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.
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