LECTORAAT CHANGE MANAGEMENT – De Haagse Hogeschool

It’s dark. It’s 6:08 AM but it’s dark. The wifi doesn’t work. There is a body covered in white sheets on the big couch in front of me but I do not know to whom it belongs. The filter coffee machine is making its noise. In front of me a bowl of red and green apples, and tangerines. I use the light on my phone to get around the big farm house as I don’t want to wake anybody up. There are eleven of us here including me. We arrived sporadically late last afternoon and evening. We are here on what is called a writing retreat, a retreat for writing. The idea seemed to have come up during casual knowledge exchanges with other members of other research groups. The body on the big couch is lightly snoring. There is a vase with fake plastic flowers in it next to me on my right. The kitchen is impressive. I drink some of the coffee which helps me wake up a bit but I’m still feeling a bit off and disorientated from the jet lag. I landed back in The Netherlands a couple of days ago already but my internal body time hasn’t managed yet to synchronise itself with the time of the environment surrounding it. I go for a second cup of coffee even though a lot of the jet jag literature that I looked into in recent weeks suggest to pace the coffee intake depending on the time of day. I even downloaded an app called Timeshifter that was supposed to give me advice on which actions to take during the day in order to overcome the jet lag moving across several time zone easier. Timeshifter envisions “a future where clock time and circadian time live side-by-side”. Timeshifter also promises in a future-proof fashion that “by knowing our internal biological time, and being able to control it, we can improve our performance, health and safety” (Timeshifter). Nevertheless, from my short experience with the app, it felt clumsy and hard to follow. I therefore allowed my own body to dictate how it feels or wants to behave depending on its own bodily rhythm and so I postponed the adventure of time control or time shifting for the moment.

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Last evening before going to bed and after having an improvised supermarket dinner and some wine on the big couch we asked chatGPT to help us make a schedule for the next day of the writing retreat. ‘What is the best way to organise a writing retreat?’ was the guiding question. ChatGPT came up expectedly with ideas on how to maximise productivity during the writing retreat. Get up early, make a clear schedule that everyone can follow, work in silence, but allow some soft background music to play occasionally, have meals at set times, leave some room for rest, yoga and other forms of recreation so that the body can maintain its main function as deliverer of words on the page/ screen.

Disappointingly my idea that the writing retreat can also be a retreat from writing seemed to have fallen on deaf ears. And so I pick up this paradoxical question here on the page – Can one retreat from writing? What does it mean to not write or write of the not? If writing is a trace as many post structuralist philosophers of the 20^th century have taught us then what does it mean to not leave a trace, to be invisible, or to retreat, to withdrawal from the trace? Erasure seems related to the idea of a retreat from writing but contains within it an active gesture of re-writing or re-inscribing a new trace of erasure, a new smudge. I try to imagine a gesture of writing which is not fully inscribed, imprinted or scripted, or in another words is not using force, and at the same time lays itself down like a feather or leaf falling gently and silently on the ground.

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Here in the forest nearby Nijverdal (which means in Dutch ‘Industrious Valley’), close to the border between The Netherlands and Germany, a town of approximately 25,000 inhabitants in the Dutch province of Overijssel populate the territory known as the place where the industrial revolution in the Netherlands began in the middle of the 19^th century. I am also told by Wikipedia that Nijverdal had a small Jewish community that was essentially erased during WW2 where most of its members were sent to death in Sobibor or Auschwitz. Without going all too holocausty, it is interesting to think of living/ dead bodies as devices or instruments that enact or perform both a form of writing and tracing, and at the same time are open to a certain retreat from writing, either by their own doing or by the doing of others. 

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What in the human body and flesh allows us to conceive of it in this double nature of writing and a retreat from writing? Is it the distressing fact of our limited time upon earth? Maybe the pressing awareness of the finitude of our earth itself? Do our body movements during our lifetime upon earth form a trace for others to follow like a treasure hunt? Or do our body movements hint towards a desire to not write, a desire to escape, to retreat from writing as in to not leave a trace, so that our bodies can be fully embracing and embraced within the fabric of the earth and the multiple resonating and never ending relations of the living and dead that make it what it is.

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Another body wakes up. I am told for the second time this early morning that there is no wifi as a form of BREAKING NEWS (The first time was by the long body on the even longer couch covered in white sheets). Our life line to the outside world is gone. We cannot access the world wide web of relations and so our dependence upon each other in this writing retreat increases even more. The traces we make here and decide to take with us can only be shared later on when we retreat from this forest back to our original land or territory of the everyday, where they will take the form of writings from the writing retreat, but for me they will mean gestures that contain within them a desire to not be written but rather lived. The second body that woke up tells me they didn’t sleep until 4 AM but that it doesn’t matter, they will sleep all day long and that is a form of writing too they say. I close my computer and go for a walk outside in the forest.  

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It’s 9:50 AM. We are after breakfast, some of us had showers, the drama of the wifi was solved (bad electricity fuse that went down when the dishwasher was turned on), a few more members of the research group arrived from the nearby hotel they were staying at and some others arrived from The Hague or Amsterdam by car. We are 50 minutes late to our writing-in-silence-mode schedule. A sound of an apple being bitten is heard, then a plastic cap of a pen being pushed down on the pen, then some more chewing sounds and the sound of wind. Now that the wifi is fixed everybody is behaving like little babies that just got their breast milk from mama earth. Calm, leaning over their laptops and writing tables, some are lounging on the couches (I am seated on the couch with my laptop on my lap). Silence. Someone whispers asking for the wifi password. We share our wifi passwords in S-I-L-E-N-C-E.

