The writing body and the reading sensorium : material calibrations of a living encounter

![CDATA[This paper turns on a concern for that convention that sees the writer dissuaded from imbuing the material dimensions of a piece of writing with meaning – or rather, from disturbing the standardised meaning allotted to these dimensions by the contingencies of a history of print. I’m referring here to literary texts manufactured within a tradition (‘ours’) the particularities of which bar writing from having instilled in its sensually apprehensible form the affective capacity that is instead expected to inhere within writing’s intelligible content. This paper draws attention to the vitality of the surfaces upon which we write and their potential pliability at the hands of the writer in aid of enriching or diversifying a text’s semantic import. In fact, a certain consciousness of the materiality of writing and of its effects, I suggest, constitutes a writerly responsibility, the assumption of which is coextensive with an understanding of what writing is and what it can do. At stake is a singular ethical opportunity, since writing generates an opportunity for encounter with an external other – a union that is ethical insofar as it does not fail to foreground both writer’s and reader’s bodies as individualised and agential sensoria. As practitioners and as educators, to ignore the stuff of writing, I argue, is to insist upon a paradigm that miscalculates the sway of material bodies, reckoning them objects, rather than posthuman assemblages, active agents in the vital matter of life.]]