What happens when you realise you are not Francis Bacon or Gilles Deleuze?

Me and Kate did a keynote yesterday about creative methods - its the fourth talk on methods I've done in 6 weeks.   We were talking about our Fishing as Wisdom project, I decided to explain Carlos who is in the image above.   His origins lie in my artistic belief that during the 1970's technology, in the modernist sense of progression, was still full of the potential for good.  Cine cameras were used to record a baby's first steps or a wedding, the idea of video surveillance was a Science Fiction fan's dream.  Carlos and his tripod are from the 1970's; apart from his ears that were purchased from the Scarborough based company Harmony Supplies who sell equipment for  Chinese medicine and were the only company I could find who supply a left and a right ear to practice acupuncture on.  The head has a tea towel soaked in plaster of Paris inside to try and simulate the density of a human brain/head/mind.  The ears have some plastic tube used in home brew connected inside which is sealed at one end and contains a specific amount of air designed to give back pressure similar to a human ear drum.  Binaural recording uses the two channels of a stereo sound recorder to capture the sound as close to the point where a human would hear it. When played back through headphones it gives a sense of the space of sound. It is a bit like surround-sound in your head - you can judge space and movement.  I used Binaural sound as a homage to one of my favorite artists Janet Cardiff but also because it's a way of recording that pays attention to space.

When fishing I noticed that one ear attunes to the outside, to the noise of the water and nature, and the other attunes to what people are saying or to conversation.  The sounds come from different sources; the space is open on one side and intimate on the other.  The head bought from Ebay has the name Carlos written on the back; it is his brand name. Carlos was a recording device and he also became the symbol for art in the project.  I struggled to explain this in the talk: I intended to show the film with its Binaural sound but the equipment was working on a single channel. The sound cut off due to a technical issue half way through the clip.  It didn't seem to matter.  Carlos and Binaural sound are probably best left in the margins, they were never meant to take centre ground.

In my RD2 progression meeting we had a long discussion about how to make arts practice and writing work together.  I said lots of it is none linguistic but this isn't a good enough answer in the context of a PhD, it doesn't move us forward.  My description of Carlos is not like Deleuze talking us through Francis Bacon's painting, it is not on the same plane of immanence.  However hard we try it will not fold in.  I'm happy with that as I think that failure is something that carries its own momentum.   I don't think practice can always align well with words.  Words can struggle towards meaning and practice can maintain itself in a place of whimsy on the edge of meaning; they are chalk and cheese or chalky cheese.  In a way, Carlos is art like Francis Bacon's paintings are art - Carlos points to more than he is, more than he can ever be; he is art and in a way he is change and movement. Carlos fails in reality as art, as device, as recording machine.  He fails to ask the questions that need to be asked, he is a silent witness who does not bear witness as I had intended.   It is impossible to articulate what Carlos does, that is why he can still represent art an intentional object with no intention.  He lives in a cupboard in my studio - the cupboard is called Mick, it is named after a cupboard in my Grandad's garage which was called Mick - he would name his cupboards to help us find things.

I need the warm winds of Johan

When I first started working with Johan I would talk to him about Lacan and trilectics and spacial theory.  He would talk to me about death the gap and the void - Johan taught me how to float. When I was at the sweat lodge on the new moon I prayed to the spirits and it was hot so I laid down on the earth floor which acts as a heat sink and holds its coldness.  For a moment forming from  the smoke I was visited by my spirit animal and without any irony it appeared as a wolf; a lone wolf.  The last time I used this image in a blog the title was - The day Johan wore his wolf suit and made mischief of one kind and another.  I am having my mischief squeezed out of me and this is no good thing.  As nobody is reading this blog and its probably far to introspective to be of any use I will put down some notes as a marker as I prepare for next weeks mini ViVa that sounds like a mini Valet at the car wash - a surface clean.

I can see the need to focus down and the simplest way to do this now is to take a deep dive into new materialism.

The justification for this is that my artistic practice as a sculptor weaves in and out in an entanglement with making that involves my body, others bodies and active materials.  The idea of what sculpture is and can be is not in question but it is my clear tradition, my line and linage.  What this  new approach excludes from the sphere of the study to an extent is the agentive qualities of what artists bring to research.  At the back of the study is an inclination that the place holder that research makes for art is an abstraction and a projection and sometimes within social science research it is filled by an imaginary – so when you put an actual artist in there, things fall apart.

  
This I know on paper is a very loose justification for having Ruskin in my lit review,  he stands for the romantic idea of the artist which persists and isn’t taken that seriously but is embodied within artists.   It is part of their material or embodied self and so their potential agentive role, there vital power.  See how I am trying to turn this towards a New Materialism – it is an awkward fit – well really no fit at all. 

I have to now accept that I was doing a recon a butchers hook  – a once over a skim or a thin slice.  I was asking what is post-qualt social science research and why do we need it?  I was trying to read properly but the reading was all over the place and in this all otherness I was dropping down wormholes – I was a kid in the sweaty shop of theory, deciding between 2 ounce of Yorkshire mixtures or a gobstopper.

But then when you talk to anyone outside of the very small bubble I’m floating in nobody has a clue about any of it - not even academics working in what may seems like a similar field.  So my seam is too wide and it sits in a mountain side. I am digging in and have not got the energy or equipment to go up or down into what sits below or above.  All this is necessary and I can already feel a shift in the level I’m working at theoretically. Yet the point is to take this into the world you need to come up from underground or dip out of the clouds Whiteheads flights of the speculative imagination seem a long time ago. My problem is not the digging into the seam it is the inability, as Geoff would say to come by - the walking back up the drift at the end of the day into the world. 

 I suppose I never really made a separation between theory and practice or process and product and I could,  as it says in the the Hanson family song "let myself feel like when I learnt to float.'

You need to learn to float but sinking comes naturally especially if you remember to inhale.  I read my RD2 this morning and I was worried it would be shit but it is in fact very good – it holds its effort and if you give it a tiny bit of space and make allowances for me  it is someone’s struggle to learn to float.  Floating is not treading water or swimming it is expending the least amount of energy possible to let yourself be in water.
 

