What's my Problem?

I thought I would do a short blog post to remind me when I look back that I had a problem.  It is partly coming back from Toronto and partly reading through my musings here on my blog.  My RD1 is not quite signed off which is just procedure but it is also another not quite done thing which is a problem with a system where everything needs to be done before moving on to the next step.

I have spent much of my time since the last supervision trying to establish the actions around which my research will take place.  I have submitted and resubmitted my ethics forms and I've done some planning with Abi.  I've drawn down funding for a making self-build equipment/sculpture at an adventure playground project from the arts council England. This work is in partnership with the school of architecture in Sheffield and Now Then magazine.  I've connected it to the artist George Fullard and the idea of assemblage.  The working title for this project was 'Assembling the Bits'  I wasn't sure about it but its stuck now- it can be the working title for my PhD.

I think I want to say now that this is what 'we' do, by we I mean long in the tooth freelance artists like me. assemble the bits of work, of history. of thinking and doing to create agency or perhaps movement.  So it would be impossible to just look at a bit of the assemblage, a pointless bit of narrowing down, reducing the depth of field.  So this is my problem, I have my list of authors and texts and the line of the imagination. This has emerged from thinking about how fit the bits together. It is  dropping the bits into a pan full of theory stock-  I have the soup to be cooking.

For the soup to work it has to include all it's bits - I would like to put it through the wizzer, as we say in our house, and make a blend.  What I'm feeling though is the tug of epistemology, a framing of knowledge that is coming from somewhere.  It feels like knowledge is a building where if you are very lucky and privileged in all sorts of ways you may be given permission to add a single brick somewhere high up where nobody can see it, better make it very secure so it can't drop off and brain someone.

My problem I suppose is summed up by my favorite Heidegger quote that I actually found a couple of weeks ago as I'm trying to do proper research rather than just find the odd quote  - here it is with a bit more context. I think my problem is I'm finding it hard to dwell in the tiny spaces a PhD marks out for itself, this is my own feeling and my own fault and I need to busy myself in building a place to dwell within, to dwell is not to be comfortable  so I live more expansively and embrace the precarious.

But that thinking itself belongs to dwelling in the same sense as building, although in a different way, may perhaps be attested to by the course of thought here attempted.
Building and thinking are, each in its own way, inescapable for dwelling. The two, however, are also insufficient for dwelling so long as each busies itself with its own affairs in separation instead of listening to one another. They are able to listen if both- building and thinking-belong to dwelling, if they remain within their limits and realize that the one as much as the other comes from the workshop of long experience and incessant practice.
We are attempting to trace in thought the nature of dwelling. The next step on this path would be the question: what is the state of dwelling in our precarious age? On all sides we hear talk about the housing shortage, and with good reason. Nor is there just talk; there is action too. We try to fill the need by providing houses, by promoting the building of houses, planning the whole architectural enterprise. However hard and bitter, however hampering and threatening the lack of houses remains, the real plight of dwelling does not lie merely in a lack of houses. The real plight of dwelling is indeed older than the world wars with their destruction, older also than the increase of the earth's population and the condition of the industrial workers. The real dwelling plight lies in this, that mortals ever search anew for the nature of dwelling, that they must ever learn to dwell. What if man's homelessness consisted in this, that man still does not even think of the real plight of dwelling as the plight? Yet as soon as man gives thought to his homelessness, it is a misery no longer. Rightly considered and kept well in mind, it is the sole summons that calls mortals into their dwelling. 

Poetry, Language, Thought, translated by Albert Hofstadter, Harper Colophon
Books, New York, 1971.

Something happened in Toronto

This feels like the first time I have blogged because I felt I should rather than having something to say.  I woke up last night and thought I hadn't done much writing of any sort for a while.  It's probably a month since I sat down and tried to construct a coherent text that wasn't what they call in school, 'writing for purpose.'  It feels like things have been very busy, my ongoing application for ethical approval, my successful Arts Council application, my gathering together the threads of next year's work.

