Reading and Writing

Kate has asked me to write three pages about my reading before we meet on Thursday.  I have been procrastinating so far today.  Partly by mending my back gates and, partly by reading Colin Ward.  My biggest fear about reading is that it doesn't feel like doing anything, there are no small feelings of achievement, nothing to tick off, in my criterion of actually doing something reading doesn't even register.  I'm also a very slow reader.  My kindle says I read at about a quarter of the speed of someone considered a slow reader - this is very slow; I am a snail reader. I would like to say I have good cognition but I'm not sure I do, I seem to forget everything I read almost instantly.  I do like buying books though on Amazon, these two arrived yesterday. Colin Ward is my current favorite and when these two beauties dropped through the letter box I wondered about their former life.  It felt like they had been handed around at a WEA meeting or passed between people in the mid 1970's who sought an alternative world view. On the front page of Anarchy in Action, I found two drawings.  Both became a distraction.

 

I once found a scan of a hand and a pubic hair in a digital edition of Felix Guattari's Three Ecologies.  My friend Tim said it was the Body without Organs, but it was also a distraction.  Partly because I now always look for the hands that have been accidentally scanned in books when I read them online. 

I am now going to write some less clever-clever things on my blog so I can shuffle myself towards the reality of my cleverness and become less slippy.  As Morrisey would say, I will pin and mount myself to the page like a butterfly or a snail.  

I will discuss my line of reading, I am connecting it through the theme of the imagination.  I have noticed that in many of the books I have started to like how writers qualify how they will use words; especially words that are contested. Maxine Greene does it really well in the Dialectics of Freedom, well she does freedom really well, she does less well on Dialectics, nobody does Dialectics very well, apart from maybe Benjamin and Adorno.  I actually got distracted here looking for a quote from a letter where Adorno describes dialectic as being like a piece of paper that once ripped in half and pieced back together can never seem whole again. I couldn't find the quote but did find this interesting text which has reminded me why I have bought some books and stopped trying to read online.  Hyperlinks drag you outside of texts and I am trying to read things a bit better from the inside.   The scatterbrain jumping about though seems to make more sense than my line seems to have.  My line is jumping about.  I have forgotten Raymond Williams and the Critical Theory of the Frankfurt group where I think I started and where I often desire to end up.

Ruskin

Dewey

Colin Ward

Maxine Greene

Erin Manning

Brian Massumi 

This list seems ridiculous; it spans 200 years and I don't think even on a good day I can cope with the jump from Maxine Greene to Manning and Massumi.  It leap-frogs the whole of post-structuralism. Manning and Massumi are grounded within Deleuze and Guattari without whom they don't really make that much sense.  So - no Raymond Williams, no Stuart Hall, no Gramski, no Common Sense, no Everyday, no Critical Theory, no Ranciere no Simondon.  I realise I can only include 6 writers in my RD1 and all sorts of things will come into the thinking and the reading but it feels like my list is a bit too jumpy bumpy - it is not really a line its a series of trips, jumps and stutters - a hop a skip and a jump. 

This is the actual story of my reading so far and what I think or to be a bit Deleurze what has deflected.  I have not been very systematic but I'm not going to beat myself up about this because most of the texts I've been falling into really can't be read in a systematic way.  I am also trying to encounter people like Dewey as Philosophers first without trying to pull out the bits of their oeuvre that fits into a preconceived idea.  I have realised that this is an easy yet catastrophic approach.

The practical stuff I have read.

I started off with Massumi's Semblance and Event.  I read ten pages a day when I got up.  I got to about page 60 then gave up , thinking I would return to it and also thinking that 10 pages were too much and too little.  It reminded me of trying to read 1000 Plateaus and feeling stupid.   I like Massumi though and I think the way it talks of a smaller politics means it works with Manning very well.  I then started to read Manning ten pages a day - A Minor Gesture and got to about page 50.  

Although I did feel a bit stuck I think that what I took from Massumi was the irreducible nature of what he describes as the 'event'.  Thinking hard, now all I can really remember is a story about a mouse emerging and how its emergence was an event.  I like the mouse story.  When I was working with Richard Steadman-Jones on the Writing in the Home and the Street project we talked about how we were training ourselves to see writing in the world. It became a type of foraging for what my friend Tim calls wild-signs.  Richard told me a story about when he used to travel on a train and he had got so used to spotting rabbits that on the occasions he spotted a place that looked like there might be a rabbit and  he was surprised that there wasn't a rabbit there.  This absence of what was supposed to be within the event of seeing a rabbit is the same as the mouse in Massumi's story. I'm not sure why though, perhaps it is the absence of sense that is the same.  Manning is not as good a writer as Massumi,  There is a transparency to her writing that makes me feel less confident, most of the time it does not feel like a rabbit will appear unless it is pulled out of a hat. Each chapter of both a Minor Gesture and the Politics of Touch begins in a moderately accessible way it does not make a proposition but it somehow informs you that there will be an unveiling, something will be made visible even if it is not to be understood.  1000 Plateaus is like this, with enough time and application it does offer something tangible, as suggested in its title this is never stable, all the plateaus exist simultaneously on the same plane.  I like the way Manning uses the term agensement rather than assemblage.  Geoff and Helen Graham mentioned Massumi's mis-translation or to be fair, maintaining a previous translation of the term. The word Assemblage feels too fixed, as a proposition it lacks the necessary friction to say what it needs to say.  Perhaps within the idea of the event Massumi puts the energy back into the assemblage of things that become things  - the event becomes an attempt at some sort of redemption, a making amends.

