Im/Probabilities of Post/Authorship and Academic Writing Otherwise in Postfoundational Inquiry

This article explores questions of im/probability of/as post/authorship in postfoundational inquiry. Inspired by Deleuzian philosophy, the article instantiates post/authorship and academic writing otherwise as a means to interrogate, critique, and undo the representationalist modes of normative authorship. Through a series of playful im/probabilities, the article suggests and enacts a writerly mode of post/authorship that reframes notions of authorial intentionality and origination. Reviewer 2: “… your contribution … needs to be more clearly stated at the outset”. In paying attention to writerly invention as inquiry without method, the article’s provocation is, “What might happen if/when we go rogue and become post/authorship imposters instead of authors?”

To this end, the article includes multiple dialogic encounters, textual irruptions, reviewer comments recently received by one of us on an article submitted to a Q1 journal, and accidental occurrences in which we disturb the authority of author(ship) and the representationalist modes of normative authorship. Our disturbances invite and entangle "us two" and "you" our reader, companion theorists, and nonhuman kin in the postfoundational critical endeavor of proposing and instantiating the im/probabilities of post/authorship.
The article outlines and critiques the self-centeredness of traditional academic authorship; discusses post/authorship (Benozzo et al., 2016) and its alternative values, practices, and promises for postfoundational inquiry; and alludes to post/authorship and experimental writing practices Taylor et al., 2019;Carey et al., 2021;Fairchild et al., 2022). The article's postauthorship instantiations can, we suggest, be valuable in postfoundational inquiry, as a means to work ethically and productively against (while being enmeshed within) the normative prescriptions and governmentalizing deformations of the academic-writing-machine- Henderson et al.'s (2016, p. 5) felicitous phrase for the "hyper-quantified machine of the neoliberal university" that individualizes us as performative writing units, counts our outputs, and then grants us recognition as "proper" academics. Our article disturbs the presumptions of, and undermines the foundations of, the academic-writing-machine in its central provocation: What might happen if/when we go rogue and become post/authorship imposters instead of authors?

Write. Right. Pay Heed to The Rules! Author, Write Your Research Story
In graduate school, we are urged by our supervisors to ensure that our research tells a story, a story that describes and accounts for the unfolding of the research journey, which attends to the trajectory of the researcher (ourselves) who are constructing, undergoing, or (sometimes) suffering on that journey, and which offers an accurate, authentic, and truthful representation of the journey undertaken. Doctoral theses, research articles, and book chapters relate such research stories, often contained in the methodology section in traditionally organized writing modes. Such research stories are cossetted things; they are tales into which time and love are poured; their contours smoothed; their unproductive byways erased. Their storied form works to demonstrate that as researchers we possess and/or have developed competence, skills, honesty, trustworthiness; that our style accords with our theoretical and methodological intentions and orientations; and that they accurately record and represent the particular ways in which our research story has generated novel insights and produced new knowledgebecause if it doesn't, then we won't pass our doctoral viva, right? or we won't get our article or chapter published. We won't count or be counted. But. The "telling the research story" doesn't finish here. To make the thesis an article, you have to think about a paper's pipeline and when the article is finished it must have "key research storyline" with an introduction, a development, and a conclusion; we are told it must be consistent; we are advised that the research story line has to have a hook. Have you been told this? Have you learned these rules? The need for telling the story, for having a key storyline, and for constructing the hook of the paper are all illusional effects-productions of pan/optical deformations and research fictions that condition us to believe that we as researchers are grasping reality and that our research story is mirroring reality. These illusional effects are resonant of a foundationalist approach to research and inquiry.
The "rightness" of writing our research stories must Pay Heed to The Rules (capitals intentional, important, and significant!). If it doesn't, then rejection beckons. For doctoral theses, The Rules include strictures on length, layout, contents, and reference format. Articles are bound by The Rules of the particular journal. One of us is Editor for the international journal Gender and Education that has detailed Instructions for Authors. One of us recently had a book published (anonymized) that was required to comply with the publisher's (anonymized) "Graphic and editorial norms," which stated the manuscript delivered to the publisher must be/should be 1. definitive in the writing 2. uniform, meaning that all the graphic and editorial standards indicated by the publishing house must be respected and maintained for the entire course of the text; 3. ordered, meaning evident in its structure and in the succession of its various parts . . . a. It must lay out a map for the reader of the content of the article or chapter b. It must tell the reader the order of that content 3. There must be a Main Body with an Argument.