I think I can address the comments on the Rd2 document and keep a strong sense of the things that are quite good about it, some of its struggle.  I have a lot to do though I need to build a platform where loose parts transcend themselves become vibrant and glow in a flat ontology where I am their equal – I also need to spin a yarn that goes from here to there and enter back into the worked out coal seam.  

In defence of R2 D2

I have finished most of my work and after a week of restless nights and a grinding of teeth I have started to feel better about the RD2 process.

Strangely this feeling better has come from the same kind of thinking too deeply that put me here in the first place.  Deeply here does not mean productively as I have being flitting around in the realm of theory like a fly on scatological shit.  Or perhaps more poetically some sort of insect pollinator traversing a meadow of wild flowers.  Although I think I have been producing tins of artists shit  rather than the Bill Woodrows bee keeper honey.  I thought it may be good to reference artists work here as it is another strand of the useful process of defending my RD2.  Art has it's traditions and its foundations and interestingly in creating hyperlinks the mind and the clicking tends to stop at the specific work; they are points on a map. The flight of the speculative imagination is held in the image, they stand in for more than what they are, without representing what they are,  at least that is for us artists.

I have ended up at a cross roads and feel like I need to quote Ruskin - he is in my PhD for this reason as he was a great thinker who to an extent understood the artists of his day.  Better I think than Deleuze or Lacan as they created art and the artist in the image of their own desire or drive, the artists of the gap and the void.  Ruskin gives us the artists in full flight, in the lofty mountains of the alps or the cold Gothic beauty of a Northern cathedral .

‘And nothing is ever taken seriously or as it is meant but always, if it may be, turned the wrong way, and misunderstood; and while this is so, there is not, nor cannot be, any hope of achievement of high things; men dare not open their hearts to us, if we are to broil them on a thorn-fire.’

John Ruskin Modern Painters, Volume 2

 This indeed is the point of him and I have had my heart broiled on a thorn fire.  The  fears the fast rampaging flames crackling all around, yet my heart slowly cooking in a pan of congealing ontological stew.  Ruskin is in my RD2 because of his difficulty; I am told that we need to stay with the difficulty.  My problem is one of capitulation, I am aware of what it is thought I should do with my work, I am aware of its logic and its neatness, it course of least resistance. Yet I am at a point of refusal and I am not sure where to locate the stoppage.  As Ruskin tells us nothing is ever taken seriously or how it is meant but always turned the wrong way.

I haven't reread my RD2 yet because I remember writing it and I remember all its faults, naive and under researched, it is an honest deep dive into an ontological soup, a short treading of water, a little broiling a re-emergence and an attempt to swim to the side of the pan where the liquid is cooler and there is potential to bide a while.  I wrote it at the wrong time and I was ill prepared for the critique. Deleuze and Guattari in What is Philosophy? tell us that philosophy is the development of new concepts, they say this quite plainly.  This is the endeavor and the reworking of old concepts is not philosophy yet as you read on there is a realistion that the new concepts sit on a plain of Immanence which unfolds towards an event horizon that contains its limits yet not its territory.  At least within my RD2 I didn't aspire to create my own plain of immanence limiting my self creation to new concept and methodology.

 I met with Kate and Laura who did an emergency supervision as I probably come across as needed help.  It feels like it was decided that I could look at a New Materialist reading of informal areas of learning and narrow my field of view.  Instead of wondering why social science in its late stages of the post Qualitative turn needs a flat ontology that de-centers the subjective I should just adopt the parts of the thinking we can all cope with and apply it to the area of study.  

This is a shame really as I was in the middle of thinking that my problem was somewhere between Deleuze and Lacan.  Both after and before Oedipus  on the road between drive and desire.  I was making some progress in the unpicking of thought and was taking myself probably too seriously.  I wondered whether the dissolution of the subjective and the absence of organs, the human as organic machines and the collapse of the ego super ego and the id did not leave a constitutive gap. The fact that Hegal personified has become a dialectic utterly active in any argument both for and against this  despite Deluezes protestations, an active and constituted gap within Delueze through his enforced absense , his body without organs.  I can find lots of interest within a turn to New Materialism and I'm enjoying reading the texts that emerge from an encounter with the world through this thought path.  I think though that it should be necessary to put this desire for a different way to think through the world in a broader context of it emergence, the need for it - what it is against. 

If I were my supervisor I would encourage an active defense of a deep dive into an ontology that requires more than passive reading it requires a visceral and active change in the way we/I /they comprehend the world and this struggle is valiant and salient it is a struggle that we/I/they would always need to come back from and it is both productive and counter productive yet for the sake of the gap that used to be god in the context of my journey it should at least be recognised as necessary.  

here endeth the rant. 

I found this image in a sketchbook from 1984 - it is part of the artists way - it is what we bring in all our difficulties and it does not flatten well.

 

 

The encroachment of the real

This image is taken from the exhibition in Rotherham - I am going to use it to talk to Abi about the real.  It is interesting as first of all it is a digital image that is its material reality a collection of binary code - not as I think new materialism may like to see it quantum code but a series of naughts and ones that may rely on electrons and may exists on the cloud in torrents, widely displayed but do not rely on uncertainty principle to do their appointed jobs - they are machines in a very traditional mechanical way and should not be confused with Turin's thinking machines.  Then we have the real of the exhibition the codes and practices that structure the collection, archiving and  representational nature of the artefacts.  Each object stands in  for itself it is not the real doll it is an object of meaning that presents us with doll, it is not the real dog on wheels it is the dog that represents the dog on wheels.  This is the ony way a museum can work to present the real and authentic as a stand in for the actual real. Then there is the actual toy dog that presents the image of the real that makes us realise that all the objects are in fact a reflection in the door of the case.  In a sense the fact that the image of the toy dog on the right is more real than the reflection is the only thing that lets us know that the binary code presents us with a reflection of the real that stands in for the real that was never a real baby or a real dog. An images rhetoric is changed by the change in the medium and the object can never be the same.