Reading Manning and Massumi together is not something to be taken lightly. I was pleased I decided to put them down and pick up something a little more manageable.  When I revisit them I will be better equipped to work out why.  I do want to mention though that Mannings description of Research Creation in the second chapter of a Minor Gesture seems very attractive.   Firstly, because it seems more generous and less driven by an individual artist's practice, angst or life force than Practice as Research approaches and secondly it feels more collective.  I think it is collective in that it attempts to work out what to do together from a flatter field of experience.  It avoids the types of collaborative research that foregrounds traditions, skills and methods - it avoids to a minor extent many of the bifurcations of other approaches( I always think of a mussel shell or a clam when I say this - it is better than a binary or a duality as it acknowledges that the two parts make a single thing) that emerge from linear thinking however convoluted and messy it appears to get.  

I have had to put Manning and Massumi to one side for a while though.  As I was reading I kept worrying about how the idea of art was emerging within the texts.  It wasn't really my idea of art and it was also making me conscious that my idea of art is also unexamined and perhaps just as bad as any of the projections of art that were falling out of the two texts.  Romantic, semi spiritual quasy-religous perhaps the space of the undefined - More Than - beyond -the unknown and the unknowable.  I felt a bit like Sean Connery in The Man Who Would Be King.  In the film he gets taken for a god in a remote Himalayan province, eventually he starts to believe he is a god and it all goes very pear-shaped; even Michael Kane can't save him.  

Both books and many of the shorter articles I've read that draw on research creation and the work of sense-lab in Canada and North America make me feel uneasy.  The disquiet is hard to locate - part of me thinks. 'Well why not?'.  Art can be or do anything people want to construct it to do - artists can be seers and Shaman, special and ordinary; they have skills and have no skills; they know, are known and are impossible to know.  The reason I had to leave Massumi and Manning for a while was because their construction of the agensement of art and art as event was like a place where I expect to see a rabbit or a mouse because everything looks just perfect for the rabbit to appear but actually there is no rabbit.  Like being dealt two aces or pocket rockets in poker - at the moment they are starting to feel like false prophets.  

So after having a good chat with Laura, I decided to read some Dewey.  I went on Amazon and bought Art and Experience which is a book I've wanted to read since a Swiss artist told me about how it had changed his life.   I also got the much smaller Experience and Education which Dewey wrote later in his career, it is only about 100 pages long and its much easier to get through. I read it on the train to Glasgow.  It repeats itself quite a bit in the way analytical philosophy has to to build an argument and made me consider changing the imagination into freedom as a thematic through my line of writers.  I always say when people ask me what art means to me that it means freedom and when they ask. 'Freedom from what?',  I say, 'Freedom from boredom'.

  
Experience and Education reviews what have become very current critiques of progressive education; Dewey's major contribution to the field.  It really made me wonder if we actually had progressive education in our schools today.  We have the rhetoric of it but as we don't really have anything to be against as we think we are progressive we have forgotten what it actually means.  As a future reminder because I will forget Dewey basically says that all learning needs to be situated within the experience of the learner and these experiences should offer opportunity for further experience.  It is a grower, so to speak, but he suggests that nobody will truly learn anything if knowledge is abstract.  I would think most educationalists and most schools think they are progressive and children are given the opportunity to learn from experience. I'd also say that we have moved towards thinking education needs to be a balance between learning in an abstract way and learning from experience - I don't think Dewey would agree with this. Maxine Greene draws on Dewey a lot in her Dialectics of Freedom another reason I considered changing the emphasis from imagination to freedom.

Talking of freedom makes me want to mention Colin Ward.  I have read a Short History of Anarchy and some big chunks of Anarchy in Action and also his book called Art and the Built Environment, which he co-wrote with Eileen Adams.  I have also just bought the Child in the City.  I would like to say that I'm finding a rich seam in Anarchic thinking and to an extent I am, yet the thing that is intoxicating about Ward's writing is his ability to make it feel relevant and useful in the world.  Of course not in terms of practical tools or approaches but in an essential way that constantly asks us to consider what is of value, what we value.  And I like it because it doesn't create a space for art or artfulness, it's just there.  It feels like before Thatcher, art could underpin all sorts of things and it wasn't everyday or about the everyday, it was still special but it was real.  Well, that's what I'm naively going to believe for a while. There is a problem simmering on the back burner of all this reading.  It rears its head as socially engaged arts practice and community arts.  Critically engaged art and cultural democracy, the spectator and their emancipation.  At the heart of much of this reading there is an  essential bifurcation, a splitting of the shell to expose fragile contents that become dispersed.  The split is not a divide between two ways of describing the same thing it is the confusion or the convenience of describing difference as the same, the inside of the shell being the same as the outside, like a dead mussel, smelly slime, or primordial soup.

