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.
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.
Books, New York, 1971.
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