Natalie Joelle

This article develops what I call 'prac crip' as an innovative methodology to perform on the page the scholarly realities of working, living and writing with the disability of repetitive strain injury. Prac crip is a prac crit of crips that complicates liberatory crip criticism. It shows how repetitive strain injury changes an approach to practical criticism, but also, by association with 'crit' , how practices of practical criticism with repetitive strain injury shift some key uses of the 'crip'. Critical of this mode of cripping as well as cripical, prac crip demonstrates the emancipatory limits of practising crip criticism for those crips the work also hurts in the act. Peter Larkin's fascination with gleaning runs parallel to the rise of lean. To glean and its derivatives have a 'distinctive presence' in his lexis from Pastoral Advert (1988) to Seven Leaf Sermons (2018), a thirty-year period during which lean management has become increasingly global. The article traces through Larkin the eco-politically crucial relationships between the common right of gathering after harvest known as gleaning, historically, a practice for disabled people; the gesture of leaning; and the genealogy of global lean management technologies in the packing of lean meat. The essay explores how disability is an integral part of how its readings are produced, as well as addressing the predicament that work-related upper limb disorders, which are driven by lean managed environments, continue to be driven by writing against lean managed environments.

Georges Seurat’s fascinating work The Gleaner is an ambiguous abstraction of an important figure in nineteenth-century French culture, which pushes the motif of the bending subject in Seurat’s work to a dramatically curved extreme. Yet in spite of being included in several major exhibitions and available in the British Museum’s public collection, the drawing, also known as A Man Gleaning, remains barely documented and demands further research.

To dwell in detail upon the specificities of a single drawing throughout the form of an extended essay is an uncommon approach in the Anglophone literature on Seurat’s work on paper. This study will address the imbalance in the field by offering a sustained critical account of this one early-1880s drawing by the Neo-Impressionist artist.

With reference to contemporary optical theory and comparative approaches, this piece argues that Seurat’s plant-like gleaner fathoms the surface of visual anatomy; intervenes as an entoptical phenomenon; blurs the bounds of legality; enacts a metaphor for information and evokes vitality. The drawing is a troubling, multivalent assessment of what it might mean to glean: to gather what reapers have left behind.

‘gleaners […] daily improvise a more honest and intimate relation to the material’
--Maurizia Boscagli, Stuff Theory, 2014

‘What do you know about gleaning?’
‘Gleaning? Gleaning? Sounds a bit kinky Jim’
--Jamie and Jimmy’s Friday Night Feasts, 2015

This paper complicates redemptive concepts of gleaning in recent ecocritical and new materialist scholarship (Boscagli, 2014; Sandilands, 2011) in light of divergent current representations of gleaning practices.

Beginning with Jamie Oliver’s feminised ‘kinky’ gleaning, at once countercultural and too easily appropriable (Fresh One Productions, 2015), the paper demonstrates how the term has recently gained currency in popular culture as part of Tayloristic and largely depoliticised debates on food waste reform, and suggests that these draw upon dominant ‘lean’ management ideology, which aspires to eliminate all waste or ‘muda’.

The paper presents a polemical genealogy of ‘lean thinking’ (Womack & Jones, 2003) in lean meat and its slaughterhouse technologies, and puts management theory into unusual conversation with The Book of Ruth to consider gleaning as a mode of resistance to ‘lean thinking’.

Finally, this paper argues that today there is a pharmacology of gleaning, or, gleanologic, which typifies our ecological moment of capitalism: poised, as poison, between the increasing pervasiveness of lean thinking in managerial strategy (Leadbeater, 2015), and a more curative challenge to carnism (Joy, 2011) that is radical insofar as carnism and capitalism are coarticulated (Shukin, 2009). In contrast to Boscagli’s optimistic conclusion, it suggests that gleaning as a method of gathering ‘green knowledge’ is troubling in lean times.

