Acknowledgement(s): A Response to Frances McDonald

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Although collaboration is the norm in STEM fields, it is, as Frances McDonald points out, an anomaly in the humanities. Even as new subfields like digital humanities and new methodologies like surface reading and thick description are poised to "topple the (implicitly male) figure of the Single Author," collaboration in the humanities remains awfully impoverished. Or so it seems. Fran's essay reminds us that collaboration in the humanities has been happening in many ways that go under- or unrecognized, either because they are feminist or because they do not conform to standard notions of collaboration. The model of collaboration Fran traces is unlike the one most common to the sciences, in which the concept of the "first author" still reigns, in which the team is composed of individuals who work together but remain discrete entities. Instead, Fran considers the possibility of a more radical, post-humanist collaboration, in which credit cannot be assigned to individual contributors because the very act of collaboration loosens and liquefies the contours of the subject.

Throughout her piece, Fran tries on different terms to describe this kind of "intersubjective" collaboration in which, when we work together, you and I are dissolved into a plural we. Donna Haraway's "muddle," Karen Barad's "diffraction," and Eric Hayot's "gyration in prose," transpose concepts from biology, chemistry, and physics into the realm of literary and humanistic reading. In the muddle, elements collide and comingle; diffraction names a widening or spreading; gyration a rapid, circular movement. All three terms suggest that collaboration—laboring together, as its etymology indicates—requires intimacy. For the scholars Fran cites and in her own practice with Whitney Trettien, collaboration is a contact sport. But to say that collaboration is a mode of entanglement does not necessarily mean that it is post-humanist, nor that it is feminist. To think through Fran's claim that, in its best forms, collaboration is both, I'd like to lean into her logic of multiplicity. This is a claim Tara McPherson touches on in her recent book Feminist in a Software Lab, where she writes that collaboration has convinced her that "we are never really writing or even thinking alone."1  So can the "we" of collaboration really dissolve individual collaborators? Or, as the joke has it, is it still the case that "there is no I in team, but there is a me."

Fran notes that Deleuze and Guattari "used the formal pronoun vous when addressing one another," and therefore fall short of such a goal. But vous, of course, is not only formal: it is also plural. Might this form of address signify plurality rather than formality? Does the ampersand that links the two men, with its sinuous looping, signify the kind of profound entanglement that would overturn the humanist subject or does it merely indicate adjacency? Can Deleuze or Guattari each contain multitudes? I can't claim to answer such a question, but the reference to Walt Whitman here is not accidental. The all-powerful I in Whitman's "Song of Myself" is meant to speak for everyone, to be the voice of an idealized, democratic America. Reading Fran's essay, I am struck by the fact that plurality is different when it is feminist. Odd and anachronistic as the comparison may seem, Whitman's I is more like Deleuze and Guattari's vous than it is like the mode of sticky collaboration Fran champions. Put another way, feminist collaboration doesn't posit an I that contains multitudes so much as it insists on the multitudes in which every I must reside. In this view, the self is always relational, the ego formed and held within a community, not forged in the fire of a heroic (masculine) individuality.

For Irigaray, 'woman' is famously, sexually, always double—and even further, multiple.2 I think Fran's essay reminds us that woman is also intellectually multiple: frequently denied the symbolic and institutional "loneliness" granted to genius men, the female scholar must remain keenly aware of her intellectual debts, her interlocutors, her own ego and those of her audience. Rather than see this as something detrimental though, Fran suggests that such awareness can generate new ideas and new modes of scholarship. I am not surprised that the example she discusses—the creative, experimental, risk-taking object that is thresholds—is born out of a friendship and collaboration between two women. While male scholars have critiqued the idea of the singular subjects and feminist scholars developed a language to enact that critique, we see now that the medium in which such a critique takes place brings with it a new epistemology. Fran's narration of her "sticky" process with Whitney bespeaks a surrendering of ego that most women can recognize as a means of survival and of flourishing in their professional and personal lives.

How possible it is to enact and reward this sort of collaboration in the humanities is, I think, an open question. Institutional structures are not designed to recognize this kind of work, and even as digital humanities and other subfields attempt to change this, we still rely on citations, bylines, monographs, Twitter handles, and other markers of "star power" for our scholarly metrics.  But perhaps we deploy the feminist collaborative practice that Fran delineates here in our writing more often than we suspect. Almost every instance of written scholarship comes into being only through a process of diffraction that involves multiple agents. In writing this response, for instance, I have become entangled with Fran's ideas, with the scholars she cites; my text has also been improved by Dan Sinykin's editing, not to mention the friends with whom I discussed my ideas. In every text, even those we would not call collaborative, we encounter the imprint of our mentors and the traces of our discarded ideas. But entanglement is usually anaesthetized by the conventions of scholarly publishing. We track our intellectual debts through citation, and we silo our gratitude and our ghosts of influence in the acknowledgments sections of books, but what if we were invited to summon them more often? What if writing well meant regularly and powerfully exposing the fantasy of the single author? To use the central term of Fran's essay, might such a practice make the stakes of our writing both clearer and more communal?

Sarah Wasserman is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Delaware, where she teaches course on 20th and 21st century American literature, material culture studies, literary theory, and media studies. She is currently finishing her first book, The Death of Things: Ephemera in America, which examines literary representations of ephemeral objects in American culture from the beginning of the twentieth century until today. Her work appears in Contemporary Literature, Modern Fiction Studies, The Journal of American Studies, and Literature Compass. She co-edited Cultures of Obsolescence: History, Materiality, and the Digital Age (2015) and curates the "Thing Theory and Literary Studies" colloquy on the Stanford Arcade website.