I've just realised my blog title references the procession of the simulacra an accident that I think I was aware of making. At this moment I feel like the fatted calf  rather than the golden boy.  I'm returning from Leeds and giving a talk about artists and research, not home ground but as close to it as I have felt for a while.

I used the negative meaning wears the trousers and an old school art prof tells me a story about Kieth Arnot as his lecturer making them all read loads of theory and I thought I bet he was a bit of a bastard that Kieth- but what a time.   During conceptualism we artists saw ourselves as quick philosophers and many of us were treated as such.  But it was a reminder that my self constructed real place of art is still there and though it accepts no one it holds Ernst Blocks warm winds of Hiemat.

I am not sure where to go from here other than to say I have worked out that I have been going backwards to try and find where a certain type of thinking emerges from - to ask the question before the question I thought I needed to ask - this will always be ontological.  I have found in D and G what is philosophy a kind of answer that I will keep to myself as it is unpopular and will be full of holes but it is enough to move forward with understanding if not clarity. In the words of both Lacan and Mick Jagger - you can't always get what you want, but you can get what you need.

here is my email to Kate as a reminder and a note to self ;-

essentially the problem I have is that the split in the theory is Hegelian in relation to the individual subjective - so research creation or anything post after Oedipus and Deleuzian defuses the subjective but what I think I'm saying is art especially as it is co-opted and put to work in research follows a Hegelian logos or indeed a plane of immanence where its horizon is firmly moving within the realm of the subjective , infact its agency and from a Lacanian perspective  we can claim back human individuated agency. It's not that Deleuze denies the possibility of the individual more the denial of any kind of phenomenology.this gives art to the collective the hive yet steels it from the id as the id no longer exists.  Within artistic research apart from perhaps Mannings' notion of the defused desire of research creation we operate in what could be called either denial or an active dualism - neither of which suit my PhD 

The concepts that fall out of a plain of immanence can't be picked up piecemeal as the singularity of the event horizon established by Deleurs does not allow for a personal logus or episto-ontilogy   That's my term it's how you organise your Ontologies.  

The reason we turn to ego within artists studio project is that the drivers for art are Freudian and art as it is imagined and practiced is built on this foundation - it is what in a simple way it offers to research and it's why everything after Deleuze has been such a struggle in terms of my PHD

If you think about it social science has spent most of its history trying to erase the Id and the individual from its research - yes in the hope for an impossible scientific objectivism but the process of withdrawal is the same it is a moving away from the world and a denial of self - an old habit that chains the dog to its vomit - though this was never Deleuze intention as I believe he was always driven by desire .

Rather a Long Pause

I am in the middle of things and it keeps raining.  Venice is now flooded as is Doncaster and I've been working with the playground and the School of Architecture and Abi and the playground. The dog has died and I've just been away for five days.  While I was away I bought a book about Palmistry - it goes with my book on Phrenology and my flat earth book.  They are special books as they use science to prove the absurd and they are all very convincing if you are in a position to be convinced.

Why indeed should we all have different marks on our different shaped hands unless they are there to tell us something?  This got me thinking about speculative realism and the world of metaphysical possibility.  I read a bit more of the Diffractive ethnography and delved into its pseudo science.  The books were very similar- a strange broken metaphor a wish to tell us that things are not what they seem.

The doing and the thinking have either become merged or I'm a bit over tired - I don't think that any of the ontological turn as Guillion calls it offers us much hope in a Blokian sense.  Not much hope for ethnography or for social science or for a languge that can better explain anything.

The rational goes like this.  We thought the world worked one way and it was wrong it actually works another way and the two ways we think it works are incompatible. We have an old social science that is based on traditional science and it doesn't work at certain levels of inquiry so we can learn from the Quantum world of entanglement to use a different approach to understand what life is.  This may not be human life or even animal or plant life it is the life within the assembled entanglement of the material world which is all that exists in any possible sense.

There is no mention of Einstein and his relativity which transforms Newtonian physics and gives us the Nuclear bomb. I'm not sure Max Plank with his black box gave us nuclear fission but I don't know enough about it.  What seems to be an omission probably not in the Barad who I haven't read yet but definitely in the bits I've read of diffractive ethnogrphy is the fact that quantum science still abides to the basic philosophy of science.  It relies on hypothesis, experimentation and the fact it can be verified and repeated, its also underpinned by some crazy mathematical shit that none of us understand. And that is the problem with diffractive ethnography it may allow for sloppy ethnographic practice that in trying to escape its own floored tradition chucks the baby out with the bathwater and ends up saying - we can't know anything because everything is far to complicated.   I feel myself saying well just go and do stuff then rejoice in the complications of living and experiencing the world,  if we always come back to writing - 'its all very complicated' then do a painting, write a novel, build a giant spaceship and fly it to the planets.  Tales of palmists and Phrenologists are fascinating and convincing and of a time and I wonder if the speculation on the reality we are living through has an element of escapism and rabbit holes. 

Back from Europe and the edge

The students in Venice made me cry -  I'm not sure why, it was a letting go of something we were never really allowed to have - us British say we are European but I'm not that sure that many of us who have lived lives on our island  genuinely feel it.  Venice was a pause for lots of reasons, it came on the end of writing my RD2,  its the last piece of scheduled Poly-Technic work with Kate and it was for 2 weeks.  Venice is  one of the most amazing cities in the world my spiritual home an old soul in an old city.  Its left me feeling a bit warn out to be honest, like the pause is leaking into my everyday life but then of course there is always other stuff going on.

I'm reading Gullion's Diffractive ethnography today and doing some writing.  I'm actually doing three types of writing.  I'm catching up on field notes'  I'm writing notes on the book I'm reading and I'm writing a blog post.  They are all very similar as they are personal and although this is public few people will read it.  I don't swear on the blog though I do swear in all my other texts (fuck).

The blog is a roughly weekly affair where I attempt to put a marker down on where I am. I do try to be clever probably for posterity and my archive it is very much about how I feel about things.  I also try and skim some of the deeper bits of my thought to have a shorthand that clarifies a few things.  Today I'm recognising a conflict between doing and thinking.   It feels like there isn't enough time in a life to get to wrapped up in one or the other and the trick isn't finding a balance.

