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.