In Kurt Vonnegut's book from 1964, at the height of the Cold War, he describes a father showing his son the Cat's Cradle game. "See the cat....... see the cradle", he says but the child sees neither, yet enjoys the game so much he pretends to see both. Vonnegut as narrator goes on to say,
No wonder kids grow up crazy. A cat's cradle is nothing but a bunch of X's between somebody's hands, and little kids look and look and look at all those X's
The tiles above were very common in bathrooms in the 1970's - my Dad called them parrot tiles, some people call them chick tiles. The design is supposed to be abstract yet as we can find cats in cradles in fingers in string we find birds or perhaps a nice Stilton in the most abstract of patterns. As a species we are hard-wired to see forms within the world or at least hard-wired enough to find interest in seeking forms for us to continue in the quest for them.
It's a week since my last supervision meeting and it's taken a while to settle. It was unsettling and although I was ill I don't think that explains the way it left me feeling. I was not ill prepared, I had just prepared for a different meeting. In my head we would be practical about the next step and all agree that the writing of 1500 words with six references was a difficult though necessary hoop to jump through. One of my favorite phrases when planning projects is, "Well I wouldn't start here", which obviously is where we are. My determination to enjoy the process of doing my PhD began to fall from view and an old feeling returned, half remembered from the difficult bits of my otherwise soft rural childhood, the realisation that I am neither clever, handsome or good at sports. Pseudo- science suggests that the dyslexic brain may work within different modes and I must admit when I'm thinking through doing, in a place of constructed arts practice my brain feels different - see the cat see the cradle - the things connect differently. I have noticed how Erin Manning talks of art as a 'way' perhaps a route or a quest but in the world of research it often manifests itself as a desire for more, or at least a potential for more. It is a disconnected 'more' that has no points of reference. It does not know what more it wants or what it wants more of. The more spills out of a great big hole and a desire to fill it with more of something else that isn't the hole.
So I fixed the toilets. It was not difficult, it would of been more of an event if I had had a flood or a load of shit had got stuck as I hadn't set the cisterns for a 9 litre flush. When you fix something you sometimes have to make a decision about how far you go, how much you replace. Do you try and keep something going a little bit longer with a quick fix or do you just rip out all the old stuff and replace it? Often something that has worked fine for years suddenly breaks down when you put a new bit in the system. The pressure increases or some unknowable tiny change makes something that's on the edge of breaking, break. It is not the butterfly effect, the connection between action and effect are much more localised, in fact they all become within a single toilet cubicle. I'm not sure the toilet thing is working here, but I'm going to leave it in. Basically the supervision meeting brought up a couple of issues around my PhD that I think need talking about and articulating in a clearer way - something feels like it needs mending and I'm not sure how much to replace.
I can't do everything on the blog but I want to address two issues that came up in the meeting. The first was Geoff's questioning of my references for the RD1 and the need to be very robust intellectually in connecting the line between them. The second was my inability to articulate what I was finding difficult about some of the reading I had been doing, especially the articles that draw on artistic practices and artistic ways of thinking and doing. I will try and address the research list here without the confines of an RD1 form, I will try and refrain from metaphor - see the cat, see the cradle.
My References
What has struck me since starting to work on my PhD at ESRI is the way much of the literature I have been pointed towards in terms of more recent writing feels driven by a desire to uncover a metaphysical world within the parameters of the physical or material world. At the heart of what we are loosely calling the New Materialism is a conflicted metaphysics that can't come to terms with the fact it yearns to find a place within the romantic and the spiritual. This is why I start with Ruskin, his personal enlightenment and his spiritual journey mirrored Nietzsche in terms of timeline yet Ruskin was never able to accept the death of God, instead he chose to locate God in the world. Not as the Messiah, angels or the Holy Ghost but within nature, beauty and a set of complex human relations.
The reason Ruskin is interesting in relation to artists is that he saw us as gifted, he saw artists as special, with an ability to see the very nature of things, perhaps to see and show the new God he had imagined. One of the dilemmas you face working as an artist or identifying as an artist within projects is that some of the agency you have is dependent on the social construction of the role. This agency is often superficially located within techniques or skills, the idea of a honed craft or sensibility, yet dig a bit deeper and the agency that is attached to the role of artists spills over - it is more complex and more rooted in the individual. A way to think about it is how a poet can liberate the use of language within a classroom, they can get people to use and think about language differently, they authorise transgression through their role as experts on the creative use of language. Ruskin writes about the artistic imagination in Modern Painters and I think that these few chapters will be enough to locate some thinking around roles.