At the moment I am in a doing phase or on the brink of a doing phase and its hanging a little heavy with me as it does feel like a balance - the draw of the text, the reading and the writing are a distraction from the doing.  The reading and the writing are an essential- vibrant matter - is not something that fits well with words but without words it would not be shaping my thoughts.  I'm also finding myself drawn to aesthetics and emotion and affect but know that these terms are very much  appropriated,  in different realms they mean different things the songs are not on the same hymn sheet

I'm not finding Diffractive ethnography very helpful at the moment it seems like a methods book about Qualt verses quant and the problems with positivism wrapped up in new materialism - its as if it is giving us as much as ethnography can cope with.  I'm enjoying writing field notes and saying I'm doing ethnography and reading a bit about it. I acknowledge its a construction and I know where I think it fits in terms of my relationship to the world but I'd like to have it as a useful tool to work with so that my doing is not just doing. Ethnography cannot elevate the doing into something else but it does make the doing different.  I'm having different here back from Derrida and using it just to mean different to what I've always done which is mainly is about doing.

When people encounter something new like art or ethnogrphy it has the potency of the newness to them, for them.  I've had many encounters in my life of love, of the imagination of pain and fear, we all have.  Every new encounter sits within this trajectory of previous encounters - it is a skill to be able to encounter something as new, to grasp it tightly and to change through and with it.

That is one of the problems with the mundane and the everyday and methodologies that are completely embedded, methodologies can work with difference they can shape the encounter between actors - sometimes methodologies need an interjection of newness to make them work for us to give us momentum.  Because people spend a lifetime in  research and can get lazy or as Whitehead would say in a groove methods and methodologies need renewal.  The thing that can sometimes be forgotten is what is old and tired for some is completely new for others and as we know since the end to history has already taken place no position is more progressive or advanced than any other.

In the playground and personally I probably need my newness of old school ethnography to give me epistemological distance in a very traditional way - A distance that just doing denies me.  In terms of ESRI for most people things have moved past this.  I'm pretending  my residency is at the playground but perhaps my real work is at ESRI.  I know this as I haven't got ethical consent so the boundaries are not set by systems.  So which will it be heavens or hells, truths or speculation, old school or new materialism - my ontologies are not flat they stick out at and angle. "Is that a flat ontology or are you not pleased to see me?"

Igloos and upcycling

I am back from Venice and today I installed two igloos that are being taken out of artic world at Weston park Museum at the playground.  After two months of working on the exhibition in Rotherham and writing my RD2 its one of the first times I've felt useful in this kind of way for a while.  By useful II mean handy but also doing something physical, making a change in the structure of the world - a change of space.  I didn't make them but along with others I'm instrumental in them getting here.

I keep telling people that Venice was like -walkabout - a songline and a travel away from the everyday of my life. I am pleased to be back and pleased my brain feels a little easier for the break but I'm also missing the intensity of thinking I managed in the middle of my RD2.  Some of that complexity has now become a short hand and I've relaised that the shorthand does not contain enough of the original.  I wonder what the walkabout means for me, if I will actually get somewhere when I come back to earth. At the moment I feel more like I have lost an important thread.  I read a lot of Dewey when I was away and I think this messed my thoughts up a little.   There is clearly something within art and experience that is very useful.  It links to Williams and culture as ordinary in that it prevents us creating categories of art or culture.  The thinking also stops us talking about art as process and art as product and these two aspects of art being set against each other. In Dewey art can only be experience and this is very useful as both process and product only exist as experience so they are not strictly speaking in opposition or in fact different.   Perhaps this is the obvious thread I bring back from my walkabout plus the dense  melancholy aesthetic massage that Venice inevitably gives me.

I set out with the newly found focus on the aesthetic and saw this as a line in all my work and came back feeling raw and exposed to the aesthetic world of feeling and seeing.  This connection is always to much and though I turn from it ironically it is always on the brink of consuming me, indulging me and taking me deeply into myself.  Its strange how I thought this was happening intellectually in the world of ideas and as Whitehead says the grooves we slip into but to be honest it has always been the aesthetic I hold at bay and am dragged relentlessly towards.

I need to focus on fieldwork for a while and be immersed in place and making in all its complexity  academic thought is just a massive distraction no wonder the field is so conflicted. 

I will write some field notes tomorrow about my work at the playground and meeting the architecture students .  They seemed a little lost I told them I hated CNC routers plywood and laser cutters and it was as if I had taken away all their toys. 

Fooling around with Form

My RD2 or R2D2 as I've been calling it is nearly ready to go in.  I am pleased with where I got, although I'm trying to have a much needed relaxation of my brain.  I think for the first time on the PhD project I've moved into a space between the Form of art and the Form of academic writing.  My RD2 doesn't know what it is and I like this as I am intending to move in this direction.

I have adopted a new way of writing that feels more like arts practise than when I have written before.  Rather than constructing a text from the bottom up I massaged all sorts of ideas together until I felt I was getting somewhere then produced a false confidence that this was where I wanted to be.  I then wrote in bursts of around 2000 words and gradually worked back into these chunks of text. I lost quite a bit in this cutting back and pruning to try and meet the criteria and guidelines of the RD2 requirements but I did maintain the essence of my idea and my writing style, the style I'm trying to mature. The process has taken about 6 weeks and has included a lot of revisiting notes and deep reflecting on what I have read.  This made the reading process feel worthwhile as at times in the year I hadn't really known where I was going.  The biggest thought is how the writing has helped the thinking move on and how the writing has become about making something new.  It holds the struggle of the year.

I am reading What is Philosophy,  D and G's last book together - I think the first chapter is about the void staring back at you- Johan Siebers introduced me to this idea and it gave me the eebee jeebies.  D and G talk a lot about making new concepts and explain what they mean by the concept - its a good book because it says a lot of what I tried to say in my RD2 - that philosophy is total and you can't cherry pick bits of it to fit into a social science paradigm without changing social science to become  its new image.  I think this is why I have got so stuck - the logos or logic of what lots of educational researchers seem to be doing struggles as they layer what gets referred to as theory which is really philosophy, the construction of new concepts onto social research rather than the world. 

