INTERFERENCE

A One Act Play¹ by

Alana Guarino & Maria Guarino

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Interference is a one act play and also a research-creation project. I, MARIA am a graduate student studying Education, and I, ALANA am an artist who is managing mental health issues. We developed this inquiry mostly through conversations on the phone, getting to places where we needed to go. Rooted in philosopher Erin Manning’s concept of “artfulness” (2016), this play emerged as a way to explore disability, teaching, learning and art, drawing from MARIA’s experiences as an epileptic student navigating the academy and ALANA’s perspective as someone diagnosed with mental illness, navigating job and housing situations. Situated within posthumanist, Mad, and critical disability studies, the project resists fixed goals or specific research questions. Instead, it embraces open-ended exploration, moving beyond representation to consider ways of just being and becoming. What did we want to know? We were not really sure, but there were experiences that felt important for us to pursue. 

Sunaura Taylor, in her book Disabled Ecologies: Lessons From a Wounded Desert (2024) writes extensive, lengthy footnotes, referring to them as the book’s “underground… the vast web of relations and contexts that have allowed for what is written above to emerge on the surface” (p. 5). We take up a similar practice. What emerges in the “above” part of our play is a dramatic script, which we hope will be read, enjoyed, produced, and staged- not only by us, but by other actors, performers, academics, crazy kin, and people who come across this play. As Taylor writes, we hope that the “main text” of this  script is as “accessible and readable” as possible (p. 5). In the “below” part of the book, our footnotes form a dynamic methodology—a space where our ideas coalesce, unravel,  re-form, and “respond” (Barad, 2014, p. 184) to the work itself. This methodology cannot be predetermined or fixed. Following Aimee Sinclair and Lyn Mahboub (2024), “we consider the potentials of maddening post qualitative inquiry” (p. 1248). As we write and create, our methodology is always changing. We are embracing madness as a mode of inquiry. Or, as La Marr Jurelle Bruce writes (2021): We are recognizing the “potential in the so-called rants and raves of madpeople” (p. 306). We also reject humanist logics. While lived experience fuels our work, the human body does not center it. A prioritization of rationality and coherence fails to account for the relational, fluid, and entangled nature of existence. By centering madness as a way of knowing, we aim to dismantle the normative boundaries of the human and reimagine research-creation as a collective, disruptive, and generative process that is always becoming.

So, like Taylor’s “underground” these footnotes within our script emerge as a type of undercommons. Dreamt by Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, Erin Manning (2016) conceptualizes the undercommons as a site of research-creation, neurodivergence, and artfulness. Manning writes: 

“What makes it a commons is not the existing gathering but its speculative presence as an ecology of practices. The undercommons is a tentative holding in place of fragile comings- into relation, physical and virtual, that create the potential to reorient fields of life-living- a belief in the ineffable and its powers of resistance to keep it alive. In Moten and Harney’s reading of the undercommons, the university looms large as a site in need. The academic institution also has a major role to play with respect to the policing of neurotypicality” (p. 8).

Manning continues, following Moten and Harney’s dreaming, asking: “What if knowledge were not assumed to have a form already? What if we didn’t yet know what needed to be taught, let alone questioned?… Most academic questions are of the solvable, unproblematic sort. What the undercommons seeks are real problems, problems intuited and crafted in the inquiry” (pp. 9-10, emphases ours).

We agree that the University has serious issues, and we discover many of them on our walks. We also do not hold strict the place of the University as the ultimate site of school. Many of our conversations, which would usually happen as MARIA was walking up or down Broadway, on the way to or from school, would have ALANA on the other side smoking a cigarette at her favorite WaWA gas station, watching people, walking on the bike trail to work, or figuring out basic life shit. While ALANA’s doings and happenings may seem dissimilar or in tension to the work done within the academy (or as ALANA says, they are FloridaGurlRatchet), we found much to talk about, to theorize, and, more excitingly (for us), to make art about. But, as Manning laments, ALANA is not eligible for the neurotypical university. So, our undercommons, our footnotes, are grounded in and through the embodied sensations of the neuroqueerness and neurodeviance that we experience. Moten and Harney conceptualize this practice as study: “something that you do with other people. It’s talking and walking around with other people, working, dancing, suffering, some irreducible convergence of all three, held under the name of speculative practice” (Moten and Harney, cited in Manning, 2016). For us, study is creating this play.