetheless, "situated knowledges" is rarely put to action in institutional settings. Trying to speak from one's own particular situatedness, from one's own embodied position always comes with the risk of being accused of propagating non-objective knowledge claims, of contaminating scientific methods with subjective or relative perspectives, of including accidental properties, and thus, of being unworthy of recognition and consideration. So, be aware when entering academia. It does not keep its promises. One may end up asking why did you let me through the doors in the first place If you were just gonna turn around and force me out? (Tagore, 2011, p. 37)5 I am wondering: was I ever invited to speak? Or, rather, was I directed to speak ("go, perform your academic self!"), which left me with nothing to say, with my silence, panic, and an urgeas I felt itto disappear. This led me to thinking about the relationship between performance and certain spaces that you also  (Irigaray, 1993(Irigaray, [1985, p. 29).
Female-identified (and others marginalized based on their bodies and gender expression) philosophers are dropping outone by onefrom academia,  (1) it may be identified with feminist practices that shape knowledge production today, for instance, the development of explicitly feminist approaches to science, physics, politics, or philosophy. Take as an example the image of a "reasonable feminist"she is a figure produced by the guards that police academic territories in order to justify their existence and function: these guards point to the "reasonable feminist" in order to mark their own openness and tolerance towards difference. Fear of a disorderly buzzing of discourse often comes with a fear of different, confusing, or ill-defined bodies that need to be mastered and controled. We are, willy-nilly, left to perform in-between, if we are willing to (have strength to) perform at all. It struck me how dangerous but also exciting it is to perform in the space of borderlines (Anzaldúa, 1991). The "unruly edges" (Tsing, 2012) of such materialdiscursive academic performances make us both vulnerable and creative. The "unruly edges" of the cuts, where the proliferation, fermentation, gemmation take place are both painful and soothing, providing or opening up the space for more and more of us to perform.
OC: For many traditionally-oriented philosophers, particularly those that work in the analytical tradition, "feminist philosophy" is an illogical impossibility; it is, as you say, just a buzzing to their ears… I myself was trained in this tradition and thus very attached to a certain canon in which philosophical study necessarily means rational argumentation, rigorous rules for thinking, and established logics. And these characteristics have, seemingly, nothing to do with the body and its extensive needs An alternative approach is to perform with and within, to position oneself against the rules of the game so as not to give up any ground, and, eventually, to manifest a challenge and change to these rules from within existing forms and practices. I believe we can extrapolate this strategy for academia generally but before we do so, we must acknowledge that the academic labor market is very difficult and unstable, and the working conditions within academic institutions are precarious and often exploitative. This, among other reasons, is why so many people quitsome are forced to do so, some knowingly choose to leave a suboptimal working environment. Sometimes such decisions come with a feeling of loss (see Bartram, 2018) and other times exiting such conditions brings much needed relief.
Matter: Journal of New Materialist Research, volume 1 (2020): 23-51 ISSN: 2604-7551 (1) For a feminist philosopher to remain working within the field of academic philosophy means that she must commit herself to an abiding quest for spaces in which she can perform. You called these spacesevoking Anzaldúa (1991) -"borderlines." You write: "It struck me how dangerous and exciting it is to perform in the space of borderlines." Borderlines are the spaces of in-betweenness, which separate and delimit but, at the same time, remain indeterminate: unsettled, undecided, doubtful, and dangerous. And then, again, a "borderline" is also a type of personality disorder, one which is diagnosed mainly in women and associated with "hysterical" impulsivity, emotional instability, and sexual promiscuity. In our feminist archive, thinking with borderlines also evokes the work of feminists of color. For Anzaldúa, borderlands are the areas susceptible to la mezclahybridity, zones similar to the borderlines that you describe as being unruly and rebellious, constituted through morphogenic edges where vulnerability goes hand in hand with creativity. Borderlines are thus prolific: cuts, wounds, and injuries disturb the homeostasis of the body surface and, simultaneously, they set in motion the processes of healing, re-growth, regeneration (of tissue), and formation (of a scar) in which bodily capabilities are mobilized.
However, having recognized the above, I need to stop here. There are cuts that will not heal and injuries which cannot be recovered from. Some damages are beyond repair, but only when we think of repair as an individualized process in which a sense of harm or loss is seen as unproductive and where change is unwelcomed.
