I take things apart. I break in order to open. That’s how I critically proceed. That mode of critical encounter can be met with frustration or incomprehension in the social academic contexts I work in. This form is thus meant to create a space to take the care and time to explain and guide interested interlocutors into my process and where I’m coming from. When I am approaching sentences in a critical attitude, I take them to be structures in which to move. For me, sentences (as I read them or write them from an interest in critical engagement, which is not the only way, of course, to read and write sentences) are NOT representations. They are not straightforward, passive conveyers of meaning. When I’m encountering a sentence in a critical mode, I experience a sentence instead as a form of architecture to guide an experience and a form of movement through words and ideas and connections that is not predetermined or given. I come out of the sentence and then go back in. This is the spirit of this experiment, and of this form. It works like this: each sentence contains worlds. Each term I’m using, each vocal or scriptural gesture, is entangled and intimate with many others and this form is intended to try to move in and with those tangles.

The Exploded View Diagram project is a form of nonlinear essay. The links embedded in the text are meant to create the opportunity for moving into and through a sentence in a dynamic way. Please do click, and move, and explore. There is much more to come.