Companions: A Speculative Muddle

Virginia Woolf knows writers (and readers) are in good company – it is a sentiment shared in a great deal of feminist thought. Sara Ahmed recommends Virginia Woolf novels as companion texts quite often ¹Sara Ahmed, ‘On Being Directed’, in Living a Feminist Life (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017), 41–64; Sara Ahmed, ‘The Contingency of Pain’, Parallax 8, no. 1 (1 January 2002): 17–34.. Karan Barad illustrates the agency of working together-apart with Gloria Anzaldua and Donna Haraway ²Karen Barad, ‘Diffracting Diffraction: Cutting Together-Apart’, Parallax 20, no. 3 (2014): 168–87.; Audre Lorde and Adrienne Rich frequently speak and refer to each other to provide examples about how the skills of transformation are supported by the labour of learning required by the individual, companions, and community Audre Lorde and Adrienne Rich, ‘An Interview: Audre Lorde and Adrienne Rich’, in Sister Outsider, ed. Audre Lorde (Woman Poet of the East, 1979; repr., London: Penguin Random House UK, 2019), 103–6.[/mfn]. Susan Sontag challenges Adrienne Rich³Susan Sontag and Adrienne Rich, ‘Feminism and Fascism: An Exchange’, New York Review Books, 20 March 1975., and Rebecca Solnit values her relation with them all Rebecca Solnit, Recollections of My Nonexistence: A Memoir (Penguin, 2021); Sharon Blackie, If Women Rose Rooted: A Life-Changing Journey to Authenticity and Belonging (September Publishing, 2016).[/mfn].

As each of these women shares, companion texts are something to walk with rather than away from. They are there to co-navigate a muddle, collaborate, face together rather than push away from or or argue against. Companions are beneficial when hidden or emergent subjects are involved, such as the shifting perspectives walking generates or the ‘personal’ lives of FLINTA Folx are involved. Companion texts help us tune into standpoints and situated knowledge that is unrecognisable by the usual ways of getting to know something or another. At the top of this entry, Virginia Woolf draws our attention to scribbling in notebooks, asking who is looking over our shoulders, what is shaping our words and ideas across time, and where we might find comradery while we navigate muddles. Above she was looking over the shoulders of her companion, not her grandfather, E.M. Forster, another, who, much like her preferred the untidy and harrassed⁴Virginia Woolf, ‘The Art of Fiction’, The Nation and Athenaeum Literary Supplement, 12 November 1927.. Virginia Woolf recognised the value of thinking-with (and about) companions.

Walking together with companion texts means putting into conversation all that are present through an ongoing recalibration and conscious recombination. It means to try on something new and show some of the clumsiness involved so that the subject of knowing something hidden, as is the subject here, is illustrated. “By attending to the particularity of this other that we can show that which fails to be grasped in the here and the now, in the very somebody whom I am faced with⁵Sara Ahmed, ‘This Other and Other Others’, Economy and Society 31, no. 4 (1 November 2002): 560..” In a muddle, companions may give some guidance, but the relationship between the protagonist and their other gestures to what company is and does and what is generative in companionship: there is a shared experience of dis/comfort or dis/orientation. It is something quite ordinary, something shared, a sense that ensures we have something in common – even if our somethings are quite opposing.

In Routes and P(l)aces, companion texts are selected first, by shared words, and second by their ability to guide us to recognise the shape of things to come, both literary and aesthetically – form and content, visual and discursive. Companion texts are chosen for their capacity to demonstrate the processes involved with working together-apart. Walking-with the companion texts of this muddle, the muddle of knowing FLINTA lives, means thinking with the disjointed stream-of-consciousness Virginia Woolf delivers so effectively (as an example). It means learning a skill to recognise the moment of being that arrives when pace and route, place and time, go in and out of step. I am speaking here to the shared experience of learning this skill of rhythm emerging out of our co-presence – what if the co-creation of discomfort and tension, instead of the production of two-sided conflict, was our shared experience? Thinking-with companions while walking involves recognising this dis/organisation of thought that comes in pieces and often leaves ussettled. It is remaining with the discomfort is ways that still move through it.

We walk because we must understand the mobility of knowing ourselves.

We identify the world around us (and what comes to matter) depending on the specific location and people encountered – formulating ideas and conclusions based on what is seen and known. We get to know something through the broken fragments of sight and sound collected, through difference. When Karen Barad walks with her companions, often listing them out as she goes, she speaks in snippets, rambling about lived moments, then cuts diagonally through ‘thick spacetimemattering’ that present translational muddle that invokes something that is, as Trinh Minh-ha is paraphrased to have same ‘not opposed to sameness, nor synonymous with separateness’. Barad thinks with Trinh:

Virginia Woolfs companions think not of the new nucleus, but about creating one via embodied, in situ, activities. They look for experiential unfolding to enter liminal spaces where visual fields and affective exchanges, chats along water, across parks, and in forests, gather meaning and trust – trust in the process and production of knowledge drawn on the sensorial and (pleasurable) affective that folx above highlight, as Audre Lorde said, a powerful resource to guide our destinies⁶Audre Lorde, ‘The Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power’, The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader, 1993, 339–43.. With companions, we learn that the murky and dark muck often thought of as something to get past is essential to work with. In our walks, our companions are foundational in the development of a method of knowing that attends to the difference of experience by centring the research not on the subject but rather the sensations and phenomenologies that inform epistemologies and pedagogies that inform what and how we come to experience the unknowable.