Being silenced will not teach us how to speak. Just as being called "stupid" will not make us feel smart and confident. For this alchemical process in which vulnerability is transformed into empowerment to take place, it seems to me that yet another element is indispensable. The harm is not enough for the body to heal; rather, it is the mobilization of a collective effort of a body's cells that provides for such healing. In "The Phoenix, the Spider, and the Salamander," But, to go back to Malabou, I feel that we do not have any guaranteeswe do not know for sure that our tails will regrow, that we will manage to create something anew, that we will be able to heal ourselves. The category of openness that I find so fascinating in this respect is only a promise, a condition that might enable "something new and promising to come to light," but it also may not yield anything productive at all. While openness raises hope, thisof coursemay be jeopardized. Openness comes with riska very real oneof failing. Openness confirms and affirms the fact that we are not in the position to controlneither our bodies, nor our language. It is at this point where the autonomous, selfcontrolling, and self-centered subject turns out to be a pipe dream. To recognize and to admit this openness as the ground on which we are funded makes a difference in several ways that I will now address.  (1) resentment, and defense via offense. It was a great relief when I realized that people who employed these practices were not talking about me, nor about any of us. In fact they were not discussing my projects, papers, academic performances at allall they were doing was sharing their logophobia with others. In fact, the real object of those attacks are often fantasies about who is a woman-philosopher, a feminist-scientist, and how she may harm the status quo.
Stating that does not mean that I am not aware of (or that I diminish) the fact that this "phantom war" may cost you your job. To silence us wouldfor the hegemonic power relationsmean to survive, to let us speak would entail castration, deprivation of voice, power, body. The logic of castration or deprivation implies that one is taking from me something I own, something that I feel is mine, my property. This logic is deprived of its infectious potential by the concept of the subject's opennesswhat is it that I own? What is it that I control? I would sayonly phantoms. Phantoms haunt us with a false claim of ownership. Phantoms that we created ourselves and overinvested with pain, refusing to let go of the harm and our narcissistic ego. Phantoms of the castrated phalluswas it ours to begin with? Please don't get me wrong, I don't mean to ignore anybody's pain, I just need to find a place for the joyfulness and play that comes with performance.
And it is not even that… it is not only about making it possible for joy and playfulness to enter into my academic performances. It is much more andat the same timemuch less than that. The stakes are higher. It is about finding a place, where living an academic feminist life could be possible at all.
That's why I would reformulate your question: How do we then become salamanders whose tails regrow? I propose we ask instead: How do we detach ourselves from the lost tail, how do we get rid of the phantom of the lost tail, or at I refer to Grosz again (1994, p. 73), who reckons that the phantom is an expression of nostalgia for the unity and wholeness of the body, its completion. It is a memorial to the missing limb, a psychical delegate that stands in its place. […] The phantom limb is the narcissistic reassertion of the limb's presence in the face of its manifest biological loss, an attempt to preserve the subject's narcissistic sense of bodily wholeness.
A phantom is also a condition of possibility for the replacement of the lost limb with a prosthesis (p. 71). Again, a vicious circle -the "I" demands a phantom out of misery and a longing for integrity, the phantom enables replacement and substitution. The logic of openness that I am arguing for here is the logic that resists narcissistic, self-sufficient subjectivity; it denies the possibility of replacement and it appreciates the opportunity to find new "tails"new collective and individual solutions.
From this perspective it is always about breaking the vicious circle of loss-nostalgiareplacement. "Given the choice between conformity to the limitative demands of adaptation and death, it [instinct -MRS] invents a third way: the excess invention of a more to life. An inventiveness immanent to the topology of experience, one with its lived qualities, at its most subjective leading edge, spontaneously responds to adaptive pressures" (Massumi, 2014, p. 18). How might weindividually and collectivelyinvent third ways that are simultaneously with/in and against academia?
And again the borderlines are to be addressed urgently. The power of the phantom remains a constant "memory irritation" -we cannot forget about our losses, that's why we feel impotent. According to Rosi Braidotti (2008, p. 22) this is the really negative effect of negative affectsblockages. This is the state where one forgets about "an inventiveness immanent to the topology of experience" (Massumi, 2014, p.18 (1) perform while being "out of joint"? Can "third ways" be born out of this state of "out-  (1) with other women while we examined the words to fit a world in which we all believed, bridging our differences.
The politics of voice and silence are gendered -as much as they are raced and classed. Audre Lorde wrote about this extensively in reference to violence against Black and queer women. But by "voice" here I don't only mean its discursive register, but also the very materiality of voice -things like vocal timbre and height ("does it sound 'masculine' or 'feminine'?") or a voice's fluidity and accent ("does it sound 'native' or 'foreign'?") (see also Cielemęcka, 2017). Speech pathologist David Azul brings our attention to this aspect of speaking when writing about the materiality of trans and gender diverse voices and the voice-lessness that is imposed on them by the violence of gender dichotomy. Azul predicts that one day "in the foreseeable future, […] we will be able to 3D print standard-sized male or female voice organs and implant them into suitable pharyngo-laryngectomized throats in a simple organ replacement procedure" (Azul, 2018, p. 130 (1) forms the harder it is to get through. Speaking out and speaking with, sheltering those who speak; these acts of spreading the word, are world making.