‘Life on the earthly plane is always throwing down a bridge between discordances of things’
- Georg Simmel

Georges Seurat’s draughtsmanship relies upon ridges, which appear in the interplay of dark, soft conté crayon and white rough handmade Michallet paper, lending a liminal quality to the texture of his work. Drawing on the plane of Seurat’s paper is always, to adopt Simmel’s words, throwing down a bridge between discordances of things.

This paper will consider the spaces of Seurat’s 1881-3 drawing The Gleaner. The piece is an exquisite abstraction of an important figure in nineteenth-century French culture, which pushes the type of the bending subject in Seurat’s work to a dramatically curved extreme. Yet in spite of being included in several major exhibitions and available in the British Museum’s public collection, this fascinating work remains barely documented.

This paper appeals to spatial theories to argue that Seurat’s figure complicates and in part urbanizes the conceptual space of gleaning. As a biblical practice, gleaning is concerned with marginal spaces, with corners: ‘thou shalt not make clean riddance of the corners of thy field when thou reapest, neither shalt thou gather any gleaning of thy harvest’, Leviticus 23:22 demands. Seurat’s sturdy bending silhouette presents a bridge-like human form. With reference to Heidegger’s essay ‘Building Dwelling Thinking’, Paul Valéry’s short piece ‘London Bridge’, the construction of the Parisian Pont d'Asnières and contemporary architectural theory, this paper suggests that Seurat’s bridge-like gleaner breaks our mental shortcuts.

Reading Seurat’s work on paper alongside spatial theory troubles the practice of gleaning. Refiguring what it means to glean, the focal body as a bridge that gathers – or assembles – also disassembles; unsettlingly transporting us to an unknown country where we cannot collect ourselves.

To glean – to gather the left behind after harvest – is 'inconsistent with the nature of property’, ruled judge Lord Loughborough in a landmark 1788 lawsuit: ‘the great case of gleaning’. Enclosure abolished gleaning rights: ‘if the poor broke down fences they trespassed', in the words of one Suffolk farmer.

Peter King’s studies of this customary right from 1750 to 1850 emphasise how practice continued to dissent from legal precedent. Gleaning has endured – yet the cultures of this important right in England after 1850 are little documented and demand further research.

The first part of this collaborative paper asks: how does gleaning resist economies of enclosure? It suggests that just as 'gleaning' is a word in which 'leaning' is not quite enclosed, so the leaning gesture of gleaning troubles the conceptual fences of enclosure.

The second part will argue that, like the gleaner after the court ruling of 1788, Wordsworth's ‘The Solitary Reaper’ is a ‘survivor-figure from the traditional open fields farming practice’: both lie beyond the constitutive bounds of capitalist society and waged labour relations which frame the lyric encounter.

J. H. Prynne’s critical ‘field notes’ to Wordsworth’s poem offer a slant way into reading some of his difficult later texts against the common condition of fraternal love exalted in his early work. The gathering which succeeds harvest or the moraine that forms in the wake of the glacier shares with reaper and gleaner the quality of being beyond or after, leaving one early poem to state, ‘we are what it leaves’. From this apparent obsolescence might be drawn a paradoxical strength and means of resistance to the topographical bounding of common land in the late eighteenth century.

The thrown-away descends. How does that which has gone down come up again? This paper explores the ‘leaning’ in gleaning; the spinal stooping and bending depicted in Varda and Walker’s recent rubbish documentaries (2000, 2010). How do these vertebral curves articulate what is involved in the waste-reclaiming encounter? Do the arcs of these backs express how wasted things move us? Varda and Walker reflect on a gestural parallel between interactions with refuse and aesthetic experience. Both films offer an opportunity to talk ‘back’ to ways of conceptualising artistic labour and things.

This hybrid panel Autecologies: Emerging Gleanings On Aut(ism) & Emergency presents a timely gathering of majority Autist-activist environmental creative and critical practice. How can divergent ways of being and living lead to ecologically recognizing diverse forms of life? How do these “Autecologies” or Autist-ecologies offer divergent gleanings and emerging acts of recovery in the context of climate and clinical emergencies?

In these presentations, described by order of first name:

* Author and scholar Anand Prahlad reflects on his award-winning memoir and the environmental racism at the heart of most approaches to ‘nature’ and human health.

