Unplugging from the Goldberg Machine

Abstract

The academic publishing apparatus that binds and constricts our writing production is as deliberately over-engineered as a Goldberg machine that is designed to perform a very simple task using complicated and unnecessary processes. In this text, I take up the challenge to write against the boundaries of academic language, to move beyond the strictures of the scientific method, to make language vibrate with a new intensity. I turn to Deleuze to help in mapping the (mis)uses of language in order to understand how to use language to talk and think and write against the boundaries of knowledge, of binaries, of text. In creating the text, I stutter and stammer my way through and across the white page, playing with words, unplanned and unpredictably. And in this creation, I become a writermachine ‘made up of these components, these passages, these materials that enter into this machine’ (Lambert, 2006, p. 37).