I have learnt to look for rabbits and not to be surprised not to see them where I think they will be.  I have learnt to not be methodical because there is no truth and if there was it is as likely to be inside as outside a shell.  I have learnt that knowing the difference between an assemblage and an agencement in italics is important but not that important.  I have learnt that its hard to read texts outside of their historical context which is why lots of my reading needs to be contemporary. I have learnt that many contemporary texts make little sense without knowing what they are for or what they are against.  I have learnt that I know very little and also know a lot.

Three Games and isn't that the point of a metaphor?

Last week I started working with Abi in Eastwood.  We are hoping to make my work on this project an active part of my PhD - a site of practice or residency.  As I have not done my ethics or RD1 yet, I'm working with Abi as a freelance artist, working within and through her ethical procedures.  This feels a funny thing to say as it suggests the work has a different form if it is within the PhD, it sits within a different category as if I can or would think about it differently.  We had a few quick chats between the bits that is the chaos of a good playgroup.  It reminded me of a thousand fragmented conversations I had as a Dad at home, the swinging between the deaths of parents, the choice of school, the tips on what to feed a baby or if sleep training was a useful tool or emotionally destructive.  As is always likely to happen in a conversation with me and Abi we got onto Deleuze,  Abi told me that Deleuze didn't like metaphor he would ask, 'Why not use the real thing?'  I always think through visual metaphors, I can write, but my thinking is not based in texts or images.  As text it is founded in deep and rich stories that speak of a disjointed and broken set of experiences.  My most overused words are 'it's like when' followed by a story where nobody can really connect to what I'm talking about.

For example it's like when I was a child and I was on holiday in Greece and I bought a tacky souvenir toy sword and asked my Dad if it was possible it had ever been used in Ancient Greece in a battle, perhaps by a Spartan.  My Dad is very pragmatic and said that there was no possibility it had ever been used in Ancient Greece, that it was certainly new and a souvenir.  I didn't know what that word meant.  'Souvenir' sounded potent and full of memories.  As was my way, I asked again about the possibility that the sword could, by some vast and tangled chance, have been used by a Spartan soldier in combat.  My dad was also stubborn but after the 10th or probably 40th time of asking he did confirm that there was a possibility that the sword could have been mixed up with a genuine sword within a museum and indeed there did exist a  possibility that it had been used in combat, probably by a Spartan at the battle of Thermopyae by one of the 300.

The image of the mousetrap above is from when I caught a real mouse in the game mousetrap when we left it set up overnight on the front room floor. This is not a metaphor for the PhD, its the real thing.  So reflecting on my conversation with Abi and, given the two stories above, surely a becoming in a way is a true metaphor where a thing becomes something else, rather than appears to be like something, a simile or perhaps semblance.  Keeping this in mind and also considering a need to track how I am feeling here rather than what I am doing I want to compare my PhD to two games but to honour Deleuze and Abi I will present them as becomings.  

I am not a great Chess player although I do have a good middle game. To play chess with anyone who is any good you need to learn a good number of openings; for most of us that is about the first  seven moves.  If you don't know your openings and you are playing someone good then you lose the game very quickly as there are certain openings that require a certain response.  The game or the number of possible combinations of the game at this stage are known, there is little chance of deviation although you do have many different versions of classic openings.  I often go for some kind of aggressive Queen's pawn to D4  with a slightly cockeyed two Knights. If I'm feeling less confident I may fianchetto one or both my Bishops, not because it's good play rather because it slows me down and makes it impossible for me to launch an early attack. This is my Achilles' heal in playing even a poor standard pub chess player.  My opening game is very poor and as I get further away from the lonely twelve year old who used to save up his money to buy chess books that my dyslexia meant I could barely read, my opening gets more lazy and more pedestrian.  Bobby Fisher, one of Chess' Cold War legends, devised a version of the game where the back rank (the major pieces) would be set up more randomly based on the shaking of a dice. For a chess player with a weak opening then this degree of uncertainty is very attractive. Yet, if you are to take chess seriously, learning a few openings is a rites of passage and possibly the least difficult requirement of becoming a player.

Dyslexia brings with it, for some, a number of gifts. These are both because of and in spite of the divergence and very difficult to put a finger on.  Tom, my son, plays chess like me; I suppose I taught him to play, not the rules but the game.  We both have good middle games, an uneducated and untrained flare for seeing the board as a single thing.  We feel the multiplicity of possibilities, in the middle game you have to feel the board, you have to see the pathways and the potential.  On many levels you can explain this through a set of principles, control the centre squares, protect the king, try and get small advantages, such as doubled pawns.  There is also some simple maths such as twice attacked triple defended pieces, and the threats always in the background such as disclosed checks or nasty Knight forks.  You learn to see these but you probably feel them.  I like the middle game, I even like it if I'm losing because the potential of getting out of a very nasty situation is always there especially if you can keep some major pieces.