Likewise
a. The Argument has to be supported by Evidence b. There must be a Balanced Argument judiciously weighing up different aspects 4. The Conclusion must be at the End and should: a. Sum up the Argument b. Recap the Key Points c. Suggest limitations and areas for future research 5. There must be transition sentences and linking sentences for the reader to follow the Argument. 6. Each paragraph must begin with a Topic Sentence and deal with one main idea. 7. Academic and specialist terms should be defined and explained. 8. Acronyms must be written in full at first use and then abbreviated thereafter. 9. There must be a high standard of written English, with correct grammar, syntax, and punctuation. 10. There must be a full end reference list. 11. All work must be your own. Where not, the originating author must be cited and acknowledged. 12. You must follow the Instructions for Authors provided by the Editors. 13. You must submit on time. adhering to textual, graphic, and representational precepts that shape, interact with, and sometimes delimit content, meaning, and expression. When writing (when we were writing this), questions arise: Do authors notice what work The Rules do? Do authors desire subjection to The Rules? Do authors feel bounded and hounded by The Rules?
Hold on a moment. Stay a while. Let's sit with these questions and refuse to hurry on by.
We wonder if you nod in quiet or enthusiastic agreement with these three questions: "Yes! Those damn rules. I follow them, they annoy me, I rail against them, but in the end and for an 'easy life' I comply with them." We also wonder if you go "Grrrrrr! I am a free thinker. I reject rules. I will only publish in a journal where I can do as I like'" Are you, we want to ask, always able to do that? At the same time, we also wonder if, for an early career researcher with little knowledge of publishing conventions and the broader fields, The Rules provide a comfort blanket, and work as handholds or footholds in the slippery slopes and unknown landscapes of academic publishing. We-that is we two who are writing this as collaborative co-authors-are confident in how and where and when to push back against, ignore, play with, or comply with the rules. But we know this because we are experienced and have been in the mangle of the academic-writing-machine for many years. Because of our entangled mangling as co-authors, we suggest that The Rules offer foundational precepts that school our bodies-minds-hearts such that working with/in the academic-writing-machine requires modes of subjection and perhaps even occasional abjection: It produces schooled writing bodies and even docile academics.
AND BUT SO. Pondering these three questions, the answer seems to be variable and multiple: yes, no, sometimes, often, maybe, perhaps.
It seems, then, that the author's dilemma in postfoundational inquiry is around questions of how and to what extent is it possible to navigate a space of and for freedom of expression while accepting that some strictures will probably be necessary? In The Psychic Life of Power, Judith Butler (1997, p. 1) comments "to be dominated by a power external to oneself is a familiar and agonizing form power takes." In taking issue with Althusser and Foucault's omission of "the entire domain of the psyche" in their understanding of the formation of the subject, Butler (1997) suggests that the psychic life of power helps shape subjectivity through its production of psychic effects of ambivalence, risk, and haunting. In post/authorship, power (The Rules) is felt/enacted as a paradoxical process, as an oppression to which one (willingly) submits and as a desire to play, produce otherwise, write differently. Postfoundational inquiry in/as postauthorship modes, then, aims to de-form and perform authorship not as subjection or opposition but as contested and entangled relation with/in The Rules. In which case, the desire in post/authorship enfolds psyche-body-pagetext-environment-computer, and the desire to go rogue, to become-imposter, materializes bodily and sensorially as a "relation of power" that is at the same time a relation of "bodies, multiplicities, movements, desires, forces" (Foucault, 1980, p. 73). These knotted-nots of power shape practices of post/authorship as nomadic experimentation as/in inquiry without method.
In a recent journal special issue on seductions as theory and praxis, Linda Knight (2022, p. 99) argues that "creeping conservatisms and micro-fascisms make seduction vital for the survival of free thinking" in a contemporary academic context that favors the strait-laced and controlled. Knight's argument speaks into the knotted-nots of subjection and desire we ponder in this section and play with in this article's multivoiced enactments. And yet . . . Knight appears to presume a human authoring academic connected to the practice of "free thinking." The question of how to author writing that refuses Reviewer 6: "… you have to clarify the explanations of the study's method and analysis and justifying your choices for these…" creeping micro-fascisms is a provocation to both of us (and we hope you too?) to become un/authored -that it serves as an invitation to the more fugitive im/possibilities and unbounded im/probabilities that sidle and slide around us as we continue to pursue our postfoundational postauthorship evasions of capture by the academic-writing-machine.
In what follows, we pose rogue-ish imposturings that seek to reorientate authorship as a starting somewhere else-as a mode of postfoundational writerly inquiry.