Art is not a philosophy or a  concept in the true sense neither is it a method or a methodology and it is something that wriggles away from capture.  The RD2 feels like a moving back to art but not in a defensive way as if I have been threatened but more in a loving way as if my old friend has come to walk with me for a while, out of friendship rather than duty or loneliness. 





 

Question For Ted

Doing what it said on the tin

I'm still trying to write my RD2.  I want to write a front end as a list but I don't think it will go down well so I will do it here.  The process of trying to write has brought me to a set of conclusions most of which if unpicked are positive and lay some groundwork.

1. There is an aesthetic turn within social science research.  This is at a practical and theoretical level.

2. Aesthetic thinking is slippery and often gets conflated with other types of thinking- it nests with phenomenology yet also refutes it.

3. The coin has many sides but the two that really count are the idea that aesthetics exist externally to human experience (within the object sometimes called Kantian aesthetics) or that they are constructed by things outside it ( often human actors thoughts , networks or event).  One road leads to relativism the other awakens all types of gods and her functions. 

4. Artists are involved because they historically have the reputation of living closer to an aesthetic world as Ruskin says they learn to see what is really there. If we flip the coin they help construct all that can possibly be constructed.

5. ESRI is known for cutting edge social research that embraces the turn towards speculation and questions the value of any existing methods.

6.  The only real point in progressing this PhD is to be able to work from within the idea of what artists can bring to research and invest in the relations that construct this network.

7. Theory of this sort can sit next to practise yet when we work it through practise or as I suggest worldize it,  it is not  helpful to split the two. ( hence the pull of totalising ontologies- Dialectics - phenomenology new and old materialism the Event and the move towards flatness)

8. The systems at the university are not set up to enable the kind of artistic approaches to research that people are keen to explore.

9.  There is a lot of cherry picking of thoughts and ideas from different fields and an attempt to work with them out of context.  This can find low hanging fruit but becomes problematic when it turns to fundamentally different ontologies and world views - you can't just sit where you like.

10. I am doing real work and getting somewhere with a complex set of thoughts but it is fragile- the temptation to go through the motions is difficult as going through the motions in the past had a rational that I understood or felt in terms of a wider practice.  Going through the motions now has no point and more importantly would disenchant my world.

today I am mostly thinking theory

My head is hurting this morning.  I'm reading Harman's idiot guide to Object Oriented Ontologies - the book is very like Stephen Hawkins a brief history of time in that someone deeply embedded in a field writes an explanation for normal people.  It is still on the edge of what it is possible for me to understand yet clear enough for me to work out where and why I disagree with lots of the thinking.  It also in its reductive flight through a selected history of western philosophy reminds me of a lot of things and gives good insights into phenomenology and Actor Network Theory.

I don't want to review the book or go into the detail of OOO as I've not finished yet but I do want to say - nice diagrams- and it is good to see Heidegger making another comeback and actually get a reference that doesn't just remind us he was a Nazi sympathiser.

I met with Richard Steadman Jones yesterday and probably went on a bit - we probably both went on a bit in our own specific ways and it was probably good for both of us.  Richard said I seemed to be going a bit theory heavy. This surprised me as I wasn't thinking of the theory in itself.  I  think I am thinking of a way to navigate my RD 2 so I can write a PhD that does not feel banal to me - this is my secret fear.  The trick with theory is to have a take on it that allows you to think through the world in new ways and that is my quest to come up with something obscure and robust enough to ride the storm of necessary critque .

I tried to explain this to Richard by giving a potted history of the Post - qualt turn in social science. I am not sure if it was just a mumbled ramble as it slopped out of my mouth. It felt like among the big stories and new theories of everything there are small trajectories that are been enacted in the world of educational research and among with other things these threads of relations make sense of me being at Esri as a philosopher artists trying to write a PhD.  As Boudoir so clearly points out the glass in the window does not break because the stone hits it it breaks because glass is breakable.  Along with all sorts of other things that look like luck the fabric and thoughts of social science at its edges are flaky and breakable. I am not really a stone though more like a clod of soft mud, well shit I suppose so I may smear the windows of social science with brown streaks and that may be enough as it is cold in houses with no windows.

People in glass houses should not throw stones

For ages people thought that scientific method was a good way to understand the world and that the natural sciences and the study of society needed to adopt scientific method based on an enlightenment notion that the world could be known fully.  This is realist and materialist and positivist approaches but they are fundamentally based on the idea of a fully knowable world even if this is not called the real the true or the quantum world.  Anthropology trundles on in the background in the south pacific it doesn't fully buy into scientific method but cracks on with writing about culture and holding opinions deeply embed in enlightenment thinking. Post 68 but obviously before, the post structuralists break down the possibility of truly knowing anything and social research splits and expand and reconstructs.  Qualitative research builds a stronger profile and this is underpinned by the ideas that we cannot ever really understand and have true knowledge of the world of emotion of the social of the human and more than human. We need methods that give us archeologies of knowledge to reference Foucault.

Post- qualt or what sometimes gets called the new theory emerges from falling deeper into the trap of thinking that nothing is truly knowable it  responsed to and resists  post structuralism and its challenge to the idea of knowledge is only ever enacted as power.  My encounter with post-qualt at ESRI brings into play a plethora of fantastically dense ideas and philosophies.  They are alternative theory, a bit like alternative medicine the homeopathy or Rieka of the social sciences.  They have massive appeal to those of us who struggle with the dominance of scientific rational reductionist ways of encountering the world and the trail of thought carnage this can leave in moving feeling aesthetic bodies.

I tried to explain this to Tim while we were picking mushrooms he thinks actor network theory and OOO are potential wormholes that spiral forever.  I wondered about the term wormhole - in science its a theoretical connection between dimensions - I also thought of Felix down the rabbit hole which is of course a reference to Alice in Wonderland and in that moment of thinking I logged in my head a paragraph that is not banal about the theoretically possible wormhole that has never been seen beyond mathematics and Lewis Carols creation for Alice to enter a speculative dimension.  I thought a paragraph that could explore the two through ideas of speculative realism with a focus on function metaphorical and scientific could hold something interesting but its not really for now.