As an artist who thinks about what is possible and what is useful it is difficult to locate your agency within a socially constructed role. It is a hard pill to swallow and a nagging uncomfortable thought especially if you have a commitment to cultural democracy that encourages everyone to meet their creative potential. However if you are committed to working within the world and trying to create positive change, then it is important to understand where any potential agency originates. Ruskin is a guide, 200 years since his birth and much critiqued as anti-progress I cannot help but think that in many ways he was right, or at least if we had understood better and lived closer to some of his ideals then we would not be living in a world that feels so precarious. "There is no wealth but life."
Whitehead is new to me - I had seen him referenced a lot in the literature I'd been reading and was taken by the terms process philosophy and flights of the speculative imagination. Whitehead seemed to be an origin of some of the more metaphysical New Materialism - an excuse to speak of God but also a critique of the ingrained Christian roots of Western philosophical thought. I secretly think that people could find a lot of what they are searching for within Taoism but are worried about cultural appropriation. Perhaps they should just bite the bullet but that would not be very Buddhist. The more I think about Whitehead the more I wonder if I can take the step to committing to reading his notoriously difficult original texts. I started Process and Reality because I thought I should but my heart just wasn't in it. Geoff is probably right that I will need to really think about whether Whitehead is relevant to what I end up saying. At the moment what I'm most interested in is where the 'New Theory' comes from and how it may be useful in any sort of practice. People in arts schools used to really like Heidegger and Wittgenstein, many are now into what has become known as speculative realism - essentially they are concerned within ontological framing. Perhaps this is founded in a deep held belief or desire that the arts offer a clearer route or through experience a more appropriate episte-ontology of life. They could do with a reminder that Deleuze never was a phenomenologist. When trying to pull together the RD1 I felt like Whitehead would provide a good foil for Dewey, perhaps give an historical backdrop or allow for some interesting space to emerge around Dewey's understanding of the imagination in relation to experience. Although Dewey does present to an extent a metaphysics based within experience Whitehead's ability to speak of God and locate God within the creative asks questions of Dewey's fundamentally pragmatic scientific foundations. Looking back Dewey's focus on experience and empiricism seems out of step with the quantum world that physics was hypothesising and finding. Whitehead in contrast saw science as opening up a field of the inexplicable, the potential and the open - perhaps a space that could be occupied by both the scientist and the artist.
Ruskin, Dewey and Whitehead then are included as a way of thinking about the origins of what I'm calling here the "new theory" by this I think I mean the slightly left field artistic and philosophical approaches to social science that are popular within ESRI. It feels like they have grown out of certain specific failures within Qualitative Methods and an aching acceptance of the inadequacies of a certain type of academic writing to get close to illuminating lived experience or specific feeling orientated aspects of life. I am not at all sure if this is what I should be doing but at this moment it is all I can think to do. I can't let myself enter the space of actually thinking that the artist's way offers an alternative approach to understand the world that will be of great use to the world of social science post-qualt research. Neither am I searching for a way to debunk anything or put spanners in any works. I am just really interested in understanding what it is that is desired within the world of arts practice that draws or inscribes itself of the world of social research. So although the idea of following the line of the imagination through my references is a way to limit and refine the focus of the research; the point of the research is to better understand how art is working here. Perhaps how it can do more and perhaps how it can better construct itself to be more useful. I think there are many other literatures I could have worked with to follow this journey, I could have started much later and worked more with post-structuralism. Yet with the little work and knowledge I have so far these three writers centralise art or creativity as a way and also in their own idiosyncratic ways touch on the divine. My feeling - and what I wanted to say at the supervision meeting - is I'm not anticipating getting that far with all this. I think Geoff spotted this and was disappointed. If this body of literature was a house I would be entering a backroom and slightly opening a window to let some air in. I will be torn to pieces by the dogs who live in the house, I'm aware of this and need to take precautions, some dogs can be offered the distraction of a bone or a squeaky toys, some will bite anyway and the wounds will need dressing but the house is smelling stale and the windows need opening.