Then there is the end game.  I am rubbish at this bit and have lost many a game just because my dogged often-teenage opponent fails to resign or I make stupid mistakes.  If I have held my three supervisor's attention this far then within this becoming of writing and chess, there is probably a caution that will manifest itself in three years time.  Luckily for me though, I am still within an opening of simple learnt moves.

Snakes and ladders is an altogether more simple game and a more simple becoming. At the moment the snakes feel far more useful than the ladders.  I'm enjoying landing on the snakes as I have spent most of the last ten years looking for ladders; shortcuts to the end of the game so I can look for and start a new one.  The privilege of my current position is that I don't seem to mind landing on snakes and this seems to make the game more fun.

Assemblage

I made the sculpture above last year, it formed the center of a newspaper about the Sheffield artist George Fullard and his assemblages.  My Friend Stephen Walker wrote this small piece for me-

It is interesting to consider George Fullard’s Assemblages from the 1960s alongside other assemblages (and the broader context of their emergence in the same period), in order to emphasise the particular intention and impact of Fuller’s pieces.

Many people during this time celebrated the potential they observed in bringing together —assembling—material and ideas from a wide variety of things and disciplines. Gilbert Simondon referred to this as supporting ‘transcategorical knowledge’. It was believed to operate across widely differing categories, low and high, science and art, human and nature.  Fullard’s near-namesake Richard Buckminster Fuller’s work through the post-war period became emblematic of this work for many North American and European countercultural groups. The environmental impulse in 1960s art, associated with the Independent Group in the UK or avant-garde artists in the USA, emphasised superficial similarity between categorically different things, or advocated immersive environments and Happenings (Kaprow etc) where the assemblage of artist, spectator/audience and location attempted to smooth over categorical complexity that related these ingredients in traditional art.

But Fullard’s Assemblages operate by maintaining a clarity of origin and reference to the strange ingredients he brought together in each piece. More akin to William S Burroughs’ ‘cut up’ technique, Fullard’s Assemblages play with both visual and material languages: defying the smooth ‘transcategorical’ products of contemporary Assemblages, his works retain sufficient legibility of their component parts for these to transport the audience away to multiple other contexts, while the strangeness of their assembled composition pushes and pulls these component parts, and their resonance (dissonance). Moreover, maintaining contact with the art-gallery system, Fullard’s Assemblages also operate by posing a challenge to the contemplative distance expected of viewers in front of conventional artworks in the conventional surroundings of the art gallery. This mixture is further complicated (or smoothed) by (proposed) castings in bronze of some of Fullard’s Assemblages and the resulting homogenization of their operative material dissonance. 

I have come back to it here as it's probably the last work I did that people would recognise as an artwork - not just the assemblage homage but the whole thing. I made paper hats from the newspaper and placed them on the head of one of Fullards' bronzes that are is sited in front of the winter gardens in Sheffield.

I'm in the thick of reading and it feels like an assemblage of ideas and thoughts forming.  After meeting with Laura I felt like I had a way to move forward so in the background I'm quietly reading Dewey and then I'm going to read some Maxine Greene and I'm hoping to fill in a few holes.  The thing I'm learning is to be consistent but not systematic and that is why I'm returning to arts practice, this is how I always approach the making of art, it is a process of falling through an idea and living on the inside of it.  This is very different to having an idea and trying to realise it or manifest it in the world. I'm really pleased to have found this correlation it makes the thinking fit better and the long walks and jiggling of ideas feel both  familiar and  unfamiliar.

Two things have struck me as I've been reading some of the more recent literature on artists in education.  The first is that much of the writing that attempts to decentre or flatten the individual, the subjective, the position in space and time, whether through the post-human or individuation or the rhizomatic  or the corporal and affect or event  can take some of the raging egocentric idiosyncratic navel gazing out of what constitutes art.  To an extent it frees art from the double bind of the self and individual desire, makes it more open to possibilities of the collective and collective actions. Secondly in the massive struggle to avoid dualism, bifurcation, deconstructionism, the breaking down into parts there is often a very difficult and examined bifurcation of Art and none Art - and Artist and non Artist. In some of the writing , actually most of the most recent writing within the context of education there is an almost spiritual potential to how art and artists are imagined within some of the writing.  Although it is reminiscent of Joseph Beuys  ideas of artist as both Shaman and Sharletton it is as with Beuys completely sincere, it has to be sincere for it to work.

So my reading and thinking is drawing on the idea of assemblage or as Manning corrects Massumi - assengement and I quite like the disparate nature of what is coming together and the need not to actually be making sense of it.  That is what art has to feel like, for me it has to be a falling through.  In my first post here I talked of needing a safety harness, perhaps that is the last thing I actually need.  