For now I wanted to try and put a marker down about why I'm not getting heavily into theory and it was Tim that came up with it as I was giving him my basic steps to Object Orientated Ontologies and it was this.  Firstly he asked me if I believed in magic? then he asked if I thought it was about a new enchantment.? I think I had been building to this point but Tim catalysed it in his questions and I saw that my PhD was not about theory in the broad sense of all the guff I had been reading but was about a re-enchantment of the world through aesthetic experience. and perhaps this 'is' what people are looking for and within this lies a kernel of hope.

I started my RD 2 and wrote this  -

‘People are constantly putting up an umbrella that shelters them and on the underside of which they draw a firmament and write their conventions and opinions. But poets, artists, make a slit in the umbrella, they tear open the firmament itself, to let in a bit of free and windy chaos and to frame in a sudden light a vision that appears through the rent— WP- D and G)203-204’

Working within a frame of residency as method requires a location of the individual subjective artists that takes account of philosophies that present flat ontologies in order to problematise the human as privileged actor within the social space.  In order to work within a more-than-human research field the re-enchantment of the world, its objects, subjects, spaces, feelings, thoughts and emotions need to activate and become visible through creative events that bring the potential of newness into the world.

he wrote yes but it needs an edit.

I wrote this:-

edit it !  - I’ve got to write 6000 words and I’ve only done 9 

I wanted to sends it as I’m nicking your idea of re-enchantment - I think that is perhaps what it is - an opening up of possibilities that science closes down and we look to art to hold it but all the artists are saying - that is to much to ask for us - you need to banish us Like Plato did the poets and we can go and be Hermits and be happy.

If ~I go down this avenue then I’m the person or one of them that is required to re- enchant and persuade people they need re- enchanting but art now refers to itself - its like the coalfields it has been mined out and what is left isn’t worth digging out - its just the pit props and the bits they left underground to stop the land subsiding.

I’m just going to write 6000 words and then start to edit - to hard to construct well as you go along - better to get it all down and then work it up -  Basically its jumping through a flaming hoop and not burning yourself.

mushrooms were nice - scoffed em all - the big ones sort of melted into worms over night XX

and now its clear that the process of doing the PhD in all its relations may need me to fall in love or recognise my love of the aesthetic world in all its sensuous affect and it is essential within the objects of artists to love the world and seek to know it. This is a task worth setting a mind to.  In the end all theory of any value leads to the felt beating heart of the living body in the world of relations.  The new theory is important but to return to Heidegger through the thoughts of OOO it only really becomes visible when it stops functioning as a tool. 

What is Philosophy

: people are constantly putting up an umbrella that shelters them and on the underside of which they draw a firmament and write their conventions and opinions. But poets, artists, make a slit in the umbrella, they tear open the firmament itself, to let in a bit of free and windy chaos and to frame in a sudden light a vision that appears through the rent—Wordsworth’s spring or Cézanne’s apple, the silhouettes of Macbeth or Ahab. Then come the crowd of imitators who repair the umbrella with something vaguely resembling the vision, and the crowd of commentators who patch over the rent with opinions: communication. Other artists are always needed to make other slits, to carry out necessary and perhaps ever-greater destructions, thereby restoring to their predecessors the incommunicable novelty that we could no longer see. This is to say that artists struggle less against chaos (that, in a certain manner, all their wishes summon forth) than against the “clichés” of opinion. (WP- D and G)203-204

I was starting to write an invoice and I found this quote in the wrong folder on my computer.  It came at a good point as I was thinking about my encounter with a rat and working out how it would slot itself into the world of research.  The rat is a slit in the umbrella a tear in the firmament.  The loss of this fragment is significant as it must be important and it popping up as I looked for a folder to copy an invoice is testament to my messy note keeping.  This makes me think about slippage and the points that are becoming interesting are these slippages.  Not as art but as moments that transcend the present - become a memory in the act of their becoming. There is a physicality and a reality and although we have some arty stuff in the quote the tear in the umbrella seems to go beyond art.

I have just ordered  What is Philosophy - I hope its not really hard biut it could be useful for my PhD - not a bedrock but a shifting sand to drive in the concrete foundations that will be washed away in the storm - never buy a house in a hole or build on unsure foundations.
Here are my fieldnots about the rat and a reminder and a tear.

I talked myself out of doing a den building competition or having a den building afternoon as a way of getting more kids actively involved as it felt like a workshop and I wasn’t really that interested in workshops.  I felt like I was relaxing into being at the playground without doing an all singing all dancing role and started fiddling with the 360 camera and wondering what it would be able to capture – its playing in the background as I write these field notes and its strange – I don’t know where it will go but I will talk it through with people and work it out – it feels strangely ethnographic and not invasive like police surveillance – perhaps this is because I’m carrying it about everywhere.  It definitely felt like I was hanging out at the playground and this is what I had planned to do but it also felt like I needed to be deprogrammed from trying to be useful.

This became more noticeable as the sinks in the kitchen got blocked.  Both sinks were full of washing up which is unusual as, even if the drain is blocked, water tends to leak out the top of the drain outside rather than sit in the sink.  I genuinely felt a small lift inside, a little flutter as I cleared the cupboards to strip down the waste pipe and find the fat burger.  A strange Lacanian primeval desire to be useful coupled with the unsettling feeling that I was just very deliberately hanging about like what my dad would call a loose part.  The playground has a collapsed drain so I got Sinbad to run the sinks in the kid’s toilets to check there wasn’t a big blockage further down.  I suppose if my brain had been working better I would of realized that it was unlikely that both sinks had got blocked simultaneously but experience teaches you that you come across unpredictable phenomena and double faults in plumbing.  I had once used back-pressure to clear a blockage in my friends Saskia’s shower system – the water ran bright blue for ten minutes afterwards with no practical or scientific explanation. 