* Disability Studies scholar David T. Mitchell presents collaborative work with Sharon L. Snyder on Autism and Nonspeciesism, drawing on their recent chapter in Disability Studies and the Environmental Humanities: Toward an Eco-Crip Theory.

* Poet and Insect Librarian Dez Mendoza considers their entomological found-text work ‘Frass’ as a an Autistic poetics of care.

* Artist Helen Mirra considers a constellation of what she helpfully, and here influentially, suggests can be considered ampersand qualities, and ecologically responsible guidelines for artmaking.

* Rhonda Moore offers an Autist-autobiographical narrative poem that connects her anthropological interest in pain with her lived experience of interconnecting ecologies of grief.

The presentations together are Autecologies of enworlded ethics, care, communication, perception, and politics; including liberatory contemplative practices; considerations of the role of the colour green in the context of intersectional violence; and radical gleanerly acts of nonproduction and non-harm.

ASLE: EMERGENCE/Y, July 26-August 6, 2021
Registration: www.asle.org/conf-register/

A handful of gleanings are known as a ‘songle’, a word that also gives its name to a component of an electrical switch. Electrically and agriculturally, songles delimit and define fields: a songle relay alters an electromagnetic current; a songle of gleaned sheaves alters the flows of agricultural production.
Proposals are invited for ten minute presentations to form part of a session on gleaning, or, SONGLE, as part of the programme at the 2019 ASLE-UKI Biennial, ‘Co-emergence, Co-creation, Co-existence’.
Proposals considering cultural representations, practices or figures of gleaning, either historical or contemporary, are welcomed from scholars and practitioners across disciplines, including creative contributions, and creative-critical dialogues.
Please send abstracts of no more than 250 words, accompanied by a 50 word bio, and any additional or technical requirements, to Natalie Joelle at natalie@gleaning.info by 1st February 2019.

Academic labour is often considered to be abstract and disembodied in the popular imagination, and its recent transformation by digital technologies might make this seem even more the case. But the advent of the digital also makes all with digits, physically standardising scholarly activity into the same few motions required to interact with a keyboard, mouse or screen. Academic work has a real, and for some, a lasting, corporeal impact.

Academic labour after repetitive strain injury (RSI) often demands establishing a radically different relationship to the digital, including operating a computer with speech in what is largely a silent, open plan work culture; (re)learning alternative methods of composition; and intellectually unwelcome and financially unsustainable rest breaks from what for many is a vocation in addition to a precarious livelihood.

How do we as scholars with RSI interact differently with or defer the digital in our labour, and what might it mean to have a ‘differigital’ working practice in a digital age? What present and possible forms might ‘differigital’ academic work take? And how might we use them to begin creating a more RSI-positive work environment in the academy?

This participant-driven meeting will be an opportunity to network with others affected by or interested in the causes, impacts and context of RSI, share research, political and personal insights and ways of working.

Attendees are encouraged, but not required, to arrive with a small stimulus to contribute to the discussion, which can take any form, but might include:
• A verbal account of an experience or idea for change;
• A 250 word abstract style summary of prospective, in progress, or published research relevant to the topic;
• An artefact to introduce.

Those experiencing or researching RSI in HEIs are particularly invited to attend, in addition to – but not limited to – equality activists and campaigners; developers of assistive technologies; health and wellbeing practitioners; scholars in digital humanities, medical humanities, critical management studies and disability studies.

It is hoped that the event will be the catalyst for the formation of an alliance that will produce research, offer mutual support and provide advocacy for an extensive but underserved community.

Difference and Repetition: Academic Labour after RSI
Thursday 25th May 2017, 6-7:30 PM
Room 106, School of Arts 43-46 Gordon Square Birkbeck, University of London WC1H

Convenors: Natalie Joelle (Birkbeck) and Chris Till (Leeds Beckett)

Optional RSVP via Eventbrite: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/difference-and-repetition-academic-labour-after-rsi-tickets-33547817425