 

Week Six- The Penetrative Imagination

As a young man John Ruskin had to rewrite the history of art in his head after walking into the Scoula di san Roco in Venice and experiencing the Tintortto's painted onto the walls and ceilings. He went outside and lay on a bench to come back to himself.  His experience formed part of a chapter in Modern Painter Three called the penetrative  imagination.  Here he talks about seeing beneath the surface of things to the reality of what is really there, what constitutes them.  In terms of the crucifixion I projected onto a building in Sheffield on Saturday he was talking about the truth of the bodies and the flesh the spirit and the corporal.  Sat in front of this painting at the Scoula, Christs bowed head is very human,  totally present, Tintoretto paints what is actually there, the truth of the fragility of our bodies and our mortality. 

Since my meeting with Laura last week I have constructed a line which starts at Ruskin within his writing on the imagination.  I am not sure where it goes next but we decided I should read some Dewey and some secondary texts on Dewey which I have started.  I am enjoying them but its slightly depressing that so little has seemed to change in the 80 or 90 years since he was writing in what is actually valued in education.  As I dart around in my reading the theme of failure seems to be coming up more than I expected.  Its not a reframed failure that turns into good art, or as Samual Becket put it ' Fail, fail again fail better.'  It the big failures of Marxism, of the politics of resistance , of social science to understand anything, of any type of intervention in the world that actually makes anything better.

Art carries enough failures and enough inadequacies of its own.  It is riddles with elitism, class , power, colonialism, appropriation and the fact that for it to be art most people feel it needs to be useless. I think art ended before history and it may end before the end of the world which will surprise everyone.

We have had a paper accepted for Aera .  It's for our project about feeling Odd in the world of education.  Me and Kate Pahl are presenting with Maggie Macclure so I have been reading a few of her papers. Its really refreshing to read something that is so well written and reflects what I feel I have taken from all my personal encounters with Post - structuralism and my newer encounters with the New Materialism.  What is very apparent when I'm reading though is that of all the things I feel guilty for the failure of method within social science research is not one of them.  I do not carry the sins of the fathers and I'm not complicit in it's failures. I realise that much of what I'm reading in terms of the newer publications is reacting to challenging established ways of thinking and doing research and this is making me wonder if I'm part of the problem or part of a solution.  In a strange way moving into the world of research is affirming my identity as an artist in a way that I didn't really need before, I just was one even though often it didn't feel like that.

A week of distractions

Its been a week of distractions.  I did however do this amazing projection onto Weston Park Museum and someone came up and said they loved me because I made stuff happen which was nice.  I got a bit distracted by thinking about my RD1 form and the gradual feeling that I'm moving further and further away from having a clue what I'm doing.  I wish I could go back and quote the original "Case for Support" the stick we normally use to measure and beat ourselves with but there isn't one.

I am also getting to be a bit to careful in writing this blog, perhaps trying to be clever and come across as a ""big head" like we used to say at school.  So I am going to do a few bullet points to map where I am and fewer metaphors and narratives.  It is a day to draw a line of some sort in some place.

1.  I am moving away from working in a school.  I am currently working in a brilliant school on a project about feeling odd in the worlds of education and I am enjoying it but there seems to be so little space even for a high status research project so I would be worried about making space for a doctorate project. 

2. This got me thinking about Anarchy and education so I read Colin Wards a very short history of Anarchy and re-read some bits of Anarchy in Action which I really enjoyed.  It was good to do this after Massumi and Manning  as they messed with my melon.

3.  I started to think about the possibility of working more closely with my adventure playground - it is a place where I feel I can dwell and have respect its also a place of learning and Anarchy. 

4.  I want to do some work around Residency I have positioned myself to do some work with two studios in Sheffield's school of Architecture in their Studios in residence and I also have small projects with Geoff and Abi Hacket.  I can't do these as part of the research as I do not have my RD1 or ethical consent but I think they will inform my initial thinking and allow me to situate these thoughts within a project.

5. From Massumi I take the idea of the event and how it is totalising yet allows space for becoming. I think it will be useful but I'm not sure where it fits in.

6. From Manning I take the idea of Research Creation it is attractive and feels different but has a family resemblance to Practice as Research approaches.  I will think about it more.

7.  From Geoff I take the idea that all the theory is interesting but it is not clear what it can do - in practice but also in helping to build a better world together.

8. All Laura's reading was new to me and I found it fascinating.  It made be a bit cross especially the Springay which for the most part felt really wrong.  It reminded me of the precession of the simulacra.  I had just been trying to explain it to my daughter Alice who is studying art in Glasgow.  I used the story of the Golden calf that Moses destroys when he comes down from the mountain with the Ten Commandments.  The people had made a graven image that they began to worship and it became their god Moses destroyed it continuing a long history of iconoclasm.  Anyway the point of this long metaphorical story is that I'm starting to think that the space of "Art' can be anything people choose to make it and I don't want to melt down any golden calves or as we say in Sheffield 'Piss on anyone's bonfire'.  But then I think if I can help refine things a bit more so instead of worshiping the image of art we make the space of art more inclusive and more useful. This I suppose goes back to Geoff's point of what this theory does or enacts in the world.