Working backwards down the three and a quarter inch tubing I found the T joint where the pipes joined. It was complicated to get to them and I had to pull away protective covers.  Patrick emptied the sinks and I let it run onto the grass. I stuffed my fingers into the pipe to try and find the blockage.  Remembering the blue sludge and life’s unpredictability my fingers grasped what felt like a balloon, tough and rubbery I imagine children pushing them down the sink with a wooden spoon but as I loosened it from the congealed fat and its surface began to pull away I realized it was a rat’s tale. It was attached to a body that was very stuck.  I screamed in a non-gender=specific way and asked Patrick to bring me some gloves.  Not wanting to let go of the rat as like Schrödinger’s cat I was unsure if it was both alive and dead simultaneously.

Patrick seemed a bit irritated at first I thought it was because he didn’t realize what was happening – later he would admit that he didn’t want to get accidentally slapped in the face by a dead rat if it were to fly out all in one go.  Julius came over and Fran legged it saying she needed to get ready for her holiday.  The feeling of usefulness was beginning to fade as I began to gag in that horrible way when you want to be sick but have run out of puke.   I pulled really hard and wiggled and considered moshing the bastard up a bit with a screwdriver.

  

 I asked Patrick and Julius if they remembered the story of the Giant Turnip. I thought it was in Winnie the Poo where they all had to grab hold of each other to pull it out of the ground.  I think it may be a folk tale we all knew it from our various histories - it made me laugh although I was also a bit disgusted.  It was only a baby rat in the end, my Granddad hated rats and along with his good temperament I inherited a probably quite rational dislike for them – he used to say that they “Would be bad buggers if they were as big as donkeys.’   Sinks mended, water flowing, a slight feeling of satisfaction at doing something useful with an overwhelming inner disgust.  I washed my hands like Lady Macbeth and avoided eating food with my fingers. 

Matter Out Of Place

Monday morning and about to start writing my RD2.  I've started my fieldwork at the adventure playground and I'm working with Abi in Rotherham.  I laid in the bath this morning and started to mull things over in my head. I do this about four times a day - not the bath but the mulling over.  When you think about making an artwork this is what you do, turn things over and stir them around until they fall into a place that feels about right.  Before you get properly practiced at this or mature as an artist you can get stuck at this point of falling and not enact anything.  I think this could be related to lines of flight (as a feeling) and flow (as a relationship to time)  perhaps what John Dewey would call 'the rhythms of the world'.

As I'm writing a PhD and not making an artwork, the flow doesn't make the same kind of sense - it keeps flowing out of sight into texts.  The idea of residency as method is about sense making - a slant telling of the truth or more correctly a truth.  The truth that came to me in the bath this morning before embarking on squeezing the round peg of my brain into the square hole of the RD2 writing  process was the absence of critical aesthetic thinking within the art orientated educational research  papers I have read.  Aesthetics are also a little absent in some of the spacial thinking from Soja to Massey and although Sara Pink writes a whole book from an aesthetical perspective in doing sensory ethnography, she doesn't really name it as such.  Culture and socially constructed norms are present yet there is little critical aesthetic theory from a current or historical perspective.  I can't say this with confidence as I haven't read that widely, there may well be a whole massive body of literature just concerned with aesthetic theory within educational post -qualt research. If so, I haven't encountered it yet so it's okay to say that some of the papers I have read lack a position or a perspective on aesthetics whilst explicitly situating a practice within the aesthetic realm.  Perhaps this is due to some of this work positioning aesthetics within the relational/diaolgical/everyday in some ways denying it a ontological category for itself and to an extent historical context. 

I was reminded in bed last night as I closed my eyes to go to sleep of my favorite quote from Brecht "Something is missing".  The quote is so great because the thing that is missing isn't a thing or a thought, it is the space that is opened up by the feeling that something is absent.  Aesthetics are absent in this way from the papers, not the aesthetics we can describe, the historical chain of thought from Plato banishing the poets to to the aesthetics of the everyday, they hover in the background. For me the lack is more aligned to Dewey and his sense of rhythm within art and experience, a lived and felt aesthetics of bodies moving in space in time. I feel a sense of a disjuncture, an absence of understanding, perhaps a fault line where the uncomfortable feeling of things not being quite right locates itself.

In her Blog on the Odd project Becky Shaw describes me as an 'education artist'.  I must admit, like the other prefix people put in front of my title such as local or community, I would much rather just be an artist.  This is important for my generation of artists as it allows the necessary amount of flexibility in role for us to remain unfinished.  It affords me my nomadic status and legitimizes my choices.  At a time when artists are not that bothered about what they get called and become producers or activists or community development workers there is a need to ask questions about what we lose and what we gain from thinking ourselves different.

I took a break, wrote some field notes and then read Geoff Bright's excellent position paper on auto ethnography from his PhD.  It's really interesting as he clearly explains why the method lacks traction within educational research.  It made me a little sad to read it as Geoff's struggle felt a little like mine.  He says that within auto ethnography he could find a real contribution to knowledge production as he could work with his 45 years experience as youth worker and activist in an honest way, a way where this knowledge could be drawn into the field pulled in by the great attractor, the gap, the void, the undefined thing that we all feel is missing at the heart of arty-farty-research.

I also felt quite liberated.  Geoff wanted to make a mark in the world of educational ethnographic research and every time he wanted to do something really interesting something hobbled him.  Like the scene in Misery where Kathy Bates smashes James Caan's ankles so he can't run away, when Geoff finds something that works he has to hold it to one side as nobody will publish anything that smells of auto-ethnography.  It is contamination - it is dust - it is self obsessed and self promoting, it is not knowledge.  I would love to read Geoff's proper auto-ethnography and I think this is why we both find ourselves returning to John Berger's writing, especially 'A Fortunate Man' which is the best ethnography I've come across.   Geoff's writing is a cautionary tale and a reminder that I have and never have had any intention of becoming an ethnographer of education and to an extent this is liberating. 