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At 10 AM the writing retreat is well on its way of writing itself. Everybody is focused with what seems to be a natural flow of curiosity mixed with hesitation and excitement about writing and retreating into writing rather than from it. Perhaps it is the nature of our research group that is already somewhat accustomed to writing. None of us are writing beginners or novices. We’ve all had our share, some more and some less, of the guilty pleasure of writing. The wind closes the glass entrance door gently.  

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Retreating into writing, into the writing, as a way of writing yourself out, as a way out of writing through writing. Writing as a form of retreat from the writing retreat.

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Maybe the existence of the retreat or going on a retreat already marks, performs or acts as a gesture of failure or closure of something (the political, the bond between political and philosophical)? Maybe a writing retreat is for other purposes? To mourn the impossibility of writing? To mourn the fact that we need to go on a retreat to write?

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In his 2020 article “Melancholic Withdrawal: Narratives of Retreat in Contemporary Political Thought”, philosopher and assistant professor of Cultural Analysis and Comparative Literature at the University of Amsterdam Joost de Bloois unpacks the idea of a “’politics of withdrawal’” (69) that “intimately relates ‘the political’ to gestures of retreat and destitution”. By examining an array of 20^th century continental philosophers such as Giorgio Agamben, Jean-Luc Nancy, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Wendy Brown and Judith Butler, de Bloois highlights the shifts and different registers in which the political has evacuated or been evacuated from the public sphere emphasising Giorgio Agamben’s idea that a “‘disconnection’ lies at the heart of Western Politics” (70). Clearly for Agamben, Nancy and Lacue-Labarthe (1997), the retreat of the political does not take the form of a ‘happy ending’. Deeply engrained in a somewhat nostalgic and/ or melancholic politics of post-’68, retreat marks for these philosophers a certain closure, loss and/ or mourning of the possibility of emancipatory politics as they knew it. 

Working with, rather than against, the idea of politics as a work of mourning, de Bloois cites philosopher Wendy Brown’s idea of a “‘Left Melancholy’” (74) and Judith Butler’s “Politics of Mourning” (83) in an attempt to retreat from retreat, by affirmatively extricating it out of a “melancholic narcissism that [seems] ubiquitous in contemporary life. In mourning, withdrawal does not mean taking one’s revenge on the world. Rather it means to re-affirm one’s attachment to it, so as to reorient oneself differently within it” (83). In other words, if retreating is “the political gesture” (73) par excellence, and mourning is an integral part of it, then better make use of it and work through it in order to return from the dead, so to speak, with a newly articulated sense of desire.

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It is 10:50 AM. A writing retreat member gets off his chair to do some stretches. Others seem to have disappeared from the writing table or perhaps retreated to their own writing sphere or bubble. Last night we had a night walk activity. Just before we listened to some sound file that was sent to us by a workshop instructor that talked in Dutch about the twilight, had some relaxing background new age music and referenced some philosophers to make it sound a bit more grounded in theory. Afterwards the group of eleven of us headed into the forest for a night walk. The first few minutes into the forest felt a bit uncertain but at some point when we got the feeling that there were no hazardous obstacles on the path we felt more comfortable to walk faster and steadier. The moon was one night before becoming a full moon so the skies were a bit brighter than usual but the amount of large tall trees prevented us from seeing the clear night skies until we reached a part in the path that was more open from which we could also see the almost full moon. When we reached the next crossroad the group decided to split into two groups, those who wanted to go back home and those who wanted to continue walking in the dark. I returned home as I was already very tired (still influenced by the jet lag) and immediately went to bed at 9 PM. I woke up at 5 AM and waited until 7 AM to tip toe downstairs where there were now two bodies sleeping in the living room on the long living room couches. I later learnt that they chose to sleep in the living room as each of their sleeping room partners were heavy snorers. 

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We had breakfast with eggs, coffee, some fruits and pre-baked buns in the oven. Then we watched a short movie made by one of our research group members about her time teaching abroad.

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I plan to do two more interviews today and catch a ride with one of the people from the research group that lives in Amsterdam and came here by car. 

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So far I don’t have a feeling that the writing retreat has really been beneficial to my writing but it is a good moment to spend some time with my colleagues from the research group. Whether the time spent together contributes to some kind of social bond is yet to be discovered but for sure sleeping together under the same roof, doing groceries together, preparing meals together, eating together, walking together, and talking together, have some effect or influence on the level of intimacy within the research group. Can intimacy be shared as an intense form of knowledge? 

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Arrived back home to Amsterdam. Looking back at the writing retreat it was transformative. I couldn’t say exactly what it was but intimacy was definitely part of it. Being bodies in close vicinity to each other around the clock for three days does something to those bodies. It makes them a big other body. Being an other body is not easy as different parts of your body want to do different (other) things and perceive the world in totally other ways. However, other or not, ready or not, once your smelly, sticky, snoring body is close to mine, you touch me and I touch you, and we become flesh again.

Works Cited

de Bloois, J. (2020). Melancholic Withdrawal: Narratives of Retreat in Contemporary Political Thought In P. Hesselberth, & J. de Bloois (Eds.), Politics of Withdrawal: Media, Arts, Theory (pp. 69-84). Rowman & Littlefield. 

“Timeshifter”, https://www.timeshifter.com/about. Accessed 30 Sep. 2023