9. I still want to think about creative partnerships and do some historical unpicking and make sense of that period of work for myself and perhaps encourage other to look at it from a different perspective.  It feels like this is not fitting in as well as it was so things may have to shift.

10.  I feel better I have learnt to pace myself and have slowed down in the number of new ideas I'm trying to take on.

Four ways of Reading

It is Monday morning and I have decided to try and get back to doing what I said I would do.  It is ironic that since starting the PhD I've actually done less writing than I was doing before.  Probably as much of the other writing I was doing was writing for a purpose and the new writing, I'm not doing, is more speculative.  I am holding Quaker silence as I don't feel I have anything to say that is worth breaking the silence for.

I wanted to start with a visual metaphor.  My brain feels like a sea-side Penny Push machine. I am feeding in snippets of knowledge like coins and very little is dropping out into the pay slot.  When I was a kid I didn't really understand how these machines worked.  Common sense suggested that you would get as much out as you put in - it was just a matter of timing, watching the accumulating avalanche of coinage teeter on the edge of the void, aware of the no tilting mechanism, always on the edge of a big win.  Later I realised that most of the coins were falling into a money box at the edges of the machine. On a more personal level none of us ever left the arcade with any two-pence pieces anyway, we always spent everything we had.

This is my metaphor for reading for my PhD, what I put in does not relate to what seems to come out at the other end - something gets pushed to an unknown space at the edges. I'm aware that at some point there may be some kind of pay out.  I'm also sure I will probably push everything back in at the top in an attempt to shift everything a little further forward towards the big payout that is balanced in awkward equilibrium on the precipice of knowing.

Since I've started, I've discovered or been told about four new ways of reading.  They are helpful and have changed the way I am trying to read but it is taking time and they are not what I thought they would be.   Two were given to me by other writers, one by Kate and the fourth is my own, it's not really new but I have become more aware of it, perhaps it is a way of reading that I may need to question.

1. Inhabiting books.  At my last supervision I mentioned to Kate that I wanted to be more systematic in the way I approached reading.  I had/have made much more time for it.  People have said I should start using 'End Notes' though I haven't - it is like getting around to having a blood test to check for an inherited blood disorder, I know that this is probably the sensible thing to do but I just ignore it.  I have no idea why I have struggled to do either, I have no excuse or rationale.   Kate said I should try to inhabit a book,  I liked this idea as it reminded me of being on holiday and reading a great trashy novel.  The way part of you lives in the book and how each time you turn a page its like opening a door.  Very little none fiction does this for me - I am reluctant to enter the space of the book and the idea that I now have the time and space to inhabit a book is exciting.  I am currently trying to inhabit Erin Manning's The Minor Gesture and Massumi's  Semblance and Event.  I think these two books work well as companions, both are significant achievements and both have dropped a few pennies in the tray of my understanding.  I'm not sure how easy they are to inhabit, taken in small chunks, parts of them are comically dense - the kind of texts I could email to normal people like my brother to make fun of academic writing, the content I've been asked to read.

In fact, I did photograph and send this bit to my brother who responded with this text;

To be fair it reads like
you have written it yourself.
Basically if this meaningless
drivel is content that you have to
understand and comment on
then simply produce the same sort of
shit yourself.

Of course the very act of
comment will diametrically impact
the intermingleness of the idea or
proposition and render the very subject
of the discourse and the discourse itself
changed and no longer static.

I responded -

Yes, you are correct.
True - you have entered
the transgressive space that
is the Schizophrenia of the
Phantasm- a spacial trangression
defiantly cut into the hegemony
of your everyday.

I am not fully ready to inhabit these books and it's not because I want to make fun of them it's more that I am still coming to them as a practitioner - I want to know what they can do.  To inhabit something there needs to be a space where you can strive to dwell.  I have made a good effort though - I'm 60 pages into the Manning and about 80 into the Massumi - I reckon I'm doing 'close reading' rather than 'inhabiting' which brings us on to the second way to read a book.

2. Hypothetical Sympathy. On page 38 of A Minor Gesture Manning quotes Bertrand Russell.  I was probably ingtroduced to philosophy by Russell in my early 40's after my wife was diagnosed with cancer.  In a godless world I searched for something different to make sense of things and ended up reading a History of Western Philosophy from cover to cover.  I had stolen it from our local cemetery along with a copy of Sartre's Being and Nothingness which hadn't really offered much solace in the dark hours.  Russell says  in Manning;

"In studying a philosopher, the right attitude is neither reverence nor contempt, but first a kind of hypothetical sympathy, until it is possible to know what it feels like to believe in his theories, and only then a revival of the critical attitude, which should resemble, as far as possible, the state of mind of a person abandoning opinions which he has hitherto held."