I hope there is no Kathy Bates character waiting to chain me to a bed and hobble my ankles and if there is that I can work out strategies to navigate them that are not too demoralising.  In adopting the life of a professional nomad in the post-structuralist sense of leaving behind the singularity of my consciousness, the gift or the payback is a freedom from the restraints of intellectual belonging, the rules of being accepted within any school of thought place of worship or field.  This position has its drawbacks but also its advantages. Geoff could not turn to auto-ethnography as he would not be taken seriously by the world of educational research, the world he wanted to step into and at the very least find some level of intellectual validation.  I don't share this desire, my validation lies elsewhere.  As I am just about to set fingers to typing my RD2 I wonder how much of my desire to hold onto my identity as an artist I will make visible, how much of this process needs to be treated as a game and how much of it is a genuine place for growth.

I am Icarus making wings of feathers and wax, I am not sure they will get me off the ground so at the moment have no worries of flying too close to the sun.  I have 6000 words to write and I am reluctant to start as they will pin down my thoughts in a way that chains the aesthetic mind of touch, sense and emotion and breaks with the rhymes and rhythms of my day to day.  This is what I am taking on - this is my new nomadic home. 

A difficult couple days on the road to self knowledge

Until this point I've been slightly reluctant to write about the Rotherham project as it's felt like a space in which to try things out. It's been a journey of personal reflection and I've put some feelers out into doing a different sort of research.  Until now, even though I've been involved in 14 research projects the world of research has always felt like an encounter.  I come out to meet it in the street or go to the pub for a date. I've never, to be honest felt married to it or even that fond of it.

Working on my PhD and a research project in a playgroup and with Rotherham Museum initially felt like a perfect alignment of the planets; a marriage made in heaven.  The time with Abi in the playgroup messing about with tissue paper, a gazebo, a 360 camera, Multi Cheerios and shaving foam has worked out really well, the conversations the playfulness and mostly the thinking.

Since I started back at work after been a dad at home I've always felt like a shape shifter; sometimes an artist, sometimes a researcher, sometimes a play-worker and sometime a technician. I wear all these hats with pride and do the best job I can.

On Friday though things got to me a bit.  I have always had an internal logic that justifies and places my practice in a line that connects Joseph Beuys  to social sculpture to the Fluxus movement to the Artists placement group. It has a more difficult relationship to the 'social turn' and its difficult incorporation of participation and relational aesthetics.  Of course my work also relates to political community arts and cultural democracy.   Was I a man who had only dreamed he was an artist?  The problem with thinking yourself an artist and working with internal logic based on a life of practice is it can situate you in a cloud cuckoo land. Cloud Cuckoo land can be nice while you're in it but difficult to crash out of.

I don't think my feathers were ruffled by a period of deep self reflection or a personal epiphany - it was more that I popped my own self-blown bubble.  My self image of what I was doing no longer fitted with the reality of what I was doing. I invested time and thinking in doing a research project differently, doing my own research made it different. I think one issue is locating the practice in the production of the best art I could, rather than within the best project I could.  I forgot to give up on some of the things I knew I would care about before the inevitability of having to to give them up, I have become practiced at giving up.

I invested time in trying to take images that captured a sense of place, that were evocative of space, time, and feelings they work with the position of the camera and the lens and required me to be present.  I became invested in these images and decided I liked them, that I had accomplished something, obviously not new but of a place and a time, sensory,  and evocative.  I have these images and they are interesting things to talk about and talk through.   Our exhibition at the Museum is co-produced and the parents involved prefer other images I've taken.   This of course it what I knew all along, it was never suggested that I would get to choose what images we used.  I think co-production works when nobody knows best, the images I liked looked out of focus, they showed movement but not really the concentration of young people on what they were doing.  To a general audience they probably looked a bit strange; at best arty, at worst blurry.  The other images were more than in focus; they looked like images that a professional naturalistic photographer might take.  It is another hat I've worn and the style rubs off although you need to keep your hand in and years of film making have got in the way of my natural sensitivity to composing stills, they will pass  they are good photographs.  In a still, you aim to tell a story within a single frame - this child is happy, this child is focused, this child is learning, this child has friends, these parents care.  They are not public relations images but they borrow from the genre.

My problem then is not the fact that the parents didn't like my pictures and it's not the fact I took both kinds of pictures it's that for some reason, perhaps because this was about thinking about myself and my role, I had become over invested in the wrong thing.  That is not to say that I don't normally invest in taking pictures it's just I don't normally see the taking of the pictures as being part of my practice so if people don't like them or in this case don't select them it is easy to move on.  It was harder to move on here as, if I'm honest, I put myself in a place where I believed I knew best, I thought I could educate people to like the blurry touchy-feely pictures better if only they looked at them long enough. Or I made assumptions why people didn't like them based on things I don't know.  It doesn't really matter if I was right or wrong about any of this, the point is because I was researching myself, I approached the project differently to how I would normally.  Because I was trying to see the running of the workshops and the making of the exhibition in the context of an ongoing creative practice, I had located this in the work I produced.  I have very rarely done this on any of the successful research projects I have worked on.  I have written about the dematerialised artist, the notion of the 'not yet' and 'becoming'; the idea that art is not about objects and art's potential life within research does not chain it to specific forms histories and trajectories.

It feels ironic then that when I actually get to look at this and think about residency as a method of enquiry and think about the location of practice I regress into a space of making art from my perspective as an individual. I talk about the lens and being at ease with my camera; I discuss F stops and motion blur and read Walter Benjemen's A short history of photography (again) .  These are the things in the background that prop me up and keep me going, my secret hobbies and concerns but I was never intending to bring them into the foreground.  I slipped up - not in the project but in where I locate my energies, where I locate my feeling of belonging or in keeping with my PhD title, where I reside.

This raises questions of how honest I have been with myself and how fragile the idea that I'm working in a radical tradition of engaged art within the world and not the art world.  Kate says I'm matter out of place and I think I am - neither one nor the other.  Better than expected at lots of things but not that good at most.

I'm now making the the Museum display boards for our show.  In my head I'm doing it partly as a complex set of relationships, partly to prove my value in a practical way.  Previously, I could of framed it as a complex set of practices that drew on multiple traditions including participatory and community art but now I have a chink in my armour I wonder if I'm doing it to help save money.  There is nothing wrong with this as long as I recognise where it sits, what it is and don't over invest or may it into something it isn't.