The Author as Hero, Or a Bloodily-Bloodless Tale of Academic Anemia
The Idea of The Author-singular and single-bodied, boundaried, brain enclosed in a separable human body-is a cold dish, a historical leftover of a Romanticism that lauded individual creativity, notions of genius, and the spontaneity of the imagination. This notion of the author also finds a genealogical inheritance in Enlightenment Man-the human at the center, looking over and overlooking the world, impressing his mind on all things, shaping nature, and disposing of beings (women, animals, Black and Indigenous populations) who did not look like him. This is authorship as appropriation in which He who is White and Male gets to tell the Only Stories that Matter, that is stories that center Him in justified narratives of capitalist, colonialist extractivism. There are not too many hops from these conceptualizations of authorship to contemporary knowledge practices that rely on the authority of authorship (citation, H-Index, metrics, quality ratings) to tell us how "good" certain academics are, how research should be done, what it means, and what value it has.
Reviewer 3: "Moreover, the ideas in the paper need to be referenced. For instance, in the first paragraph of the introduction, many ideas are presented without citing a single reference to support them."

Authorship and/in Post-Structuralism
In 1967, Roland Barthes's essay Death of the Author was first published in Aspen: The Magazine in a Box. It was "an invited piece for a box darts journal that also included mazes, phonograph recordings, musical scores, films, and poetry" (Moore Howard, 2016, p. xi). In 1968, Death of the Author was translated and published in France. This event gave rise in 1969 to Foucault's rejoinder and critique before the French Philosophical Society, in which Foucault (1969Foucault ( /1984 tries to unravel the enigma: What is an author? We do not consider the idea of the death of the author in a literal sense-certainly sooner or later every author diesbut as a question that has been debated in the social sciences and in poststructuralism for five decades now (Robillard & Fortune, 2016). This debate represents an attempt to overcome the modern notion of the author, that is, the idea of an individual (a single and singular person) who is responsible for, gives birth to, and composes a text in perfect solitude and is the inventor and creator of that text. This vision brings him closer to the Creator, to God the Father: He is an Author with a capital A, one who can claim ownership rights over the work and who possesses the right to give the ultimate interpretation of it. For Foucault, however, the author as subject and originator is not important and indeed a presumption of their presence constraints and limits the multiplicity or polyvocality of the text.
Foucault evokes Beckett in asking, "What does it matter who speaks?" Rather than worrying about the authenticity, originality, desires, or intentions of the author, or the truth, correctness, deepness, and authenticity of interpretation, Foucault suggests turning attention to questions of discourse, the modes of existence of discourse, and how power is instantiated, circulated, and appropriated in discourse. If the Author is dead and texts are discursive constructions, then what difference does the author make? The author's name might endure but its function is to draw the boundaries of the text and manifest the presence of a text. For Foucault, an author is an ideological and discursive product; it is a strategic positioning. The author is "the dead man in the game of writing" (Foucault, 1969(Foucault, /1984 (Barthes, 1967(Barthes, /1977) "The reader is the space on which all the quotations that make up a writing are inscribed without any of them being lost; a text's unity lies not in its origin but in its destination. Yet this destination cannot any longer be personal: the reader is without history, biography, psychology; he is simply that someone who holds together in a single field all the traces by which the written text is constituted . . . the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author." Reader 4@. I never start a book from the beginning, and I don't even read it all. I skip pages and chapters (chapters? Why chapters?) and I go to the end when I feel bored. Then, I can also go back and pick up some pieces, some random fragments. Here and there. Without a claim to understand the history, but instead with the pleasure to build another story, the one between white and black, that which is impossible to decipher.
Reader 3. She speaks to me. She writes as if she knows me. She helps me think. She casts a line to me across time and space. She wants me to dive into her ocean of wise words. And I do. She encourages me, in the sense of gives me heart. She inspires me, in the sense of breathes life into me. My pen, my fingers on the keyboard, are afire.
Reader@Imposture. Make it up. Make it make sense. Make it count. Make it bleed. Make it known. Make it. Do I (human) tell the computer's story or does the computer tell me? Perhaps we (computer-me-we-us) are hybrid, cyborgian? Perhaps we are a technologized-fleshy-bloody becoming? Or perhaps this new becoming-assemblage is an alien phenomenologist, a "plastic and metal corpse with voodoo powers" (Bogost, 2012, p. 9), which possesses "its own unique existence worthy of reflection and awe" (Bogost, 2012, p. 16). In elaborating the philosophy of speculative realism, Harman (2011) andBogost (2012) talk of how objects withdraw, of objects' estrangement from human capture, of objects' weirdnesses. What postfoundational procedures, practices, or methods might help us (humans) apprehend the strange lives of objects? None. No go. The computer refuses narration in human terms and perhaps all we can do is selfishly and foolishly anthropomorphize a plastic case with precious metal hardware inside. But there is a human-nonhuman story that matters here, concerning the material reality of digging and dirt and land exploitation and resource extraction and colonialism and capitalist waste.