Russell writes in a way that makes this way of reading easy.  In his introduction to western philosophy he takes the outstretched hand of someone desperate for a guide and walks you through a labyrinth. It is difficult, not in a minor way, to fall in love with him. Especially if you are looking for a guide through trauma as well as ideas.  Manning for me does not quite manage this, yet after reading her quote from Russell I am attempting to walk more closely with her for a while.

3. Fuck em up the arse and give them an immaculately concieved mutant child.  I was taken by this approach in my last blog.  It came from a discussion with Geoff about Hegel and Deleuze and Gattari and dialectics but I like its irreverance.  There are a few things going on here - one is that to read you must bring something of yourself, two - that sometimes ideas carry a level of hidden violence and thirdly that in reading you can make something new but it may not be what you expected.  I like all these things and I think Deleuze would like people to fuck him over in the same way.  I am probably struggling most at the moment to work out why there is such a problem about thinking about things as a whole rather than a set of parts.   The problem seems to be about 'feeling' and it 'feels' like many indigenous belief structures have a set of faith practices and beliefs that enable a flatter way to feel the world - an agencement or assemblage, a singularity or dialectic - the events are all presented as a place of resistance to the reduction of life to a set of parts. I believe many people outside philosophy and the Academies, whether through faith in a god or an alternative approach to the notion of communion, feel this anyway - they do not need to resist positivism or reductionism or structuralism they just feel the world as a set of relations.

4. Sit on the sofa with them. This is my way of reading the people I like to read.  They become my friends and my companions and many of them, now ghosts, sit on the sofa with me.  Kurt Vonnagut and Philip K Dick are there as my school friends and John Berger is lording it up with a glass of red wine.  Zizeck is in the kitchen on his own as its all too borgeois.  Colin Ward and John Ruskin are having a discussion about if they could of done more, if they were radical enougth.  Annie Proux is doing research for another book she has said she will not write.  Bertrand Russell is there but more as a father figure.  Deleuze is having a fist fight with Lacan in the toilet and Gattari and Foucault are both speaking fast in filthy street French.  They are all present; talking, disagreeing and shouting at each other - everyone is waiting for the big idea - the penny to drop but as in the arcade machine, much of the coinage is dropping down the sides into a secret storage box that only the owner of the arcade has the key for.

I am mostly thinking about being a practitioner.

I'm already behind in keeping a blog and strangely since I've started the PhD I have actually done less writing than I normally do even though I have tried to make a commitment to writing everyday.

Hows your PhD going people keep asking and as I've made it my absolute aim to enjoy my 3 years I say " Really well, I'm just in that moment between absolute terror and feeling completely lost  its a joke of course but also as with any good joke holds an element of truth.

After Harry did his very good introduction to research methods on Tuesday I asked him what single book or book chapter would he advise we read on the train on the way home.  It was a slightly cheeky question I suppose as his talked ranged across 200 years of research history with a Tiny bit of Greek philosophy as a backdrop.  He popped the reading list up which was around six books that sounded rather long and said something like - "some of these will start to give you an introduction to the field."

Within Geoff's reading he gave me there was an interesting chapter that explained who Deleuze and Guattari who against - why they didn't like Hegal.  In Massumi's introduction to his translation of 1000 Plateaus he suggests that Deleurze conceived the history of Philosophy as "a kind of ass fuck" he goes on to say he imagined approaching an author from behind and giving him a child that would indeed be his but would nonetheless be monstrous - Hegal is absent being too despicable to merit even a mutant offspring. " I like the idea of how we define ourselves by who we are against as much as what we are for - but of course we don't really do binaries.

One bonfire night years ago I was in a friends garden and a six year old came up to me and said - " What do you believe in God or Ghosts? "  I think I said neither and she walked off disappointed, now I'd probably say both.

I am just about to go to a conference about socially engaged practice and I want to write something practical to remind me where I've got to and I only have time to do a list now as I spent to long writing about Deleurze ass fucking the history of philosophy but it felt important as it holds a certain truth of the way I'm feeling about some of the reading I'm doing.

1. Big take home at the moment is the more I get into the reading the more I think of myself as a practitioner - it feels fundamental to how I identify myself and I can't leave it  behind.  I am reading everything and thinking " Interesting idea but what does it do? "  I found this nice quote From Bruce Archer in an Article Education for Participation by Eileen Evens.

".....One works best from practice towards theory and not the other way around;that one works best from the classroom to the seminar room and not the other way around;that one works best from the teacher to the investigator and not the other way around; that one seeks leadership from the field and not the center; the action must precede speculation; and that it is from the particular that we arrive at the general and not the other way around"

In the context of my reading - mainly Massumi and Manning as Kate has encouraged me to immerse myself in books this quote feels a little old fashioned yet it is also the common sense position I inhabit as a practitioner.  It is a core belief that perhaps I need to as Deleuze would say as fuck and produce my own mutant offspring.