I have been doing some thinking about the edges of things and the idea of value.  I know everyone thinks its funny that I go to a sweat lodge on the new moon yet I am reminded of a small shared spoken prayer whispered and repeated as you enter the metaphorical womb space.  'To all my relations' we each say in turn the words cast into the wind.  I think I had initially thought this was a reference to all my family but now I realise it is inclusive of all my relations to space, place, objects and all things living and dead. In the last month of my PhD project I've considered all my relations in some detail, how they flow and interplay with my identity and I've found a position where things have come into view.  I have also started over-using the term 'depth of field' and I think this is at the heart of my new thinking about knowing; as one thing comes into focus another blurs and becomes less visible.  Depth of field in films and photographs draws our attention to an area of interest, it's not composition but can be used to emphasise a specific area within a composition.

There is a pressure as a person doing a PhD, to create a very narrow depth of field - it's to do with preconceived ideas about how knowledge works and it's wrapped within a tight focus on what is knowable and what it is to know.  It's also a necessity as the fields of knowledge, any field of knowledge, have become so vast.  I think the first six months of my research have been about working out how to resist this very narrow depth of field and try and work with a deeper band of focus.

Not to be boring and technical but to get a bigger depth of field in an image using a camera you have to stop down your aperture.  This means that you will need a longer exposure, it requires more time. A pinhole camera doesn't really have a depth of field, everything is in focus yet as it's probably moving it looks blurred.  At the moment I am working with a pinhole camera - long, long exposures and blurred images as everything is moving.  Things are starting to settle down a bit though and I'm working out where I could fit into the composition.

The AERA conference in Toronto was fairly intense. I starting off with Fluxus and ending with critical race theory and Participatory Action Research.  It is still a bit of a mess in my mind but I did have a think about how art is constructed within the New Materialist and Post-qualitative social science research.   I have suspected for a while that the space of art is romanticised and becomes a shorthand for the thing that is very clearly there but cannot really be known.  This can make it a space of potential and the not-yet, on occasion the imagination can stand in for it yet it is hard within New Materialism with a fear of duality and the disavowal of an individual subjectivity to locate a useful location for the imagination to dwell.  So art as a noun and a verb becomes the placeholder, the fade to black in the film, the intake of breath for the flutist,the point of potential manifestation.  Even an ironic negation of negation - perhaps Sartre's existence that precedes essence.  This is an art that it is hard to recognise when you try and work deep within it flow in its currents.  The art of the everyday is often more mundane, it does not aspire to fill the space of the void or to transcend anything except boredom.  My relationship to art for good or bad is not as a place holder it more of an active tool to work things out.

Two ideas that came to me about the nature of art in Toronto these emerged from  a lot of complicated references to Quantum Physics and refraction.  The first was the potential of thinking of art as existing in a pre-symbolic state without the structural problems of  signs and signifying.  I could link this to our presentation that danced with the idea of a plane of pure immanence maybe art is felt as a language before structure.  This would make sense of why structuralists are so resistant to post-structuralist interpretations of the world.  The idea of a pre-language state in early childhood or early evolution or animal states or is appealing to a world that cannot be ordered with language yet absolutely depends upon it. I thought about cave paintings and wondered if their magic may reside in a pre-symbolic relation to the world and I thought about noise as opposed to music and I thought about the move towards pure abstraction within art. 

All in all if I'm honest my deeply ingrained scientism is deeply embedded from birth. It feels like the shiny bit of  like a crystal in the centre of a geode, the rocks you buy as souvenirs that look boring on the outside but are sliced or broken with a hammer to reveal a world of sparkling crystal. I felt that much of the talk of science was pseudo science and much of the talk of physics was metaphysics and I found it extremely difficult to take it very seriously however hard I tried.  I think that there is a desire to, as Maggie suggested, find something to fill the role of the God function; as Nietzsche points out if God is dead the place where he was remains and it aches to be filled.  I used to think that science was a belief structure now I think perhaps it has just been sucked into a vacuum of belief by accident.

What do these thoughts mean for my PhD?  As I'm writing this and thinking I have been asked to read Rancierre and have not had chance to get around to it. My challenge will not be to write a literature review or to fully understand the line of philosophy I have chosen, but rather to think about how I can stop down my shutter and expose myself long enough to create a deep depth of field without everything becoming so blurred that it's impossible to work out what is going on.