MRS:
Speaking or voicing ideas, thoughts, and intuitions, engaging in dialogueslike the one we perform hereis indeed world making. It accomplishes this in the sense that weas feminist philosophersoften lack institutional support and are unable to enter or perform in spaces provided for philosophical thinking and related practices. We need to make a stage for our vulnerable academic performances. Akin to birds of paradise or bowerbirds that set themselves a stage on which to perform and attract a mate, we need to build our own stages, our own "bowers," and our own academic spaces in order to provide for ourselves the conditions of possibility for feminist research to happen, to be voiced and to be heard. These stages are built for ourselves, for other women-identified-philosophers, for feminist researchers, as well as for scholars of marginalized genders and bodies. They should be built and supported collectively in hopes that others, too, will feel welcomed to perform on them. Importantly, the process of preparing the grounds for such performances must be recognized as work, as labor that consumes time, energy, and emotional, social, and cultural resources.
In describing the formation of a new social class, namely the precariat, Guy Standing addresses a phenomenon dubbed "work-for-labor" (2011, pp. 120-121), which involves "filling in forms, queuing, commuting to employment exchanges, commuting in search of jobs, commuting to job training and so on" (2011, p. 48). Building a stage for ourselves in academia is even more than "work-for-labor;" needeless to say, academia as a work environment is becoming more and more precarious, and with its reliance on adjunct and contract-based teaching labor, the academic work force feeds directly into the ever enlarging precariat.6 This is what is needed for one to laborthe stamina that it takes to be capable of doing it day after day, one rejection 6 Standing recognizes how academic work environment changes and how education is commodified (see 2011, pp. 67-72). A number of references mentions precarity as depicting conditions of academic work in neoliberalism. In feminist context see for example Taylor & Lahad, 2018.
Matter: Journal of New Materialist Research, volume 1 (2020): 23-51 ISSN: 2604-7551 (1) after another, of surviving being the object of hate speech or ridicule one time after another. It takes time, as well as emotional and collective energy and endurance, but it also invites creativity and resourcefulness in order to find the ways that these stages can be built. This is what elsewhere I called "politics of squatting" and in this context I would call us "squatters of academia." Squatting here is a metaphor and a practice "useful to grasp the mechanism of creating and producing the time and space for the new" (Rogowska-Stangret, 2015, p. 66). In the "politics of squatting" it is also crucial to uncover the previous and existing efforts taken to build spaces for (vulnerable) performances, to reveal the process required for one to get to the position of speaking, exposing the conditions of im/possibility of using one's own voice.
Above you mentioned an essay by Catherine Malabou depicting three models of recovery. The first one was a phoenixa figure that represents regeneration that does not leave a scar. In many ways throughout academic life this ideal prevails. The time, energy, and emotional work put to work for academic purposes is erased or subsumedonly the final outcome and bottomline matters. In other words, the scar of unrecognized work is there, only invisibilized. As Malou Juelskjaer and Rogowska-Stangret put it: All the hard work that went into enabling "results" (grant applications, experiments, data production and analysis, developing and dismissing theories, consulting with colleagues, engaging with other researchers' results, and so forth) is made invisible, "at the end of the day or project, the product of the physicists' activity is freed from any marks of this work" (Schrader, 2012, p. 119). These mechanisms do not apply solely to physicists, but resonate with, and might be also used to investigate, products of the work of researchers in other academic disciplines. (Juelskjaer & Rogowska-Stangret, 2017, p. 3) A phoenix in this respect is a fake that invisibilizes the work that is put to work, the efforts put towards living a feminist academic life, and the conditions that make feminist research im/possible. Scars should not be erased but rather revealed and Matter: Journal of New Materialist Research, volume 1 (2020): 23-51 ISSN: 2604-7551 (1) appreciated. They are materialized signs of what it takes to endure. You opened our conversation with a quote from Cixous about "the torment of getting up to speak" (Cixous, 1976, p. 880). This torment materializes also in our voices: trembling, of different timbre, accent, stammering, too quiet or too loud, considered to be too polite or too aggressive, too slow or too quick, sometimes estranged or alienated, out-ofjoint, sometimes intimate and revealing so much of the struggles of (and it is worth repeating) "…the torment of getting up to speak" (Cixous, 1976, p. 880). Those vulnerable voices of ours are also and at once our stages, our academic performances, and our scars. Do not hide them succumbing to an illusion offered by a phoenix. Because the scars, the scarred and vulnerable voices do matter and they are woven into how academia today sounds. Just listen to the borderlines, the spaces in-between, the "unruly edges."