2.  I am learning to inhabit books but it is slow and hard and the books are complex - I am leaning to be more generous and less resistant.  I want to be a cross between John Berger and Colin Ward I want to learn to write like them - I know this is arrogant but if I feel it as an aspiration it feels like a good thing to aspire to.

3.  I love been part of ESRI I feel like I have been welcomed into a space and a field and I feel at home their . Its made me realise that I don't feel welcome or relevant within the art world - perhaps because I'm shit at drawing.

4. New materialism relies a lot of radical pragmatism Whitehead and Dewey come up lots - I wonder if its because it's American - the Uk and Europe critical theory draws more on the Frankfurt group - I think this may be to do with a fear of relativism - I want to talk to Geoff about this he will know and point to some reading but It will jump me away from Massumni and manning which I'm trying to inhabit.  That is the trick of reading this philosophy you need to Ass fuck it and produce your own mutant children - that's probably  the way to inhabit it like the people you love.

5. I have no idea what will go into my RD1 I move further away from knowing everyday and less able to articulate even a sentence - I think this is a good thing.

6. Lot of the theories that seem to be knew feel like they skirt around dialectics and the idea of what is total or totalising.  The singularity , the event, the assemblage or from now as Manning correctly says the agencement  I'm sure Massumi probably told her that in bed - sorry love when I translated that as assemblage I should of probably stuck to agencement its confused a lot of people.  This idea of the indivisible whole that cannot be reduced is critical as a sate of mind to enter into the literature but in a way it also creates a binary between people and methods and we all know the dangers of totalising ideas - that's why Hegal wasn't even allowed a mutant offspring.

Oh and I'm actually a practitioner!

Monday 8th October First Blog

This is a drawing from my sketchbook from a meeting about a project.  It is a doodle to distract my hands and in some way help me listen by getting me to think about something else. The day before I was also in the middle of building an Arial runway - or Zip wire at an adventure playground - so I drew from memory all the tools I would need for the next day's work.  They are specific and not generic; actual and not symbols.  The chain pull was my Dad's from when he worked as a Linesman for Yorkshire Electricity Board in the 1960's; it is for tensioning wires.  I have had it for about twenty years and not used it yet.  The hammer was bought for me by a friend for helping to put up his MA show at the Royal College of Art.   It was the same year that Gavin Turk presented his now famous blue plaque - we worked in its shadow.  It is an American Roofer's hammer made by Estwing - it used to have a sticker on it that said 'Estwing - King of Hammers' - it's forged from a single piece of steel and has a leather handle.  I could go on and describe each item doodled on the page but I hope I've made the point that these things are very specific and they are what you need to do a job.  The job is at height - it requires two hands - it is imposible to do the job safely or without an element of measured risk.  This feels a bit like the start of the PhD and the reading you shared with me feels like the start of working out what tools I will need to get ready.  Some of the tools feel very familier, some of them, like my mighty Estwing, feel like the supreme nail hammers of thinking, others feel more difficult to use.  Like the old chain tensioner which was condemned as it was broken in about 1966, which can, if nudged and aided with shims of copper, just about do the job we ask of it.

From this I have decided I need to properly read some Freire - Pedagogies of the Oppressed probably.  I also probably need to read some Dewey which I've avoided for years due to a dislike of American pragmatism.  I then asked Geoff about Hegel and dialectics in relation to the idea of the irreducible totality within new materialism but also within notions of the Event and some Deleuze and Guatteri.  I liked this thought and then after Geoff's response I thought of our fear of totalitarian regimes and felt a bit like things had never connected properly in my brain.  Of course we are afraid of the idea of anything singular or irreducible as it leads to a potential repeat of a terrible history - a state of things that rarely offered much to the world in a material manifestation of a different more human or more than human world.

I then got distracted and watched a few things on YouTube about Lacan which was useful as I've read a bit but always resented the near adoration of Lacan by many artists who make work about their desire or the gaping lack at the centre of everything.

Then I did some planning with Abi on the train about ethics and realised that like with any job, building a zip wire or starting a PhD, there is only so much you can take on at once so I have steadied myself. I have had a cold and for much of last week was semi-delirious so I did not take notes when I read.

When I was putting the zip wire up I fell about nine foot from a ladder.  It is the only time I have fallen far enough to have time to contemplate my fall before I hit the ground.  It felt like I was falling in stages and the ground was coming towards me rather than the other way round.  The fall was in a strange way sublime.  The next day I went and bought a proper safety harness and made sure I carabenared myself to the structure as I worked.  I have thought about this harness in relation to my PhD, I had forgotten to draw it in my doodle plan of bits for the job.

I am compelled to bring it home and start to do a few drawings of it, not because I do drawing or they will be good but I suspect that my practice explicitly linked to my identity as an artist will provide a harness, a thing that will only let me fall so far if I attach it to the strong pieces of structure that are already there.  Not an excuse or a safety net but some sort of reassurance that if you are going to take risks you can be more ambitious if you are aware of what is keeping you safe.