Authorship and/in Posthumanism
Posthuman authorship poses textual possibilities as endless, as unfurling becomings with no origins or end, as im/ possibilities and im/probabilities. And what do "we" who write about textual im/possibilities and im/probabilities become what when-and-as-we-write? Benozzo et al. (2016) suggest authors are impostors. We, the impostors, by entering into relationship with texts, probe the possibilities that open up when the author is unknown and unrecognizable, absent and irrelevant, that is, when the author is dead. The numerous possibilities when encountering a text proliferate, no one reading can arrive at the original intentionality, no one interpretation can disclose the meaning. Text is interwoven with countless other texts. Fairchild et al. (2022)  Covid-imposter-me: an interference, and infection, and infusion.
A cellular human-nonhuman perturbation.
We invoke the earthworms as conceptual personae (Deleuze & Guattari, 1991), whose nonlinear compos(t)ing (Fairchild et al., 2022) disrupts the view that readers (and us as writers) "are subjects, stable narrators, which can articulate phenomena unambiguously" (Hein, 2019: 88). We become-with the earthworm as posthuman kin. Together we become imposters in our authorial earthwormings: What happens to the academic-writing-machine if we become imposters instead of authors? Perhaps writing, the action of actual writing and the academic mechanization of our writing is unveiled, dismantled, and deconstructed, and we become a little, perhaps just a little, more aware of the mechanisms in which we are trapped. These are the machinations of the academic-writing-machine, of writing paper after paper to get published as soon as possible, and we even forget or don't care less about the content of what we wrote. These are the obsessions of getting a certain number of citations. In some way if we become imposters, we unveil the rule of the game that we are obliged to play.

Doing Authorship Otherwise in Postfoundational Inquiry
Our ponderings, provokings, demonstrations, and instantiations take off, in philosophical terms, from Deleuze's discussion of "equal and unequal probabilities" when considering the painting technique of Francis Bacon (Deleuze, 2002, pp. 76-77). Deleuze proposes that the arrival of painterly marks on the canvas (once the painting is begun) is a negotiation of chance and choice-yes, the artist and their hand makes marks but the marks constitute an engagement with the "accidental" which, in Deleuze's view, approaches the condition of the "improbable itself." The artist cannot know in advance what the brush stroke will look like until it appears and materializes itself on-and-with the canvas. The author cannot know in advance what their words will "be" until they materialize on paper-or im/materialize digitally on screen-and the author cannot know in advance, or later, or ever, what those words will do and mean. Interpretation and authorship collide expressively not representationally, enabling postfoundational postauthorship to reach at and enable academic writing practices to resonate with modes of research-creation (Manning & Massumi, 2014); to produce research writing that is an immanent doing of inquiry in the space-times of writing's human-nonhuman co-compositions; and to ensure that such writing stays on the move in order to keep on being/becoming a challenge to normative modes of layout, typesetting, and publications. Postauthorship thus makes an "improbable" appearance on the page.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.