The next three references are a bit of a jump I suppose; we have Massumi and Barret and Bolt to represent what I have referred to as "New theory' to be specific the stuff everyone seems interested in at ESRI and where it connects to artistic ways of knowing and doing. I am aware that these broad generalisations may not seem helpful but it is how I have encountered the field. At its worst it feels like something I once heard an art curator say. When asked why art had to be so difficult her reply was - "art is difficult because life is difficult'. At the time I sat and thought that perhaps art was so difficult so it could pretend there was more to it than there actually was. Instead of working with the difficulty it was defaulting to the obscure, the idiosyncratic and the impenetrable. After much reading and thinking I do not think that researchers are trying to over complicate things yet I do feel many of the articles I've read that draw on and try to apply some of the new theory to the world of research are full of the desire for there to be something more, something residing in the edges or the middle. However the theory often does not lay onto the world very well, there remains a disjuncture, even though the New Materialism denies bifurcation, challenges Cartesian notions of any duality it often reads as metaphysics, it struggles to locate itself within the world of lived experience, perhaps that is why it often turns to art as a world of forms and representations. I'm not sure why I'm approaching the research from this perspective but writing it down here is useful. I have spent ten years working on research projects and thirty years working as an artist with a focus on change. Most often localised change but these programs are deeply entwined within ideological and policy change. In all these places I ask - What can art do here ? What can I do here? Whether it is a habit that needs breaking or developing I'm not sure but it is my direct and clear research aim at the minute and it feels like I have a clarity on this, I have something to offer, I am prepared to be useful.
Colin Ward is the wildcard. He is probably the writer who has given me most as a practitioner and his style of writing speaks in a way I would love to be able to speak. He also writes one of the very few parables on adventure play. I was also keen to have something from the 1970's after reluctantly losing Raymond Williams and Stuart Hall I felt like I needed something from the seventies. If Geoff is correct in his assertion that I will be given a hard time about my references by external examiners then Colin is a desperately easy target. Perhaps he is my sacrificial limb to be chopped off when the going gets tough. At the moment he stands for writing and ideas that sit in the world of practice and speak to practitioners, writing that makes sense and helps. This is I hope my aspiration and the reason I am optimistic, ambitious and still pretty happy. Finding Colin was a bit like stepping into a James Turrel light sculpture or watching a Steve McQueen film it was an "Ah so this is what it is about' moment. I'm not saying I will be able to write like Colin Ward yet I don't see anything wrong in the aspiration. He makes more sense than Raymond Williams or Stuart Hall as I would just get immersed in Cultural theory- which would introduce a whole new thing and a new direction. Colin is a reminder of praxis and usefulness - he is a backstop that nobody can get rid of as if they do then there will be hard borders between theory and practice.
This brings us to the point of this list of authors. On one level to find a path or to restrict the amount to be looked at I need an initial focus, the imagination is what we came up with, as a mechanism to do this both in searching and finding texts and I have read enough of each writers' primary texts to find a way to follow a line of the imagination through some of their work. The point I was trying to articulate at the supervision meeting was that this is not the prime focus of the study, I wanted to call it a fly-through or a backdrop but this makes it sound a bit flippant. I went to watch the new film about Laurel and Hardy last night and there is a fantastic scene where they both dance in front of a rear projection in Way out West. Perhaps that is a way to look at the list of references, a backdrop of writing, an artificial context that we all know is shot in a studio but as with special effects in films we suspend our disbelief. I know that this approach is what Geoff was warning me against, suggesting that I needed to do something else to be taken seriously. I have given this much thought in the week since, however the line through the thinking is really a line that asks what the new research means to practice or can mean to practice. I think it is here that I can offer something useful and in the final analysis the first four months of this process has really made me think that this is the point - the time and space to try and work out something that can be useful. As Ollie says to Stan, "That's another fine mess you've got me into". The backdrop projection then is a context for me to start to unpick or crack the nut of where arts practice in combination with bodies of new thinking can be useful in the world of educational social research. The work was always going to emerge in practice and locate itself in the multiple traditions and conflicted identities I inhabit - the trick is to not do an auto-ethnography of my own navel using gazing as method. See the cat, see the cradle.
